Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (43 page)

In the ensuing montage Charlie fights and spends in a fury; Roberts is in every shot, sometimes superimposed over the action, and Alice has supplanted Peg. No longer a tiger, Charlie has become a prize horse that Alice rides to win her own animal—the mink coat Peg once wore. Human relations, as Marx warned, have devolved into relations between things. Aware that his animal will soon wear out, Roberts gives Charlie a final job: accept $60,000 to lose to Jack Marlowe. “Why not live the easy life?” he cajoles. “You got a million friends, Charlie; you can’t miss.” He backs this soft-soap with a hard punch: “Nobody backs out now.” Charlie goes along, but Ben, who has become his trainer, refuses Roberts’s patronizing payoff. “Take the money,” Charlie urges him. “It’s got no memory. It don’t think.” Charlie should know: he
is
money. However, he
does
have a memory, and it prompts him to beseech Peg to take him back; after all, he’ll be rich. “Don’t tell me what you can buy,” she says. “You’ve got nothing to buy.” Against Roberts’s cash nexus Peg represents Charlie’s soul bonds. Guilt pangs further buffet Charlie after a neighbor praises him as a credit to Jews, and even Charlie doesn’t seem to believe his explanation to Peg and his mother that throwing the fight is “an investment, a sure thing.” But the turning point comes in the next scene, when Roberts fires Ben, who falls backward over the ring ropes, then goes berserk, collapses, and dies. His sacrifice revives Charlie’s moribund conscience.
²⁹
Perhaps, as Buhle and Wagner state, Ben’s death forces Charlie for the first time to glimpse “something beyond himself and [he] comes to terms with the pain of another human being” (
Dangerous
115). But he also realizes that Ben’s fate is likely to be his own.

The frame closes as Charlie opens his eyes on his pallet. He was “dreamin’,” he says, but now he has awakened. And so the climactic fight begins. Or rather, the match begins, but no fighting happens for several rounds, as the athletes stall, following Roberts’s plan. Then, in round thirteen, after being knocked down four times, Charlie decides to defy Roberts, and his frantic comeback scares even his opponent. “Like a tiger stalking his prey,” according to the announcer, Charlie chases Marlowe around the ring until he knocks him out. Afterward he throws Roberts’s words back at him: “Whaddaya gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies.”
³⁰

Even more directly than
Thieves’ Highway, Body and Soul
equates crime and business, with sweating bodies replacing golden apples as fungible objects. Roberts, who speaks solely in terms of business and mathematics, turns people into commodities. Desperate to rise out of the ghetto, Charlie jumps at the chance to earn big money but instead becomes it. Yet the film doesn’t really scorn the American Dream: it endorses the version voiced by Charlie’s mother—the same one pursued by Polonsky himself. How, the film asks, does one navigate the path between individual achievement and social/communal obligations? It suggests that Charlie’s most grievous error is replacing his loved ones with parasites like Quinn and Alice; when he is finally all alone, he must decide to whom he will belong and in what sense. In this respect
Body and Soul
’s values are not leftist so much as humanist. What really matters, it implies, is not money but one’s soul—not wealth but honor and loyalty. These latter values were hard to find in HUAC-era Hollywood, where many witnesses, as Dassin starkly put it, chose career over honor (“Jules Dassin” 213). Although the trials and blacklist were still in the future (the film was shot in April 1947 and released that August: Silver and Ward 38),
Body and Soul
adumbrates the choices that would soon face Hollywood progressives.

“At Enterprise, I was God, thanks to
Body and Soul
,” remembered Polonsky in 1997 (“Abraham Polonsky” 486). As the writer of the studio’s sole hit, he was afforded a chance to direct his first film,
Force of Evil
, which he adapted from Ira Wolfert’s novel
Tucker’s People
. Whereas
Body and Soul
traces the commodification of an individual and crime’s parasitic relationship to sports,
Force of Evil
attempts a more sweeping indictment. As Polonsky observed, the film uses the numbers racket to represent the entire American system of business (qtd. in Neve,
Film
133)—a system that oppresses its workers, corrupts its leaders, and hides its depredations behind patriotic platitudes and “everybody’s doing it” excuses.
³¹
The evil force in
Force of Evil
is capitalism itself. Yet the film is far from a dull didactic tract. Its crisp cinematography (George Barnes modeled the mise-enscène after the paintings of Edward Hopper; “Abraham Polonsky” 489), powerful acting, and poetically evocative dialogue make it one of the most thoughtful, incisive noirs in the canon. These features also render its critique of American values all the more persuasive.

The film’s exposure of capital’s crimes begins from its opening overhead shot of Wall Street, where Joe Morse (Garfield, in a riveting performance) explains in voice-over that he will make his first million dollars tomorrow, July 4, as the lawyer for Ben Tucker’s numbers racket. Every “sucker” will bet on the number 776
out of sentimental attachment to the American Revolution. There’s one born every minute: according to Morse, citizens spend over $100 million daily betting on numbers. Ordinarily, all of these sentimental bettors would lose, but this year Tucker plans to fix it so the number wins, thereby driving out of business all the “banks” (the betting concerns are “like banks because money is deposited there” but “unlike banks because the chances of getting your money out were a thousand to one”). This scheme will not only give Tucker’s “combine” a monopoly; it will also increase public sentiment to make the numbers racket a legal lottery and vastly increase Tucker’s—and Joe’s—earnings. The only problem is that the scam is “slightly illegal”—but no more so, Joe implies, than Wall Street’s other activities. He dismisses a colleague’s warning about a new prosecutor, Hall, insinuating that working with criminals is just business and that his own hands are not dirty because they’re merely hired.

Joe does retain the vestiges of a conscience. His brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), whom he hasn’t seen in years and who sacrificed to put Joe through law school, operates one small bank, which will go broke along with the others on July 4. Against Tucker’s wishes Joe warns Leo and offers to bring him into Tucker’s fold, only to be met with Leo’s hostile response: “I’m an honest man here, not a gangster. … I do my business honest and respectable.” His brother scoffs: “Don’t you take the nickels and dimes and pennies from people who bet just like any other crook? … They call this racket ‘policy’ because people bet their nickels on numbers instead of paying their weekly insurance premium. … It’s all the same, all policy.” According to Joe, Leo is a hypocrite, the numbers racket being no different from the racket called “insurance.” Since all business is robbery, why not make it more efficient? According to Leo, Joe is a soulless, amoral shill; unlike Tucker’s employees, Leo’s are members of his family—closer to him, indeed, than his brother. Leo believes his “legit” brother to be more crooked than he; Joe believes all crooks are the same. As Joe later explains to an associate, Tucker lends money to those he likes and lets the rest go belly-up: “we’re normal financiers.” Their plan to create a monopolistic conglomerate conforms, indeed, to postwar trends among lawful corporations, which bought out or overwhelmed small businesses to increase profits and eliminate competition.
³²
The trend continues: is there really much difference between Tucker’s tactics and those of, say, twenty-first-century Walmart?

What happens next seems to confirm Marx and Engels’s contention that capitalism degrades family relations by turning them into money relations (Marx and Engels 476): Joe tips off the police to raid Leo’s bank, hoping to force him to
join Tucker’s combine. But instead Leo vows to quit the business—tomorrow, which will be too late to salvage his bank. “People have bets in my bank. That’s a debt,” he declares. He wants to be able to “look in the mirror and see my face, not [Joe’s].” As becomes clear during the raid sequence, Leo is a kindhearted man who tries to spare his employees. The blocking also suggests that he may be morally superior to his brother: during the scene in which Leo vows to quit the business, for instance, he is constantly placed above Joe—reversing the arrangement of their first scene together, in which Joe tries to muscle Leo. But Leo soon echoes Joe’s views. When Leo’s wife reminds him that he used to own legitimate businesses, he sputters, “Real estate business: living from mortgage to mortgage, stealing credit like a thief. And the garage! … Three cents overcharge on every gallon of gas. … Well, Joe’s here now. I won’t have to steal pennies anymore. I’ll have big crooks to steal dollars for me.” Real estate, numbers, a gas station: just different forms of theft. Munby observes that Leo’s speech reveals the “hallowed American space of individual private enterprise … to be just another form of graft” (129). But Leo’s screed isn’t cynical, as Munby’s reading implies; rather, it expresses the Marxian dictum that private property ineluctably leads to oppression (Marx and Engels 484–85).

Meanwhile Joe woos Leo’s secretary, Doris Lowery (Beatrice Pearson), asserting that her alleged innocence is a pretense, that she wants him to be wicked so that he’ll bowl her over. When he admits that he would love to give her a “million-dollar ruby,” she replies that he’s like a magician with his “ruby words.”
³³
Later he resumes his blandishments, claiming that Leo planned to join the combination all along but wanted to be coerced “in order to maintain a moral superiority over me which doesn’t exist. … He pretended to be forced. Is that what you want to do?” Lifting her and placing her on a mantelpiece, he declares that she doesn’t know what she really wants. He may be correct: as we have seen, Leo’s claim that his criminality is cleaner than Joe’s is self-deluded, and Doris clearly enjoys consorting with the powerful, “wicked” Joe Morse. Yet Joe believes that everyone who works in the rackets is just as left-handed as he. In an earlier conversation, after Doris had told him that it’s not wicked to “give and want nothing back,” he answered, “It’s perversion. … To go to great expense for something you want, that’s natural. To reach out to take it—that’s human, that’s natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately, like my brother did today, … don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself, your brother, to make him feel that he’s guilty, that I’m guilty. Just to live, and be guilty.” First articulating a fundamental American principle—that
it is one’s
duty
to satisfy one’s appetites—as well as a prime tenet of American business—that it is wrong
not
to take a profit—Joe’s speech ultimately exposes his dawning self-awareness. Beginning as a defense of his “everyone is crooked” ethos, the speech turns into a self-accusation (that by forcing Leo to admit his guilt, Joe was trying to reassure himself of his own innocence) and a confession. Joe is starting to grasp that his excuses mask a hypocrisy more dangerous than Leo’s.

When Leo’s bank is engulfed by the combine, its labor practices abruptly change. As one worker says to another: “See this nickel? It belongs to Tucker, and so do we.” The film thus charts how, as stated in
The Communist Manifesto
, capitalism transforms workers into wage slaves (Marx and Engels 476). Whereas Leo’s small-time operation made them all feel like contributors, Tucker’s people might as well be working in a factory: they become estranged, as Marx argues, from the process and products of their work, as well as from other workers. Perhaps most important—as shown by the figure of the bookkeeper, Freddie Bauer (Howland Chamberlain)—each worker becomes alienated from his or her own humanity.
³⁴
Thus, on entering Leo’s bank and hearing that the profits are now channeled to Tucker, Bauer angrily quits: “I’m not your slave!” But Tucker won’t let him quit, so Bauer uses the method that trapped people often employ: he becomes an informer, keeping the police apprised of Tucker’s activities. After his first call to the cops, Bauer is accosted by Wally, a minion of Bill Ficco (Paul Fix), one of Tucker’s competitors, who proposes that Bauer give him a list of all the banks. “I don’t want to have anything to do with gangsters,” says Bauer. Wally replies, “Whaddaya mean, ‘gangsters’? It’s business.”

Wally’s mock indignation echoes the protests of Joe Morse, who has all along mouthed two conflicting interpretations of his activities: that his hands are clean because he’s just a lawyer, not a gangster, and that this doesn’t matter anyway because all business is exploitative. His conflicted nature is represented by the phones in his office—one above his desk for legitimate business; a second phone, used for shadier activities, hidden in a drawer: right-handed and left-handed endeavors, respectively. This second phone, with which he reports to Tucker and tells the police about Leo’s bank, substitutes for his hands and serves as a switching point between plans and their execution. The phone had allowed him to make a killing from a distance, but now it becomes the nexus where loyalties lapse and secrets become betrayals. Thus when Tucker’s slinky wife informs Joe that his phone is probably tapped, he realizes his “hands” are dirty, his words potentially incriminating. As Joe slowly approaches his desk, the camera, placed
just behind the drawer containing his phone, seems to entice him to make a call. Picking it up gingerly, as if it might explode, he hears the telltale click that means someone is listening. These scenes of Bauer’s whistle-blowing, Ficco’s request for lists of names, and Joe’s tapped phone eerily forecast the blacklist period. Indeed, the phone-tapping device is not merely a prediction: during the making of
Force of Evil
, Polonsky’s phone was tapped by the FBI!
³⁵

Now Joe is further conflicted: he wants Doris, who represents the better part of himself, but can’t truly believe in her (or his own) innocence; he wants to save Leo but can’t do so without betraying Tucker and endangering himself. But after Bauer’s snitching gets Doris arrested again, she breaks off with Joe, telling him that Leo will “die of this. … Well, I don’t wish to die of loving you.” Delivering these words in a phone booth, she exposes Joe’s hypocrisy by invoking the instrument that enables it. Returning to his office in the dark, Joe walks toward matching doors that symbolize his choices: stay or quit. Peeking through the skylight of the right-handed door, he views his office on the left, where an FBI agent is using Joe’s own phone to report on him. After the agent leaves, Joe opens his safe, removes his money and a gun, then trudges alone down a deserted Wall St. But it’s too late for Leo: Bauer has set him up to be captured by Ficco. As Leo is taken away, Polonsky dissolves from him to Joe: the older brother will die for the younger one’s sins.