Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (32 page)

The earliest noir with a jazz score,
The Strip
features Mickey Rooney as Stan Maxton, a talented but callow drummer (at thirty years old, Rooney looks sixteen) who becomes a suspect in the shooting of gangster Sonny Johnson (James Craig) and his girlfriend Jane Tafford (Sally Forrest). After the shootings, Stan narrates much of the story in flashback to a police lieutenant. A Korean war vet suffering from PTSD, Stan left the hospital and headed to Los Angeles, where he immediately took a job with the oily Johnson and found his way to Fluff’s nightclub, where he was treated to delightful performances of “Shadrack” and “Basin Street Blues” by Louis Armstrong and his seasoned interracial band (Jack Tea-garden, Barney Bigard, Earl Hines; Fluff [William Demarest] often joined them on piano).
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After closing time one night, Stan sat in with Fluff and was offered the gig on the spot. But he was more interested in pursuing Jane, a dancer at the club, and besides, he was already earning “good dough” with Sonny. The fatherly Fluff asked Jane to persuade Stan to join.
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The conflict is an ancient one: money versus artistic fulfillment. Indeed, the lyrics to “Shadrack” describe Stan’s dilemma. In the song (as in the book of Daniel), King Nebuchadnezzar attempts to use the music of horn, flute, and clarinet to entice Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to worship his golden idol; when
they resist, they are cast into a fiery furnace (God saves them). Similarly, despite Sonny’s disdainful remarks about jazz (“you came out here to beat your brains out with a lot of slap-happy jive men and maybe in ten or twenty years you’d end up with your own club”), Jane’s kisses persuade Stan to abandon Sonny. Stan even tells Fluff that “money isn’t everything when you’re doing what you want to do.” His motives, however, are less pure than Shadrach’s: he wants to woo Jane, even though she is merely using him to get close to Sonny, who she believes will advance her movie career. Recognizing Stan’s predicament, Fluff tells him of a girl he lost and sings the song he allegedly wrote for her, which is actually the 1935 Kalmar/Ruby/Hammerstein standard “A Kiss to Build a Dream On”: “Give me a kiss to build a dream on / And my imagination / Will thrive upon that kiss.” It’s a corny moment (as the two croon in harmony, we seem suddenly to be watching an outtake from an Andy Hardy picture), but the song is appropriate, for Stan is indeed seeking his American dream. Alas, his version—upward mobility culminating in a steady job, kids, and a home—doesn’t jibe with Jane’s vision of a glamorous career in show business. As Fluff tells Stan, Jane is a girl who aims every act at “accomplishing her [career] goals.” She’s hardly alone. In this Los Angeles, where everyone claws for success, Stan’s ingenuousness is refreshing; even so, his foolishness becomes annoying, as he ignores Edna (Kay Brown), another of Fluff’s employees, who is crazy for him, barely pays attention to his drumming, and eventually misses a gig after he gets beaten up by Sonny’s thugs for refusing to leave Jane alone.
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Though at first Rooney seems miscast, his diminutive stature fits this foolish kid who prefers a woman who doesn’t love him to his art.
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In this respect he follows the pattern set in
Blues in the Night
. But in other ways he differs from earlier noir jazz cats: far from being an alcoholic or murderer, Stan is just an ordinary guy who happens to play the drums, and the music he plays is unfailingly upbeat and genial. Hence, when a devastated Stan returns to Fluff’s after Jane’s death, the band switches from “A Kiss to Build a Dream On” (which Stan associates with her) to a fast number, and as soon as Stan begins to play, his blues vanish. Gabbard asserts that
The Strip
diminishes jazz by portraying it as “strictly for good times, providing at best a little solace now and then” (223). But compared to the films that precede it, that represents progress. Nowhere in this film do we find the unsavory connotations the music bears in
D. O. A
. or
Phantom Lady
, and although Stan is literally made black and blue, it’s not music that roughs him up; it is, rather, the balm for his bruising. Still,
The Strip
is a minor film, and Stan never entertains, let alone attains, the lofty artistic goals that drive and torment
Marty Blair or Jigger Pine, nor does he achieve the depth that, as I demonstrate below, belongs to Ida Lupino’s torch singers. Nevertheless, the film implies that playing jazz can be a legitimate way to make a living and that musicians may find in the jazz community a surrogate family and an identity that exemplifies positive American values—values reinforced by working relationships with musicians who might be black.

Armstrong was a safe choice for
The Strip:
by 1951 he had long ago refined his persona as a smiling, nonthreatening musical ambassador. Far from a glowering bebop gunslinger, he presented the image of a clown (though his actual views on race and music were more complex). A much less amiable black musician appears as a noir protagonist for the first (and last) time in Robert Wise’s 1959
Odds against Tomorrow
, in which Harry Belafonte plays singer/vibist Johnny Ingram.
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Belafonte, an astonishingly handsome man whose light skin and suave demeanor helped him to fashion a successful crossover career, allows his portrayal of the desperate Ingram to darken his image considerably.
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In this film the theme of race, an underground strain throughout classic noir, is made explicit via a bank robbery scheme that collapses because one member of the gang, Earle Slater (Robert Ryan), is a bigot who won’t trust a black man with the key to their getaway car. Indeed, the plan itself is founded on the alleged inability of whites to tell two dissimilar black men apart: by dressing as a food delivery man, Ingram enables the gang’s after-hours entry.

The film constantly juxtaposes Slater and Ingram, at first highlighting their differences as each one visits the scheme’s mastermind, former cop Dave Burke (Ed Begley). Slater patronizes the African American kids running around outside Burke’s hotel (in a cringe-inducing moment he calls one little girl a “pickaninny”), wears drab clothes, is usually alone in the frame, and snarls at the friendly black elevator operator. Ingram, by contrast, distributes gifts to the kids, jokes with the elevator man, and impresses him with his fancy duds. Likewise the film’s unobtrusive jazz score, composed by Modern Jazz Quartet pianist John Lewis, employs dissonant minor seconds on the vibes and close brass harmonies in Slater’s scenes but waxes flamboyant during Ingram’s.
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The film, however, gradually reveals the two men’s similarities. Jobless and supported by his girlfriend Lorry (Shelley Winters), ex-soldier Slater is emasculated and filled with rage. Wise depicts his feelings of oppression by constantly shooting him within doorways or windows, or from a slightly low angle that makes his head seem to bump against the ceiling. As he and Burke gaze out a
hotel window at their prospective target, a bank in the small town of Melton, Slater growls, “You didn’t say nothing about the third person bein’ a nigger.” As he utters these words barred shadows slash his face: he is imprisoned by his anger and hatred.

Ingram is just as angry. Just after Slater’s words, Wise cuts to Ingram singing a blues tune in the club where he works. “Believe me, pretty mama, / It’s not just me I know,” Belafonte proclaims in his signature hoarse tenor; “I just can’t make that jungle outside my door.” Ingram may be protesting, but he is doing nothing to free himself; though possessed of a lovely wife and daughter, he is a gambling addict who owes a huge debt to the gangster Bacco. On an outing with his daughter, he spends most of his time phoning creditors and dodging Bacco’s men instead of paying attention to his child. One evocative shot shows him surrounded by spinning merry-go-round horses, illustrating both his entrapment and his immaturity. Ingram’s flaws become clearer after he is roughed up by Bacco’s men and, instead of employing music to emancipate himself, as Stan Maxton does, he interrupts the marvelous Mae Barnes’s song “All Men Are Evil” by pounding the vibes out of time and singing badly, as if confirming the truth of her accusation. Though Ingram has the blues, he doesn’t practice the blues philosophy, famously described by Ralph Ellison as the ability to “keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive … to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (79). Ingram can muster neither lyricism nor transcendence. In a similar vein, jazz critic Albert Murray describes improvisation as not merely a musical style but as a “survival technique … suitable to the rootlessness and discontinuity … of human existence in the contemporary world” (113). In this light, one might observe that what dooms the bank job is the men’s inability to improvise: as soon as they are forced to depart from the script, they panic and turn on each other. In short, Johnny may play jazz, but he doesn’t live it.

At the film’s end, after the heist falls apart and Burke is killed (here the score becomes quasi-classical, eliding its jazz elements just as Ingram erases his identity), Slater and Ingram face off in a gun battle that ends in a conflagration as they blow up an oil refinery. A rescue worker looks at the two charred bodies and asks, “Which is which?” Answer: “Take your pick.” Racial hatred has destroyed them both and, the film suggests, may do the same to the allegedly United States.
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We may also see in this fiery conclusion a dramatization of Langston Hughes’s famous questions about the African American dream of equality:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
Or does it explode?

Two earlier scenes, however, hint at alternatives. One takes place in the Ingrams’ apartment, where Mrs. Ingram (Kim Hamilton) is hosting a PTA meeting for white and black parents; when her husband interrupts them and sneers at her alleged attempt to pander to bourgeois “ofays,” she repudiates him. And during the park scene, Ingram leaves his daughter briefly in the care of a white woman—thus reversing stereotypical roles. A nation where blacks and whites work together, attend school side by side, and treat each other as equals is adumbrated in these sequences, which contradict the suspicion and fear that destroy Slater and Ingram. In such moments
The Strip
and
Odds against Tomorrow
suggest that Americans might find in jazz a foundation—if not a kiss, at least a handshake—to build their dreams on.
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Brassy big band arrangements, swaggering saxophones, a heavy swing rhythm, and a loping minor-key theme: these are hallmarks of so-called crime jazz, a brand of musical scoring that became popular in mid-1950s film and television. Composers such as Shorty Rogers
(Private Hell 36)
, Henry Mancini
(Touch of Evil
, and a multitude of TV themes, including
Peter Gunn)
, Duke Ellington
(Anatomy of a Murder)
, and Pete Rugolo
(The Strip)
created important scores in this style.
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Was jazz being divested of its disreputable connotations? Yes and no. For example, when asked to furnish a score for Otto Preminger’s adaptation of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, Nelson Algren’s novel about a heroin-addicted drummer, Elmer Bernstein sought a style that, he said, spoke of “heroin, hysteria, longing, frustration, despair and finally death: in a word, jazz” (qtd. in Butler 130). Yet in films such as Wise’s
I Want to Live!
and Preminger’s
Anatomy of a Murder
, jazz scores lend intellectual sophistication and an aura of hip urbanity to characters as different as
Live
’s convicted murderer Barbara Graham and
Murder
’s defense attorney Paul Biegler. Jazz scores still came equipped with conflicting connotations.

These meanings are perfectly exemplified in David Raksin’s remarkable score for Joseph H. Lewis’s powerful noir
The Big Combo
. The film opens with an aerial
shot of an unnamed city, behind which a soprano saxophone wails a swanky, languidly swinging D-flat minor theme that, according to Edward Dimendberg, “would not be inappropriate … for a striptease performance” (87).
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The film does feature a stripper, Rita (Helene Stanton), the on-again-off-again girlfriend of the intense protagonist, police Lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde). Yet the musical theme is more often associated with the other major female character, Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), a beautiful but tormented woman attached to Diamond’s nemesis, the mobster Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), whose “combo,” the Bolemac Corporation, has extended its reach into legitimate businesses. Early in the film, Susan dines with Brown’s minions, the gay couple Mingo (Earl Holliman) and Fante (Lee Van Cleef), as the restaurant pianist plays the title theme. When her former piano teacher encounters her, he asks if she still plays. Susan answers, “The only thing I play now … is stud poker.” The aural equivalent of poker, jazz signifies Susan’s fall from grace.

Diamond has vowed to destroy Brown, but though the film leaves no doubt that Brown is a sociopath (he coldly kills his own assistants when they get out of line), Diamond is no jewel, and he fixates on Susan as the symbol of Brown’s success: his vendetta seems motivated less by righteousness than by jealousy. In one scene Diamond asks Rita why any woman would fall for a criminal. As they talk, a version of the theme melody swells up on tenor saxophone to show that Diamond (a tenor, not a soprano) is thinking about Susan. “Hoodlums, detectives,” Rita answers. “A woman doesn’t care how a man makes his living. Only how he makes love.” The next scene proves her point: Brown enters Susan’s apartment and, even while she protests that she “hate[s] and despise[s]” him, the ecstatic look on her face as he kisses her neck and shoulders and then moves downward, out of frame, shows why she stays with him. The jazz theme thus represents Susan’s ambivalence about this sadomasochistic sexual relationship: although Brown turns her black and blue (at least emotionally), she is addicted to his bruising. A bit later Diamond follows Susan to a classical music concert, where he brutally announces that her mink wrap isn’t made from animals but from the skins of Brown’s victims. As he speaks the music grows agitated to reflect the inner state of Susan, who answers that she lives in “a strange, blind, and backward maze, and all the little twisting paths lead back to Mr. Brown.”