Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (31 page)

Though the songs in
Nocturne
are closer to 1940s-era pop than to jazz, the film exemplifies how jazz is represented in early film noir: as evidence of decadent sexuality, as a reminder of forgotten trauma or violence, as an instrument of “noiring” that darkens even those charged with regulating those impulses. A similar set of motifs characterizes
Black Angel
, a film made concurrently with
Nocturne
and adapted, like
Phantom Lady
, from a Cornell Woolrich novel. Its narrative
also resembles that of
Phantom Lady:
a man—this time it’s pianist Marty Blair (Dan Duryea)—can’t remember the night his estranged wife (singer Mavis Marlowe [Constance Dowling]) was murdered; again the wrong man (this time it’s one Kirk Bennett) is arrested and convicted of the crime, despite the attempts of a woman—Bennett’s wife, a singer named Cathy (June Vincent)—to clear him. As in
Nocturne
, a melody signifies a murder: in
Black Angel
the tune is “Heartbreak,” a song Marty wrote for Mavis, and which is playing on her phonograph when Bennett enters her apartment and finds her dead. A moody beguine, the song is the musical correlative to the other major clue, a heart-shaped brooch that Marty presented to Mavis the night she died. “Heartbreak” is not just a song; it captures the tortured identity Marty assumed after his marriage failed and he became an alcoholic.

Suspecting that nightclub owner Marko (Peter Lorre) is behind the murder, Cathy enlists Marty’s help, and the two audition to become the club’s featured entertainers.
¹⁷
Marko hires them. Convinced that Cathy has enabled him to stay sober, Marty tries to woo her with a song called “Time Will Tell.” But she brushes him off, prompting a binge, and during the bender montage, dissonant strains of “Heartbreak” are heard, as if Cathy has become Mavis. During his spree Marty spots a bargirl wearing the heart-shaped brooch; a fight starts, and Marty lands in a prison hospital. There he flashes back to the night of the murder and recalls that he wasn’t passed out in bed that night as he’d believed but had returned to Mavis’s apartment and strangled her. During Marty’s flashback the images swim and sway to reflect his drunken perspective, and dissonant fragments from “Heartbreak” swirl through the score: she broke his heart, so he broke her neck. Marty escapes, only to collapse in Cathy’s apartment (“Time Will Tell” is heard on the soundtrack). As he awakens, a shot from his point of view dissolves Mavis’s face into Cathy’s: the bad wife gives way to the good wife, each one representing a side of Marty’s tortured psyche. He confesses in time to save Bennett’s life, and at the end “Time Will Tell” plays over a shot of the sheet music.

At first the key to Marty’s buried memory, “Heartbreak” is then transposed from a lament over lost love to a symptom of mental illness. As the symbol of Marty’s alcoholism, ruined marriage, and capacity for violence, it is counterpointed with “Time Will Tell,” the theme song of his redemptive relationship with Cathy: Marty murdered his wife out of heartbreak, but time will tell if he proves himself worthy of his good angel. Marty’s duality is deep: his angelic talent is inextricable from the “blackness” of his addiction, self-pity, and rage. Marty, then, is the black angel of the title, another sensitive white artist noired by jazz, a
performer whose talent seems only marginally more useful than that of
Nightmare Alley
’s chicken-biter.

The patterns found in
Nocturne
and
Black Angel
are amplified in Maxwell Shane’s
Nightmare
, a 1956 remake of his earlier
Fear in the Night
, both adapted from “Nightmare,” another Cornell Woolrich story.
¹⁸
In the later film’s striking opening sequence, New Orleans jazz clarinetist Stan Grayson (Kevin McCarthy) experiences a nightmare—all canted angles and eerie music—in which he is trapped in a mirrored room and about to be strangled; a woman hands him an icepick with which he stabs his assailant to death. Upon awakening, however, he finds evidence—a button, a key, his own bruises and scratches—that he actually committed the crime. Equally potent is his memory of a dissonant melody—D, up to B
, down to G
, then G, A, played over a D augmented chord, a “slow, crazy melody, like a tune from another world”—that convinces him of his guilt.

Music is essential to the story. This nightmarish jazz melody again represents objects, particularly a key Stan finds; indeed, the tune
is
the key to the crime, and in an effective montage sequence Stan roams Bourbon Street, playing the tune for every musician (some of them black) he encounters. No one recognizes it. Stan then flirts with a woman who resembles his dream’s icepick lady while a black pianist plays for them. As they retire to her apartment, the couple are serenaded by an unseen female singer’s rendition of “A Woman Ain’t a Woman (Unless She’s Got Herself a Man).” But this woman ain’t really got one, for once Stan gazes at himself in her mirror, he finds himself unable to play his part in the promised sexual duet, as if the icepick has replaced his clarinet.

In other scenes Stan’s steady girlfriend, Gina (played by singer Connie Russell), belts out the bluesy jazz numbers “What’s Your Sad Story?” and “The Last I Ever Saw of My Man.” The latter includes these lines: “Keep one eye open as you sleep / Or your man will get away.” The former, arranged New Orleans style, is heard during Stan’s later flashback to the night of the murder, which occurred on the same night that their band leader, Billy, rejected Stan’s arrangements for the upcoming recording session as “far out” and “not commercial.” Obviously Stan is too imaginative, too sensitive for his own good. As his brother-in-law, homicide detective Rene Bressard (Edward G. Robinson), observes, Grayson is a “high-strung” man with an “artistic temperament”; or as Billy more bluntly puts it, he is a “screwball.” Stan exemplifies Hollywood’s jazz musician: passive, unstable, and easy to manipulate, a geek tortured by his talent and unable to adapt to the workaday world.

But Bressard doesn’t believe he’s guilty, and the two begin to piece together the facts when—with Gina and Stan’s sister Sue (Virginia Christine)—they seek shelter from a deluge in a large mansion. In the house Gina puts on a record, inadvertently switching the turntable setting from 33
⅓
to 16rpm; abruptly the lighthearted tune becomes Stan’s nightmare melody. It is (coincidentally!) the same house where the murder took place. Stan enters the mirrored room where his key opens a closet door; inside the closet is a blood stain. Convinced of his guilt, he passes out at the police station, then tries to commit suicide by jumping from a window—variations of the “nightmare” theme stabbing in the background—before Bressard wrestles him back into the room. Ultimately, through a series of flashbacks, Stan realizes that Dr. Belknap, the psychiatrist who owns the mansion, had hypnotized him to kill Belknap’s wife and pin it on her lover.
¹⁹
Wearing a wire, Stan returns to the scene and gets Belknap to confess: just as sound once condemned him, it now sets him free.

Nightmare
’s highly melodramatic plot boldly colors in the outlines sketched in
Phantom Lady, Nocturne
, and
Black Angel
; like the latter two films, it places an unstable jazz musician at the heart of a half-remembered murder and uses a melody as the residue of a violent trauma. But if the hazy details of the murder are eventually explained, Stan is never cleared, for his association with jazz and the African American musicians who chaperone his encounter with the bargirl indelibly “noir” him. Like those of
Phantom Lady
’s Cliff, his hands have been appropriated by a more cunning artist—the hypnotist. This pattern suggests that beneath the jazz musician’s racial attributes lies another stain: that of disability. Jazz musicians, indeed, share many traits with noir’s disabled veterans, and their emotional and cognitive dysfunctions resemble nothing so much as posttraumatic flashbacks. These musicians permitted Hollywood filmmakers to transpose into another key the anxieties about readjustment, masculinity, and productivity at play in the vet films.

Though Stan’s nightmare is over, the dark cloud Hollywood casts over jazz is not. Indeed, jazz melodies represent guilt even in films where musicians play minor roles. For example, in Fritz Lang’s
The Blue Gardenia
the title song represents the guilty, fractured memory of its female protagonist, Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter). After receiving a “Dear Joan” letter from her soldier boyfriend, Norah rashly accepts a date with the wolf Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr). We first hear the title song suavely performed by Nat “King” Cole in the Blue Gardenia restaurant during Norah’s date with Prebble. An inebriated Norah (having drunk too many Polynesian Pearl Divers) then accompanies Prebble to his apartment,
where he spins a record of “The Blue Gardenia” and tries to rape her. Norah fights back, and as she struggles, the soundtrack switches from the diegetic recording to a nondiegetic arrangement that turns the tune into a discordant whirl of confusion and fear. The visual elements are equally disorienting: we see Norah grasp a poker, then images of a shattered mirror, after which she passes out. Awakening, she flees, and the next morning Prebble is found dead, his head bashed in with a poker, surrounded by “petals” from a broken mirror.

The film is a scathing portrait of the sexual marketplace. Every man keeps a little black book and treats every woman as a number; every woman (not coincidentally, Norah and her roommates work for the phone company) seems desperate to capture a man—any man. The double standard is ubiquitous: everyone (including Norah) assumes that any woman who would enter Prebble’s apartment is a slut. Hence, as Krin Gabbard observes, the song signifies “Norah’s status as a fugitive and a fallen woman” (248). But its lyrics suggest not rampant sexuality but rueful memory:

Love bloomed like a flower.
Then the petals fell.
Blue gardenia,
Thrown to a passing breeze,
But pressed in my book of memories.

The song also represents memory in the film. Thus, as
Chronicle
columnist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte) exploits the case by writing an open letter to the “unknown murderess” whom he has dubbed “The Blue Gardenia,” phrases from the song are heard whenever the murder is mentioned: orchestrally when Norah first listens to a radio report of the crime, again in a rhumba arrangement during the “blue gardenia” newspaper montage, again when Norah reads Mayo’s open letter urging her to trust him, and again when she phones him. After she agrees to meet Mayo, he plays the tune on the jukebox at Bill’s Beanery, and a portion of the melody is detectable when Norah’s roommate, Crystal (Ann Sothern), guesses the truth about her. It is last heard just after Norah is arrested.

Norah is neither a slut nor a murderer. Yet Mayo is duped by prejudice. At first treating her merely as a story (when she meets him in his office, a flashing sign over her head reads “Chronicle”), he soon falls for her, but only because he thinks she can’t be the (black and) blue gardenia. Ultimately it is revealed that Prebble’s girlfriend, Rose (Ruth Miller), killed him in a fit of anger, the presence of her favorite classical record proving to be the pivotal clue. We never hear the title song
again, perhaps because, Gabbard suggests, “the song’s codes no longer apply to her or to the film” (249). But the codes never change; only Norah does. So hardened is she by repeated male betrayals that at the film’s end this former ingénue plays hard to get to lure Mayo into chasing her. Far from resisting female commodification, she embraces it. No one is immune from the cutthroat sexual marketplace, from stifling gender roles, or from the public’s insatiable appetite for lurid sex crimes. The title song, then, betokens Norah’s lost innocence, her unhealed psychic and emotional bruises, and the dark taint of illicit sex that ultimately enhances her value. She remains a blue gardenia, stained by her association with the song (performed, we recall, by a black singer), a fallen petal pressed to fit into patriarchy’s little black book.

Two 1950s noirs perpetuate the stereotype of musicians as overgrown children. Yet these films also present—implicitly, at least—the potential for new American identities founded on jazz’s optimism and tolerance, while sharing with
Blues in the Night
a belief that the racial divide is not impervious. One of these films even presents jazz as the foundation for a remodeled American Dream.