Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (38 page)

The second half of the film, however, retreats from this provocative opening and repeats the trajectory of
The Accused:
Ann is rescued and sent back to her parents by a man, Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews), a minister who seems immune to sexual feelings. But after Bruce has helped Ann recover, another man, Marini (Jerry Paris), makes a pass at her and insinuates that Ferguson just wants her for himself. As Marini plays with Ann’s hair, Lupino moves to a close-up of his mouth, which, from her POV, becomes the rapist’s mouth. Because Marini’s mouth uttered the unspeakable—that she and Ferguson may harbor sexual feelings for each other—Ann grabs a wrench and brains him.
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Certainly Marini is too aggressive, but the traumatized Ann overreacts because sexual feelings have become anathema to her. Like Wilma Tuttle in
The Accused
, at her judicial hearing Ann doesn’t speak for herself; Bruce makes the case that she suffered from “temporary insanity” and blames society for not providing help for the rapist, who has spent half of his life incarcerated, and for its “criminal negligence” toward Ann. He pleads for better methods of turning “human scrap back into useful human beings.” After the prosecutor drops the charges, and a psychiatrist recommends that Ann undergo treatment, she returns to Jim and her parents. Thus, as Pam Cook comments, “every move Ann makes to take control of her destiny is punished or refused” (66). Moreover, what Ronnie Scheib calls the “juiceless, deadpan Army” of male doctors, ministers, judges, and lawyers absolve themselves of guilt (61) by attributing the blame to a vague entity called “society,” without recognizing their own complicity in the silencing of women.

It’s not clear whether Lupino et al. mean this denouement to be as ironic as it may seem to contemporary viewers. Several of the Lupino/Filmakers’ pictures, including
The Bigamist
(see below), feature similarly wishy-washy endings. But we may read the film as indicting not just rapists but patriarchy’s continuing violations of Ann: in the end the rapist’s gaze is merely replaced by the equally invasive surveillance of legal and mental health institutions, which will decide when, if ever, she is to be freed. To compare this film to
The Accused
, then, is to understand the degree to which women artists’ perspectives on female victimization were constrained by prevailing attitudes about sexuality and gender, and by a trust in institutions that more radical films might condemn. There’s no hint of complicity in Ann’s conscience, but complicity exists—on the part of a society that cannot integrate female sexuality, and by filmmakers who cannot conceive of alternatives.

Early in
Possessed
, a catatonic Louise Howell (Joan Crawford again) is admitted to the hospital. As a machine scans her body, the doctors speak of her in the third person. He hasn’t even talked to her, but Dr. Willard (Stanley Ridges) already knows that she is “frustrated, just like all the others we’ve seen,” and he is “thrilled” to use “narcosynthesis” (that familiar noir treatment) to induce her to tell her story. As he did in
High Wall
, director Curtis Bernhardt exposes how psychiatry steals patients’ agency. But it matters that this patient is a woman, for, even more than Ann Walton, Louise is a victim of patriarchy.
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As adapted by Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall from a
Cosmopolitan
novelette by Rita Weiman,
Possessed
presents a “schizoid” America that hides behind legal and clinical discourses while it turns women into objects.
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As in
High Wall
, the asylum is not separate from the world outside but an extension of it.

Louise’s flashback is prompted by the memory of a Schumann piece that her former lover, David Sutton (Van Heflin), loved to play on the piano. Louise confesses to Sutton that she “just existed” before she met him, but he gets defensive the minute she mentions marriage: “I like to play solo,” he protests. Louise pleads, “I just can’t go back [to] being on the outside of people’s lives looking in.” He replies, “We’re all on the outside of other people’s lives, looking in.” These lines evoke both our voyeuristic role as spectators of Louise’s gradual dissolution and the film’s master trope of barriers and bars. We don’t know why Louise clings to Sutton so tightly, for no background is provided, but clearly she has learned that her worth depends on being valued by a male. Louise is already doubly in thrall, being further tyrannized by Pauline Graham (Nana Bryant), the invalid for whom she works as a live-in nurse. Not only does Mrs. Graham constantly ring Louise’s buzzer, but she is certain that Louise has designs on her wealthy husband, Dean (Raymond Massey). Ironically, before long Louise becomes Mrs. Graham—both literally, for she marries Dean after Pauline’s death, and metaphorically, in that she too becomes disabled by jealousy and paranoia.

After a pause the flashback resumes with Louise’s memory of Mrs. Graham’s suicide by drowning. The doubling of Louise and Pauline begins at the coroner’s inquest, when Graham intones, “She did it deliberately” (the two “shes” seeming to blend) and Graham’s daughter Carol (Geraldine Brooks) angrily charges, “She killed herself because of you,” then announces to her father that “Miss Howell has taken my place, just as she took mother’s place!” Months later, Louise has become Graham’s son’s nanny and moved to Washington with them. When Sutton
visits them, she is at first cordial, then shaky, and finally, as he boasts of his conquests, nasty: “Your love affair with yourself has reached heroic proportions,” she declares, before slapping him. Mortified, she resigns. But Graham proposes marriage on the spot, and Louise accepts. If, like Julia Ross, Louise seems to have everything a woman could want, in becoming Mrs. Graham, she, like so many other noir escapees, merely swaps one form of servitude for another.

Louise mends fences with Carol, but their relationship is strained again when Sutton begins to woo the girl. Carol invites him to a piano recital, where the soloist plays the Schumann piece, sending an upset Louise back to the mansion. Alone in the house, she is tormented by sounds real and imagined—echoey piano music, high-pitched shrieking, a loud clock, even her own heartbeat. Louise shuts the barred window, but her enemies are not outside; they are inside her own mind. When Carol returns and again accuses Louise of killing her mother, Louise admits it; the women struggle, and Louise knocks Carol down the stairs to her death. Then, as the perspiring Louise gazes down in horror, Carol’s body vanishes, and Carol, quite alive, reenters the house: the argument and murder were all Louise’s fantasy. This waking dream reveals that Louise’s jealousy of Sutton is tangled up with her guilt over Pauline’s death. Her motives and pathologies converge in the “murder” of Carol: she at once eliminates a rival for Sutton’s affections, enacts her own guilty wish to have murdered the first Mrs. Graham, and—since Pauline is her alter ego—kills herself.

Calling herself “Mrs. Smith,” Louise seeks help from a physician, who diagnoses schizophrenia and compares her to a person who can’t wake from a dream. Then Mrs. Smith asks Dean for a divorce. But he has his own cure in mind: she must
face
her illness by returning to the lake estate where Pauline died. Once there, Louise sees a hand close the window of Pauline’s room, then hears her buzzer and a tinny voice calling, “Louise!” She enters Pauline’s bedroom, and we hear a series of screams. Racing upstairs, Dean finds Louise standing in the corner, a shadow slashing her middle. “It’s Pauline,” she declares. “She wants me to kill myself like she did.” Louise indeed seems “possessed” by the spirit of the first Mrs. Graham, just as she has been possessed in marriage by Mr. Graham. He calms her, but Louise’s torments aren’t over, for she remains fixated on David Sutton. After Carol announces her engagement to Sutton, Louise coldly informs her that Sutton is still in love with her and vows to prevent the marriage at any cost. When Dean tells Louise that he has engaged a shrink for her, Louise screams, “You just wanna lock me up; you wanna put me away, I know!” Then she races to Sutton’s place and points a pistol at him. The arrogant
Sutton can’t believe she would pull the trigger, but she does, repeatedly, killing him.

The flashback ends with Louise screaming, “I killed him! David! David!” Dr. Willard smugly concludes that Louise is what used to be called “possessed of devils” and (in a reprise of the epigraph to
Spellbound
) asserts that he must cast them out. He declares that Pauline’s death triggered Louise’s psychosis and that she is “neither mentally nor morally responsible for any of her actions.”
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But neither he nor Graham mentions the obsession with Sutton—the real catalyst for her illness—nor the servitude and emotional repression that fed her illness, nor the likelihood that their patronizing behavior exacerbated her disorder. Indeed, the real problem, as R. Barton Palmer observes, isn’t psychological but ideological: that the David Suttons and Dean Grahams of the world are free to enact their desires, but the world’s Louise Howells are not (166). She can revolt only by becoming insane, thereby refusing to be integrated or pacified. Alas, the hospital only multiplies the imprisonment, isolation, and alienation that Louise experienced outside its walls. Inside at last, Louise will never get out.

Similar themes are stressed in
Caged
, a hard-hitting hybrid of noir and social-problem film set in a women’s prison and produced by Jerry Wald for Warner Bros.
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Journalist Virginia Kellogg, who cowrote the screenplay, spent months visiting women’s prisons and even stayed in one for two weeks to obtain material. Later she wrote that the club women who visit prisons never see the “rot” inside (qtd. in Francke 73; emphasis in original).
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But
Caged
also exposes a more insidious rot at the core of American society. Like
Possessed
, it first distinguishes between the inside and outside only to conclude that there is little difference between them.

The film’s first shot puts us inside a police van filled with female convicts, looking out the window with protagonist Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker). A frightened naif, Marie seems out of place among these hardened women. Her “crime” is, again, one of complicity: she and her husband, Tom, had moved in with her mother and stepfather, but the men couldn’t get along. Desperate for cash, the out-of-work Tom held up a gas station, and when he was clubbed by the attendant, Marie tried to help him, which made her an accomplice. She received a fifteen-year sentence—all for a paltry forty dollars. “Five bucks less and it wouldn’t be a felony,” remarks the intake clerk. Clearly Marie is guilty of little more than weakness and of being a woman. Though her age is nineteen, her more important number is 93850: her new identity. Indeed, as the film proceeds, Marie is gradually stripped of everything she once called her own: privacy, free time,
and—after she learns that she is pregnant and must bear her child in prison—control over her body. Her loss of agency is brilliantly rendered by director John Cromwell through a disturbing montage. A prison bell chimes, followed by a repetitive round of tasks: bell, work, bell, roll call, bell, chow, bell, end of work. Their time totally regulated, the inmates become machines.

According to head matron Evelyn Harper (frighteningly played by Hope Emerson), however, the inmates are just animals and should be treated as such. She puts Marie to work scrubbing the floor: “Just like the big cage in the zoo; only you clean it up, instead of the keeper.” At the other extreme is prison superintendent Ruth Benson (Agnes Moorehead), whose well-meaning liberal aims and empathy for the inmates are impotent to overturn the power structures inside and outside the prison. The inside is ruled by Harper and inmate Kitty Stark (Betty Garde), who recruits inmates to become “boosters” (shoplifters) for her gang, promising phony legit jobs and paroles for those who cooperate. She advises Marie to “wise up before it’s too late,” but Marie declines the offer. Despite these hierarchies, the prisoners unite to help one inmate, June (Olive Deering), dress up for her parole hearing, and they defend each other against informants and brutality. And whenever a train passes by, all of them stop, listen, and gaze longingly out the barred windows at the “free side.” They’re all alike in another important respect: “if it wasn’t for men,” June concludes, “we wouldn’t be in here.”

When June is denied parole and hangs herself, the shock induces labor for Marie, who delivers her baby boy prematurely. Afterward Benson threatens to fire Harper for not informing her of June’s depressed state, but Harper, who knows a highly placed politician, is immune. As she and Benson argue, the camera rests behind Harper, so that Benson’s tiny head appears to grow out of Harper’s shoulder, showing us who really holds power. Harper’s view of the inmates is also shared by the world outside, represented by the smug Senator Donnelly (Taylor Holmes), who pays a visit after an obstetrician reports the infirmary’s filthy condition, sneering at Benson’s pleas for more rehabilitation services and a bigger budget. After he departs, Benson gazes out her barred window at the street below: she is as caged as the prisoners. The fact of female confinement becomes even clearer when Marie’s mother visits. Marie implores her to take her baby, but her stepfather won’t allow it. Her mother can’t leave him, or “there’d be no one to take care of me till you get out.” So Marie must put the baby up for adoption. This lost child signifies her disconnection from the outside and the loss of control over her body and her circumstances. Mother and daughter—one outside, the other inside—are equally imprisoned by their gender.