Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (27 page)

The lamming lovers temporarily exercise freedom through automobility. The hitchhikers who figure in many films noir might seem even less encumbered. But hitchhiking is a dangerous game, if we believe Al Roberts (Tom Neal), the protagonist of Edgar G. Ulmer’s brilliant B picture
Detour
. As Paul Cantor points out, this film “revolves around the automobile”: not only does much of the story take place during Al’s thumbing trip from New York to LA, but his journey ultimately brings him to “two distinctively American” automotive spaces: the used-car
lot and the drive-in restaurant (complete with those other archaic roadside icons, car hops; see Cantor 154). Like Frank Chambers, Al is a kind of picaro, a vagabond living on the edge of society.
¹¹
Yet if Al’s westward journey seems at first a plausible means of freeing him from his humiliating gig as a saloon pianist and a “perfect symbol of [American] mobility” (Cantor 154), in fact Al, like those missing persons analyzed in
chapter 2
, merely swaps one form of confinement for another. The film sardonically parodies Depression-era tales of escape through westward movement by presenting Al’s dream as a nightmare—a “meaningless circle or trap” (Naremore,
More Than Night
148; see also Polan 270).
¹²
Owning (or driving) a car may generate a feeling of sovereignty and autonomy, but thumbing testifies to a lack of control: it is mobility without autonomy. Hitchhiking places Al at the mercy of drivers such as Charles Haskell, a big talker whose nice suit, wad of cash, and fancy convertible can’t save his life.

While Haskell sleeps, Al gets behind the wheel. But he’s not really driving; fate is. Haskell’s untimely (though apparently natural) death in his convertible catalyzes Al’s conversion from disgruntled musician to victim of destiny.
¹³
After discovering that Haskell is dead, Al stands beside the car in a driving rain and makes the first of several tragically foolish decisions: to hide Haskell’s body and then take his money and driver’s license. It’s almost as if the car forces the transformation: had it not been a convertible, Al wouldn’t have had to stop to put up the top; Haskell wouldn’t have fallen out, may not have died; and Al might have fulfilled his original plan (although, as I suggest in
chapter 6
, he may not have really wanted to join Sue in LA in the first place).
¹⁴
Al’s new plan is foiled when he picks up the hitchhiking Vera (memorably played by Ann Savage), the “dangerous animal” responsible for the gruesome scratches Haskell earlier displayed (“What kind of dames thumb rides?” he’d asked Al. “Sunday school teachers?”). More important, she is a person who knows Al isn’t Haskell. And so Vera becomes Haskell’s “ghostly reincarnation” (Naremore,
More Than Night
149)—as if, Al tells us, he were “sitting right there in the car laughing like mad while he haunted me.” Vera first demands that Al sell Haskell’s convertible to avoid having it traced but then arrives at a more ambitious scheme: to collect Haskell’s inheritance from his dying father. How will Al prove he’s Haskell? With his car and driver’s license, of course. But though they keep the convertible, Al still isn’t in the driver’s seat and ends up (semiaccidentally) strangling Vera with a phone cord. Al’s hitchhiking—he’s doing it again at the film’s conclusion—determines his character: he will remain forever subject to the wishes of others, whether they be club patrons or conning car owners. Al’s American dream is
foiled by his lack of agency; he can’t remake himself because he has so little self to begin with. Not everyone is truly convertible.

In
Detour
, hitchhiking subjects the thumber to vicissitudes of the road, whims of fate, and eruptions of coincidence. In most subsequent noir hitchhiking films, however, the roles are switched: the hitchhiker is an invader who seizes control of the car, thereby embodying the fears of Cold War Americans—their terror of invasion and loss of freedom—as well as the recognition that their new prosperity cloaks a churning desire for lawlessness. In
The Devil Thumbs a Ride
, for example, the handsome gray 1941 convertible owned by traveling salesman Jimmy Ferguson (Ted North) seems to express his willingness to pursue the upward mobility—represented by Emerald Products (a line of ladies’ lingerie)—urged on him by his wife. In contrast the car represents the possibility of escape for Jimmy’s hitchhiker, psychopathic robber and murderer Steve Morgan (Lawrence Tierney), as well as for the two women, Agnes (Betty Lawford) and Carol (Nan Leslie), who later hitch a ride with them. But the car apparently doesn’t satisfy Jimmy, who is drunk throughout most of the film and seems well on his way to alcoholism. Indeed, the ease with which Morgan persuades Jimmy to let him take the wheel indicates a thirst for adventure running beneath Jimmy’s dream of conventional success; the convertible embodies Jimmy’s unspoken desire to defy the law and live, like Morgan, on the fly. This desire is played out after Morgan—a much better salesman, in his way, than Jimmy—convinces him to hole up at a friend’s beach house, then punctures the car’s tires to prevent their departure. After Morgan murders Carol (who has learned that he’s on the lam) and the sheriff appears, Morgan uses Jimmy’s driver’s license and car keys to convince the lawman that
he’s
Ferguson. The doubling of the two characters thus becomes explicit—Morgan incarnates Jimmy’s own lawless impulses—with the convertible again acting as catalyst.

Eventually a detective and his deputy (a gas station attendant named Kenney) expose the true identity of Morgan, who is apprehended and killed, thereby restoring order. At the end Jimmy’s wife reveals that she is pregnant and drives the convertible toward home. But though the car now seems to indicate Jimmy’s reconversion to uxorious husband and law-abiding lingerie vendor, its weaving progress in the concluding scene suggests that Jimmy’s transgressive impulses are merely quiescent, liable to resurface as soon as he fails to please his grasping wife. Jimmy’s convertible, first a sign of his mobility and then a vehicle for Morgan’s, represents the instability of conventional values and the fragility of Ferguson’s middle-class male identity.

The figure of the hitchhiker as a threat to middle-class values and masculinity appears even more forcefully in Ida Lupino’s
The Hitch-Hiker
(its taut screenplay was cowritten by Lupino and Collier Young). This film begins with a precredit introduction establishing its veracity: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours—or that young couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.” By grounding the tale in documentary detail, the prologue heightens the eruptive force of the hitchhiker. What follows—a series of montages showing the hitchhiking psychopath Emmett Myers (William Talman) at his deadly work—reinforces a sense that cars automatically generate the risk of invasion. The next sequence depicts the back of a Dodge convertible pulling up beside a man and picking him up. Darkness falls. A second car pulls up to the same man; we hear gunshots and a woman screaming, see the hiker’s hand as he examines books and papers that have fallen from the car, then his walking feet. Another car picks up the hitchhiker, who appears again only as feet and hands. Finally, we’re riding with ordinary guys Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and Roy Collins (Edmond O’Brien), who (without telling the folks at home) decide to take a detour from their fishing trip to pursue happiness by gawking at the decadent sights in a Mexican border town. The introduction thus triangulates the characters: Myers, who views human beings as body parts, as objects of demonic automotive fishing, is the sinister alter ego of Bowen and Collins, whose outlaw urges are channeled into guilty, giggling voyeurism.

Myers seems to have been conjured to punish them for their foibles. As he rides in their backseat, his face pokes into the light, revealing a paralyzed eye and a pistol barrel: “face front and keep driving,” he snarls. With the gun and commandeered car, he now possesses the full trinity of masculine power. So armed, he proceeds ruthlessly to strip away the fishermen’s defenses and masculine strength. First he plays humiliating mind games, forcing Bowen to shoot at a can Collins is holding. Then he mocks their values, calling them “suckers” who are “up to [their] neck in IOUs,” and boasts that he doesn’t “owe nobody”: he just takes the things he wants. “I didn’t need any of ’em. … If you got the know-how and a few bucks in your pocket, you can buy anything or anybody. ’Specially if you got ’em at the point of a gun.” This consummate individualist exposes the limitations of that venerated American ideal. And in appropriating their auto, Myers robs them of the sense of sovereignty cars are designed to produce. They are now prisoners in their own vehicle—ironically, a Plymouth, a brand named after an icon of American liberty. Thus Myers stands as a grotesque exaggeration
of the principles by which these men live. His power reaches its apex when Bowen and Collins try to escape, and Myers finds them by using the car’s headlights. The point of view given him as he spotlights the men suggests that the car has indeed become his prosthesis, a mechanical extension of his evil eye. Myers, in short,
is
a car, a Frankenstein’s monster assembled from the prized technologies and ideologies of postwar America.

That Myers, like Steve Morgan, also represents the fishermen’s repressed subversive impulses (the same impulses that impel policeman Cal Bruner to steal in the Lupino-Young script for
Private Hell 36
) is displayed when he forces Collins to exchange clothes with him. Indeed, as the film proceeds, Collins—angry and embittered, dragging his left leg—comes more and more to resemble Myers. Near the end of the film he glowers at the hitchhiker and seethes, “You stink, … just like your clothes. … You haven’t got a thing except that gun. You better hang on to it, because without it, you’re nothing.” Later he punches Myers in the face while the police hold the erstwhile hitcher. In this film, then, the car becomes a stage where the men enact a crisis of masculinity that, I have argued, appears in so many noirs. By abducting them, Myers forces them to discover previously hidden portions of themselves, to abandon the masks of civility they weren’t brave enough to discard on their own. Myers’s presence reveals that guns and cars, those prosthetics with which American males bolster their identities, are signs not of power but of anxious vulnerability. In short, here guns and cars function like the extra wife acquired by Harry Graham in Lupino and Young’s
The Bigamist
—an ineffective means of empowering himself and of restoring his wounded masculinity. Unlike Graham’s second marriage, Myers’s ominous existence forces an inner conversion: a mobility that is not social but psychic.

Like
The Hitch-Hiker
, Andrew Stone’s
The Night Holds Terror
presents the hitcher as a synecdoche of lawlessness, and the car as a masculine prosthesis, but the film links these qualities to an insecure economic status and to postwar technologies that entrap as much as they liberate. Here again an introduction establishes the factuality of events: an abduction perpetrated against the Courtier family in 1953 (we even see a photo of the real-life family). In the film, when Courtier (Jack Kelly) realizes that young Gosset (Vince Edwards), who has thumbed a ride in his convertible, wants to rob him, he laments in voice-over: “Why, why had I stopped to give that guy a lift? I was taking a chance; I knew that. Yet nearly everyone’s picked up a hitchhiker at one time or another. Haven’t you?” Courtier’s very friendliness (a quality, it is implied, shared by many American males) and his car’s mobility and openness render him (and it) more subject to invasion.

Gosset has assessed Courtier’s wealth from his car but has mistaken his humble Mercury for a Lincoln. “You sure picked the wrong car,” comments Courtier, who is carrying only ten dollars. The thugs—led by John Cassavetes’s intense Batsford—then force Courtier to sell his Merc for the $2,000 he claims it’s worth. Unfortunately, they can get only $500 from the dealer and must return the next day for the balance. So they spend the night in the Courtiers’ home, where Gosset makes a pass at Mrs. Courtier (Hildy Parks) and the others make free with his possessions—Batsford, for example, dons Courtier’s smoking jacket. Equipped with a gun and Courtier’s car, the thieves prove again that stealing a man’s car is stealing his male identity. Relieved of these accouterments of masculine power, Courtier is reduced to sputtering ineffectuality.

The film thus presents automobility as inherently risky: the convertible that seems to empower Courtier by displaying his affluence actually makes him more
vulnerable. Nor is his car a ticket to the open road; instead, it signifies his confinement in domesticity and debt. Hitchhikers, in turn, aren’t merely criminals but subversive forces who undermine and reveal the limitations of the values—autonomy, prosperity, domestic security—that cars are employed to represent. These hitchhikers and the cars they thumb down embody the buried restlessness in the males who own them: their desire to escape, to convert from, say, engineers (Courtier) or gas station owners (Collins) into lone wolves who owe nothing to anyone. The cars’ amoral spaces do not appease their longing for freedom so much as fuel it: it is as if the cars drive
them
.