Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (40 page)

Calling these films Lupino’s, however, begs an important question—that of cinematic authorship. I have noted that screenwriters exercised little control over their products: even Van Upp, who supervised the production of
Gilda
, had to answer to Harry Cohn. As the “women of the film industry” writers have occupied a low position in studio hierarchies since the 1940s. Lupino’s case, however, is different, for all the films she directed (aside from her last theatrical picture) were made for her own production companies, first Emerald, and then The Filmakers, Inc., which she cofounded and co-owned with Young and Malvin Wald.
⁵⁰
This arrangement provided her with an unprecedented degree of creative control. Indeed, The Filmakers represents a radical approach to cinematic authorship. A survey of the credits tells part of the story: Lupino directed seven of the company’s films, produced or coproduced two, wrote or cowrote five, acted in three, and, according to those who worked with her, also served in a variety of other capacities, from set design to prop management. In
The Bigamist
she was the first woman to direct herself in a Hollywood film. As Hastie observes, Lupino’s authorship “proliferated in multiple directions” (22). Collier Young produced eight and wrote or cowrote four pictures, and the couple continued to work together even after their marriage ended. The Filmakers’ collaborative approach thus helped to “transform the very ways that we understand how films are created” (Hastie 21). The company seems to exemplify a “feminine” approach to authorship, one emphasizing mutual support and community over hierarchy
and factory-style pigeonholing (see Kuhn 4). Most important, by blending entrepreneurship with collaboration, Filmakers offered an alternative to the patriarchal Hollywood system, making progressive films that examined women’s issues and questioned the American pursuit of wealth and happiness at any cost.

One of those issues, marriage, is the subject of
The Bigamist
, a blend of noir and domestic melodrama told largely in flashback by bigamist Harry Graham (Edmond O’Brien). When Graham and his wife, Eve (Joan Fontaine), decide to adopt a child in San Francisco, they are investigated by the agency’s Mr. Jordan (Edmund Gwenn), who is bothered by Harry’s diffidence during the interview. Following Graham to Los Angeles (where he travels frequently) and appearing unannounced at his modest home there, Jordan is shocked to hear a baby cry; he learns that Graham is also married to Phyllis Martin (played by Lupino).
The Bigamist
is, in short, the Flitcraft episode redux—except that this businessman lives his two lives at the same time. But unlike Flitcraft’s, Graham’s lives are as different as the two women he has married.
⁵¹

In an early scene in San Francisco, Harry describes Eve as “the perfect wife,” but he seems to be describing a stereotype, not an actual woman. In fact, as his flashback makes clear, Harry feels intimidated by Eve, who is also his business partner. When he returns home after meeting Phyllis, he finds Eve entertaining business associates and displaying a more thorough knowledge of the refrigerators they sell than Harry possesses. When she asks Harry to serve brandy while she plays poker with the boys, he feels she has usurped his masculine role in both marriage and business.
⁵²
The refrigerators may represent Eve but more likely stand for their marriage—or for marriage itself (Seiter 113). In any case, the couple is unable to conceive a child: instead of a dead baby, we have a baby that never exists. Seiter notes that the film recalls
Mildred Pierce
’s preoccupation with “the instability caused by career women who neglect the domestic sphere and misdirect their maternal energies” (109). Yet we must resist putting the blame on Eve; Harry implies that she is at fault, but he is far from a reliable narrator.

Graham’s transgression began one weekend in LA, when he felt particularly alienated from Eve. It was “loneliness” that drove him to it, he claims; indeed, throughout his narration Graham acts as though he had no choice in the matter. But Harry is the one who initiates the meeting with Phyllis on a Hollywood “star tour” bus, gently making a pass that prompts her world-wise response, “You’re not very good at pickups.”
⁵³
After a flirtatious conversation and a visit to her workplace, they part. On his next visit to LA he and Phyllis travel to Acapulco, where,
it is implied, they have sex. The guilt-ridden Harry stays away from Los Angeles for three months, then returns to find Phyllis pregnant, depressed, and bedridden. He proposes to her because, he tells Jordan, “for the first time I felt needed.” His double life nearly comes to an end when Eve appears in Los Angeles and Phyllis learns that he has been with another woman, but even after she kicks him out, Graham still can’t spill the beans, and Phyllis forgives him.

With Phyllis, Harry feels important, in charge, masculine. Because he can’t reconcile the conditions of his first marriage with his values, he is self-divided and takes no responsibility: it is as if some other Harry Graham is married to Eve. Unable to bring himself to ask Eve for a divorce (“How could you hurt someone so much?”) or to tell Phyllis the truth, he blames the women for his passivity. When he informs Jordan that he had planned to “help” Eve by staying with her until the baby was adopted, Jordan replies, “That was both a gallant and a foolish scheme.” Wrong. It’s a cruel scheme. By pretending that he is too kind to hurt either woman, he ends up hurting both. In fact, Graham projects his own deficiencies onto them, a different set for each: his sterility and emptiness onto Eve, his emotional neediness onto Phyllis.
⁵⁴
Though he protests that his bigamy was a result of their needs, it’s obviously a product of his own. At the end of his story Jordan remarks, “I despise you, and I pity you.” He may be too generous: this is a man, after all, who enlists a friend to tell his wife about his bigamy.

Graham’s attempt to reinvent himself fails because, as Emerson reminds us, no matter who is lying beside him, he still wakes up with himself. Harry wants to be punished, but there is no legal penalty; instead, as the magistrate declares at his trial, he will be punished by stigma and by the loss of his wives and son. According to his lawyer he is “an ordinary man that made one terrible mistake.” This rather forgiving description of Graham’s persistent deceptions does, however, point to the film’s broader critique of marriage. As his lawyer notes (and the judge agrees), there is a “peculiar … irony” in the case: had Graham merely “kept” Phyllis as his mistress, other people would wink at it. But because he married her—because, in a bizarre way, he followed convention—ordinary folks condemn him. In seeking to preserve his marriage, Graham destroyed it. Hastie thus concludes that
The Bigamist
(and, I would add, the bigamist) “rebels against rebellion” (63).
⁵⁵
I would argue, rather, that the film puts the blame on marriage itself, which entraps females by bringing them under male sovereignty and traps males by stifling their sexuality and enforcing rigid gender roles. Hastie is thus correct in stating that Graham’s situation reveals “conflicting ideals about marriage in
[the] postwar USA” (7)—the tensions I outlined above, between traditional, hierarchical arrangements and an emerging ethos of equality.

The circumstances of the film’s production add a curious element to this critique. By the time
The Bigamist
was shot, Young had divorced Lupino and married … Joan Fontaine, who plays Eve. In other words Young was working with his current wife and his ex-wife on a film he had written about bigamy! The two actresses publicly maintained that they were good friends and that the situation didn’t bother them (see Hastie 14; Donati 201). But surely they were aware of the ironies involved in acting out (and in Lupino’s case, directing a movie about) their husband’s mixed feelings. They likely shared them: like many movie stars, both Lupino (who was by 1953 married to her third husband, Howard Duff) and Fontaine (for whom Young was the third of four husbands) engaged in serial monogamy. This web of relationships among the film’s multiple creators is mirrored in its ambivalence about marriage and muted sympathy for Graham. Hastie thus asserts that Lupino “was positioned between fictional and actual roles because of her personal and professional entanglements. The story in this way is less Harry’s than it is hers” (81). It is also the story of her society, as it reveals the shifting moods and mores of a time when women’s growing presence in the workforce—women such as Eve Graham and Phyllis Martin (and Ida Lupino)—produced anomie, anxiety, and alienation, as well as hints of liberation.

These vexed personal and professional relations aside, Ida Lupino and The Filmakers embody an alternative to a factory system that exploited writers and women. The Filmakers’ approach to authorship endorsed collaboration over individualism, eschewed glamor in favor of social conscience, and abandoned moralizing for complexity. That the films end by softening their indictments of institutions and practices is regrettable but was probably necessary, given the power of the PCA and the conservatism of their audiences. Ida Lupino is, indeed, an ideal example of a noir femme vital: a woman who used her multiple talents to advance women’s interests and model female creative labor. Along the way she also helped to pioneer a revolutionary approach to cinematic authorship.

It is evident that film noir is unthinkable without femme noirs and the women who made them. These female-authored pictures helped to redefine a woman’s place, both through their content and through their production circumstances. While working behind the scenes on modestly budgeted films in an often oppressive system, these female filmmakers trained a critical eye on sexist institutions,
raised important questions about marriage, and reflected on the nature of guilt and responsibility as it affected women in particular. The femme noirs were a proving ground for major cultural shifts, a theater where Americans could witness their society dreaming for itself a new shape, as these women’s labor helped give birth to a new set of cultural paradigms.

In
The Asphalt Jungle
the invalid wife of corrupt lawyer Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern) confesses her fears. “When I think of all those awful people you come in contact with, downright criminals, I get scared,” she tells him. “Oh, there’s nothing so different about them,” he replies. “After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.” A dissolve superimposes his face over that of Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden)—a downright criminal who, with Emmerich’s backing, has helped to pull off a jewel heist. The wealthy lawyer and the hooligan are two of a kind, except that Dix, unlike Emmerich, is loyal to his comrades and believes in an undefiled world outside of the asphalt jungle.

In the context of John Huston’s film, Emmerich’s words sound like an excuse. But the line carries broader resonance for film noir, which, as many critics have recognized, was a haven for postwar Hollywood’s radical leftist writers and directors. Their films repeatedly demonstrate, as McGilligan and Buhle note, that crime is “at its base about capitalism and capitalism about criminal greed” (
Tender
xx). Indeed, as Lary May observes, the idea that crime is but a left-handed form of endeavor “informed the thinking of an entire group” of radical film artists in the 1940s (225). Important noirs made by liberal activists such as Huston and by radicals such as John Garfield, Jules Dassin, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, Cyril Endfield, Dalton Trumbo, and Joseph Losey portray class, unfettered capitalism, and hypocritical institutions as obstacles to true American democracy. Dassin’s
Thieves’ Highway
delineates the plight of truckers who fall prey to a crooked capitalist. Rossen’s script for
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
anatomizes class envy and the depredations of industrial capitalism, and his
Body and Soul
(scripted by Polonsky) chronicles the commodification of a boxer (played by Garfield) through his association with a wealthy gangster. Polonsky’s brilliant
Force of Evil
explicitly equates capitalism and organized crime with its story of two brothers involved in the numbers racket.
The Asphalt Jungle
evokes sympathy for its disenfranchised citizens, who view crime as the sole pathway to
upward mobility and the only means of preserving authenticity. Endfield’s
The Underworld Story
indicts the press for perverting its constitutional mandate into a moneymaking machine. Finally, as I show in my conclusion, Endfield’s
Try and Get Me!
and Losey’s
The Prowler
(scripted by Trumbo) portray the dissolution of the American Dream into an alibi for nihilist self-advancement.

Leftist filmmakers used noir to critique certain American values and to promote an alternative Americanism that emphasized equality, sympathy for the oppressed, and collectivity over capitalism and rampant individualism. Their left-handed endeavors criticized materialism and condemned the hypocrisies of the upper class while exposing the media’s complicity with oppression. Some of their films—even those made before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) descended on Hollywood in 1947—also capture the period’s paranoia through tales of secrecy and betrayal. These filmmakers’ challenges to orthodoxies led to their blacklisting or forced emigration, but their critiques of self-interest and the depredations of big business, as well as their defense of liberty and equality, remain trenchant today.

Many of the Hollywood Left were, or had been, members of the Communist Party. The majority of them joined during the period of the Popular Front—a coalition of radicals and liberals who fought fascism and championed the rights of workers in the 1930s—and hoped to advance the struggle for better labor conditions in Hollywood.
¹
Quite a few left the party after the Hitler-Stalin pact or in disenchantment with the CPUSA’s dogmatic devotion to Stalinism. The Hollywood reds were motivated, as Trumbo wrote in 1972 and Dassin repeated in a later interview, by a sincere desire to make the world better: to combat prejudice, work for communitarian ideals, fight fascism, resist corporate tyranny, bolster organized labor, and, not incidentally, give themselves ownership of their own creative work.
²
For these artists, communism was a means to preserve and protect cherished American values: equality, freedom of expression, resistance to oppression. Their alleged “un-Americanism” was motivated, in other words, by a faith in the American Dream.