The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (14 page)

Our initial purpose is to discuss the effect, the
feeling tone
of headlights reflected on wet urban streets in Lapland, Florida. This is central to our discourse, the feeling tone of those reflections. By implication, then, rain; cars veering at great speed around sharp corners; unholstered pistols, brandished; desperate men; a sick, thrilled sense of impendingness. The immediate historical context plays a central role, as does a profound national sense of the shameful, the squalid, matters never acknowledged in the golden but streaky Florida light. You’d need a spotlight and a truncheon to beat it out of these people. Florida, it will be remembered, tends toward the hot, the dark, the needy, the rotting, the “sultry.” The stunted and unnatural. Lapland, i.e., someone’s (theoretically) warm yet not really comfortable, in fact impossibly dispossessing. . . .

Steam rises through the grates.

We are in.................................................................................................................................gulf coast....................................................................sempiternal darkness..................................................................................without surcease, without hope for Silky’s......................

In Lapland, all the women are always awake. Even your
mother
lies awake all the night through, drawing essential feminine nourishment from the bottomless communal well. Headlights shine in long streaks on the rain-soaked streets. Just outside the city limits, a gas station attendant named Bud Forrester rolls on his side in bed, thinking of a woman named Carole Chandler. Carole Chandler is his boss’s wife, and she has no conscience whatsoever. Bud does possess a conscience, rudimentary though it is. He wishes he could amputate it, without pain, like a sixth finger no thicker around than a twig. In Bud Forrester’s past lies a tremendous crime for which his simple duties at the gas station represent a conscious and ongoing penance.

During the commission of the crime, Frank Bigelow took two rounds in the gut, and he will never again void his bowels without whimpering, cursing, sweating. He walks with a limp, Frank. He isn’t the kind of guy who can accept stuff like the whimpering, the sweating, the limping with every step of his beautifully shod feet. And when everything depended on where the money was, the money was lifting and blowing all across the tarmac, jittering through the air, like leaves, falling earthward in zigzags, like leaves. Bud Forrester always had a little tingle of a premonition that it was going to end this way. The other guys, they didn’t want to hear about it. Bradford Galt and Tom Jardine, Bigelow had them hypnotized,
in thrall
. If Bud had tried to tell them about his little tingle, Galt and Jardine would have taped his mouth shut, bound his arms and legs, and locked him in a closet. That’s the way these boys operate—on only a couple of very simple levels.

Frank Bigelow, though, is another matter. One night, over a lamplit table littered with charts and maps, he had observed a certain shine in the whites of Bud’s eyes, and immediately he had known of his underling’s traitorous misgivings.

One more detail, essential to the coils of the plot: Frank Bigelow also thinks endlessly and without.........upon Carole Chandler. These thoughts, alas, have darkened since he wound up impotent. Deep in his heart what he’d like to do is sic Tom Jardine on Carole; brutal, stupid Jardine is hung like a stallion (off-camera, the guy is always inventing excuses for showing off his tool) and while Tom makes Carole Chandler beg for more like the bitch she is, Frank would like to be watching through a kind of peephole arrangement. Trouble is, after that he would have to murder Tom Jardine, and Tom is one of his main guys, he’s like one of the family, so that’s out.

Every film noir has one impossible plot convenience: in this instance, despite his frustrated passion for wicked Carole Chandler, Frank Bigelow has no idea that Bud Forrester is employed at her husband’s Shell station, because he sees her only at the Black Swan, the gambling club of which he is part-owner with Nicky Drake, a smooth, smooth operator. In Lapland, one always finds gambling clubs; also, drunken or corrupt night watchmen; a negligee; a ditch; a running man; a number of raincoats and hats; a man named “Johnny”; a man named “Doc,” sometimes varied to “Dad”; an alcoholic; a penthouse; a beach shack; a tavern full of dumbbells; an armored car; a racetrack; a............; a shadowy staircase. These elements commonly participate in and enhance the effect of headlights reflected on wet urban streets.

When young, remarkably beautiful. When aged, negligible. This disparity passes without notice because few of the women of Lapland outlive their youth. They often hiss when they speak, or exhibit some other charming speech defect. Their reflections can be seen in rearview mirrors, the windows of apartments at night, the surfaces of slick wooden bars, the surfaces of lakes and pools, in the eyes of dead men. Carole Chandler likes the look of Bud Forrester, she “fancies” the “cut of his jib,” but he strikes her as strangely inert, withdrawn, passive. Of course Carole takes these qualities both at face value and as a personal challenge. Nicky Drake wouldn’t fuck this dame for, oh, a hundred million bucks, and his partner’s obsession with her makes him...........When Carole slinks into the Black Swan, handsome Nicky looks away and frowns in disgust.

Having the life expectancy of mayflies, these women dress like dragonflies, for like cigarette-smoking and cocktail-drinking the wearing of dragonfly attire is a means of slowing time. The most gifted women in Lapland live in virtual dog years, or on a 7:1 ratio. Time is astonishingly relative for everyone in Lapland. That it is especially so for the women allows them a tremendous advantage. They can outthink any man who wanders into their crosshairs because they have a great deal more time to do their thinking in.

In Lapland, no woman ever speaks to another woman, there’d be no point in wasting valuable time like that. What would they talk about, their feelings? They already understand everything they have to know about their feelings. In Lapland, no woman ever speaks to a child, for they are all barren, although some may now and again pretend to be pregnant. It follows that there are no children in Lapland. However, in a location error that went largely unnoticed, Frank Bigelow once drove past an elementary school. In Lapland, women speak only to men, and these interchanges are deeply codified. The soundtrack (see below) becomes especially intrusive at such moments. It is understood that the woman is motivated by a private scheme, of which the man is entirely ignorant, though he may be suspicious, and it’s always better, more dramatic, if he is.

Lapland women all have at least two names, the old one that got used up, and the new one, which gets a little more tarnished every day. Carole Chandler used to be Dorothy Lyons, back when she lived in Center City and engineered the moral ruin and financial collapse of Nicky Drake’s best friend, Rip Murdock, the owner of the Orchid Club, a gambling establishment with a private membership.

Rip, a dandy at the time, used to.............., and Carol/Dorothy, then a cocktail waitress at his club,.............................................................................. ............................................................................................................................... .............his beach shack...................................................................a moue....... ................................................................................a stranger with a gun.......... ................................................................................................................................ ..........bloody rags.............................

.......................................................................................................................... ..........................................................off the cliff.................................................. ............................................................................................................................... .............................................................................................arched an eyebrow.

Once in her life, every woman in Lapland gazes through lowered eyelids at a man like Nicky, or Frank, or Rip, or even Doc/Dad (but never at a man like Bud), and says, “You and me, we’re the same—a no-good piece of trash.” In every case, this declaration is meant as, and is taken to be, a compliment.

In Lapland, the spectator observes a world characterized by deliberate dislocations, complex and indirect narratives, flawed protagonists, ambiguous motives and resolutions, a fascination with death....................... ...................................................................................................“the blood in her hair, the blood on the floor, the blood in her hair”...................................... and an atmosphere of nightmare.

When Rusty Fontaine blew into town, he took a room at the Mandarin hotel and started spreading his money around. He was so successful at exploiting middle-class greed and veniality that in six months every square in Lapland owed him a fortune. To get out of debt, a consortium of the squares lured a banker, Chalmers Vermilyea, into an abandoned warehouse and, assisted by Rusty’s luscious and treacherous female sidekick, Marie Gardner, persuaded him to embezzle.....................................................................................sprinkled gasoline over the corpse...................................................off the cliff.

To the extent that Lapland is a style and not a genre, the vertiginous camera angles, broken shadows, neon-lit interiors, hairpin staircases, extreme high-angle long shots, graphics specific to entrapment, represent a radically disenchanted vision of postwar American life and values.

Because paranoia is always justified in Lapland, psychopathology becomes an adaptive measure. Johnny O’Clock runs a gambling casino, the Velvet Deuce. He knew Bud Forrester in the war, when they fought across France, killing hundreds of Krauts in one bombed-out village after another. Forrester was his sergeant, and he always respected the man. When one day O’Clock stops for gas at a Shell station on the edge of town, he recognizes his old friend in the station attendant and, acting on impulse, offers him a job in the casino. Forrester accepts, thinking that he might escape his obsession with Carole Chandler. Unknown to Forrester, Johnny O’Clock was unable to stop killing after returning to civilian life and now, under the cover of his job at the Velvet Deuce, hires himself out as a contract killer. He intends to recruit his old sergeant into...............velvet gloves, his trademark ................................................................................................................... Frank Bigelow....................................................steam rising through the grates...........................................................................................to the beach shack.......................................................with the alcoholic security guard in a stupor........................................................................................................ aflame, the Dodge....................................................two corpses in the back seat and six thousand dollars in cash.

World War II, it must be remembered, serves as the unspoken background for these films and defines their emotional context. Eight percent of adult males in Lapland served as snipers in the war, and a good twelve percent have metal plates in their heads. These men drink too much and mutter to themselves. Because it gives them red-rimmed headaches, they detest big-band jazz, which they refer to as “that monkey music.” They are prone to blackouts and spells of amnesia. They often marry blind women and/or nymphomaniacs. Unlike them, the former snipers display no visible emotion of any kind. The men with plates in their heads are completely devoted to the ex-snipers, who reward their loyalty with........... .........................with onions..............................

Brace Bannister threw an old woman down the stairs. For pleasure, Johnny O’Clock shot Nelle Marchetti, a prostitute, in the head and got clean away with it. Norman Clyde existed entirely in flashbacks. Old Man Tierney poisoned a girl visiting from California and kept her severed hand in his pocket. Carole Chandler’s husband, Smokey Chandler, molests small boys on “business trips” to Center City. Nicky Drake has assigned a number to everyone in the world. Carter Carpenter, the vice mayor of Lapland, sleeps on a mattress stuffed with human hair.

Most noncriminal adult males in Lapland, apart from the doomed squares, are either policemen or private eyes. It is the job of the policemen to accept bribes and arrest the innocent. It is the job of the private investigators to discover bodies, to be interrogated, to drink from the bottle, to wear trench coats, to smoke all the time, to rebuff sexual invitations from females with charming lisps and hair that hangs, fetchingly, over one eye. The private eyes distrust authority, even their own. Nick Cochran is a rich private eye, and Eddie Willis, Mike Lane, and Tony Burke struggle to make the rent on their ugly little offices, where they sleep on..........Frank Bigelow hired Eddie Willis to find Bud Forrester, but Johnny O’Clock followed Eddie into an alley behind the Black Swan and shot him dead. In Nick Cochran’s penthouse, Nicky Drake persuaded Rusty Fontaine to........................................................, but Marie Gardner, who was hiding on the............, overheard and................... ........................with Chalmers Vermilyea. Esther Vermilyea (no relation), made an anonymous call to Nick Cochran and...........................................

......................................................two corpses in the back seat and a man with a plate in his head...................................................................................... .............................................................................................................screaming and sobbing in the dark and rainy street.

Six thousand dollars blew away in the wind, and Tom Jardine....................... for the first time since the landing at Anzio. Frank Bigelow could protect him no longer.

The armored car left the racetrack. The wrinkled old criminal mastermind known as Dad, whose.................................had never left him, led Carole Chandler up the shadowy staircase and.......................................... ..............................with a new negligee from the Smart Shoppe.

THE ROLE OF ALAN LADD

Alan Ladd attracts the light.