Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (34 page)

My heart is sad and lonely
For you I sigh for you, dear, only.
Why haven’t you seen it?
I’m all for you, body and soul.

—might suggest that he has fallen for Petey, but in fact he’s still carrying the torch for Amanda.
³⁹
The two embrace by the fire, but when he admits that he has tried to see Amanda, Petey breaks off the relationship.

The film detours into a noirish plot in which Nicky uses Joey to get rid of the obnoxious Gloria, which results in her being run down by a car. Having discovered Gloria’s infidelity, her husband confronts Nicky with a gun. But Petey talks sense to him, knocks the gun from his hand, slaps him around, and calls the police. As her name indicates, she is a terrific blend of big sister and tough guy, equally able to sooth feelings and rough up villains—all while wearing a glittering evening gown! During this scene a dark, dissonant version of the title tune plays, representing the bitterness that frustrated romantic longing may engender—especially for San, for although the film’s other males are healed, San isn’t. After he departs, Petey walks alone on the pier, weeping—but only a little. She may be doomed to loneliness, but she repudiates the song’s portrait of dependency: this film is not about finding the man she loves but about giving him up to retain her autonomy.
The Man I Love
thus counterpoints the stereotypical depiction of San with the progressive figure of Petey, for whom music is not the sign of a nature too sensitive to survive but an indispensable means
to
survive. Her mastery of song signifies her mastery of the blues philosophy: an ability to remain independent and be only mildly bruised by the sexual marketplace.

Lily Stevens, Lupino’s character in
Road House
, is even tougher: when we first see her, newly arrived from Chicago in the small town of Elton, she sprawls, a
cigarette hanging from her mouth, one shapely leg resting on a table, playing solitaire and trading quips with Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde), the manager of Jefty’s Roadhouse. A few minutes later we find her at the bar beneath a stuffed deer’s head, illustrating her recognition that “this is a moose trap all around.” The club’s spoiled owner, Jefty (Richard Widmark), certainly thinks of her as his prey and, to make her easier to capture, agrees to pay her $250 a week to sing. Lily downplays her abilities, informing Jefty that she has a “small voice.” She isn’t being falsely modest. Early in the film Lupino plays piano and sings “One for My Baby” in a voice that is okay, according to the barmaid Susie (Celeste Holm), if you “like the sound of gravel.” Yet Lupino’s raspy voice and unsentimental delivery generate a compelling authority and authenticity; even Susie (who has a crush on Pete) admits that she “does more without a voice than anybody I’ve ever heard.”
⁴⁰
Lily seems to have lived the world-weary lyrics of Arlen and Mercer’s saloon song, as well as its stoic attitude toward the world’s slings and arrows: as Jefty affirms, she
is
“a kind of poet” with a “lot of things to say.” Better than any other noir jazz figure, she enacts Ellison’s blues impulse, keeping “the painful details … of a brutal experience alive” but transcending it by “squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (79).

Lily expresses this philosophy through her sexuality and clothing. A striking sight in Elton with her sophisticated mien and alluring garb (evening gowns, tight halter tops, short shorts), she draws big crowds—but doesn’t appeal to Pete, even when she sings the film’s hit, “Again,” directly to him. She has better success during a “fishing” outing with him and Susie. Having neglected to bring a swimsuit, Lily disappears behind a bush only to reappear moments later clad in a brief two-piece outfit she has fashioned out of scarves. Lily likewise crafts her identity from scraps and ad libs. Such performances can be misinterpreted: when Dutch, a burly roadhouse habitué, thinks she’s singing “The Right Kind of Love” just for him and Lily rebuffs him, he starts a brawl. But at least Dutch is honest about his urges, unlike both Pete, who pretends not to be falling for Lily, and Jefty, who camouflages his sadism with jokes and phony bonhomie. Yet the brawl brings Lily together with Pete, with whom she shares her painful life story: her “old man” pushed her to become an opera singer, so she practiced every night while working by day in a factory, until overwork destroyed her voice. Since then, Lily has treated life as a tragicomic jazz solo, as a constant process of improvisation.

Insanely jealous of Pete, Jefty frames him for stealing money from the club, but after his conviction Jefty volunteers to supervise his parole—so he can prevent him from possessing Lily. There will be no more improvisation now that Jefty calls the tunes. But even he recognizes that under his direction Lily’s “voice doesn’t sound the same”: absent autonomy, she can’t sing. And once Jefty arranges a “little vacation” for the four of them to celebrate his dominance, Lily is reduced to relying on Pete, until the film’s climax, when she guns down Jefty. This act is not out of character. As one commentator in the DVD featurette explains, Lily is in many respects the film’s “male-coded character”—the stranger who comes to town and shakes things up. Unlike
The Blue Gardenia
’s Norah Larkin, she resists becoming prey. Even more than Petey Brown, Lily Stevens offers a powerful, positive alternative to the weak, tormented male jazz musicians who populate noir. Like Petey she overcomes professional and personal obstacles by employing her wit and husbanding her emotional resources. Her success stems not from musical technique but from inner strength and flexibility. More complex than Steve Dallas and more successful than Johnny Ingram, Lupino’s singers best exemplify how jazz can be not merely a way of playing but a way of living, a poetic enterprise founded on the principle of improvisation, that “survival technique … suitable to the rootlessness and discontinuity … of human existence in the contemporary world” (Murray 113). Petey and Lily jazz the world instead of being jazzed by it.

At once resilient and resistant, Lupino’s torch singers model a realistic but inspiring American identity that incarnates a spectrum of blackness, whiteness, and blueness. Hybrids who epitomize the American values of equality, flexibility, and freedom of expression, they sing of Franklinesque self-fashioning. Neither disabled nor pathetic, they embody how improvisation may foster individual achievement within a collective and demonstrate how Americans of any race or gender could endure through the blues. These tough but sensitive artists’ improvised lives show how jazz can indeed encompass “the whole USA in one chorus.”

“One night she started to shim and shake, / That brought on the Frisco quake,” sings the shimmying Rita Hayworth in
Gilda
. “So you can put the blame on Mame, boys, / Put the blame on Mame.” Gilda’s sarcastically delivered lines describe the quintessential femme fatale—a character type, embodied in women like Kathie Moffat and Phyllis Dietrichson, that has become identified with film noir. However, as Julie Grossman has shown, such femmes fatale appear less frequently than casual viewers of noir may believe. Overinvested in this stereotype, critics have ignored the wide array of women’s roles that noir actually presents (5).
¹
Noir does offer its share of amoral seductresses and conniving criminals, but it also gives us wives, mothers, and nurses; businesswomen and writers; secretaries, singers, sleuths, and social workers; psychologists, physicians, prison guards, wardens—and even professors. In fact, most women in film noir work, and their forms of labor closely reflect the actual postwar US female workforce.

Just as important as the women working in films noir, however, were the women working on films noir—the females who performed in, wrote, produced, and even directed the movies. Their presence is one reason why noir portrays so many working women and why the films address many of postwar women’s chief concerns: sexism; the conflict between traditional domestic duties and newfound labor power; the anxieties and possibilities implicit in shifting gender roles; changes in courtship, marriage, and motherhood. The films on which these women worked—which I’m calling
femme noirs
—furnish complex, critical, and generally progressive analyses of American mores and institutions. While facing the same obstacles dramatized in the films, these female filmmakers nudged Hollywood toward more enlightened views about gender and, in one case, helped to redefine cinematic authorship. Far from femmes fatale, these women were
femmes vital:
indispensable presences whose creative labor modeled an alternative to traditional female labor—childbearing and -rearing—and injected a protofeminist note into male-oriented genres.

Women went to work with a vengeance during World War II: more than six million took new jobs, increasing the female labor force by more than 50 percent (Renov 40). By 1944, women composed more than 36 percent of the total labor force, up from 25 percent in 1941 (Walsh 1, 53). Defense jobs spelled “significant social mobility,” as many women traded low-paying employment in restaurants or laundries for wartime production work that as much as doubled their wages (Blackwelder 124; Walsh 57). Rosie the Riveter notwithstanding, the majority of working women held clerical positions during the war: for every female factory worker there were two women in office employment.
²
These conditions changed rapidly once the war ended: in 1946, although 80 percent of wartime women workers were still employed, only 40 percent still held their wartime jobs, and overall employment declined from 19.5 to 15.5 million, with wages plummeting along with employment (Walsh 78). Michael Renov notes that by late 1944 government agencies were encouraging female withdrawal from the workforce (33). Nevertheless, the war permanently altered women’s expectations: polls showed that almost 75 percent of women workers wished to remain employed after the war (Walsh 75). Perhaps more significantly, the
kind
of women who worked had permanently changed. Whereas before the war single women outnumbered married workers, by 1947 more married than single women worked, a pattern sustained ever since (Blackwelder 124).

But it would be a mistake to believe that the increased presence of working women by itself overturned prevailing ideologies; rather, it fostered dissonance and contradiction. Thus, although more women expected to work, movies and magazines continued to stress domestic obligations. Analyzing a wide range of popular periodicals, Joanne Meyerowitz finds that “domestic ideals coexisted in ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement that celebrated nondomestic activity, individual striving, public service and public success” (231). Although a great many of these portrayals presented marriage and motherhood as proper women’s roles, a significant minority (anticipating Betty Friedan) depicted domesticity as “exhausting and isolating, and frustrated mothers as over-doting and smothering” (Meyerowitz 242). Perceptions of marriage, too, underwent renovation: in women’s magazines, marriage was often depicted, perhaps wishfully, as “an equal partnership, with each partner intermingling masculine and feminine roles” (243). The war and aftermath intensified trends toward companionate marriage and serial monogamy, and increased expectations about intimate
communication and friendship between spouses (Walsh 67). Yet, as I noted about the vet noirs, most men who had spent the war years without women reentered civil society with their prewar ideas about gender intact or even exaggerated.

Of course, working women weren’t working all the time; among other activities, they were also attending movies. Then, as now, women made up more than half of the viewing audience. To attract this audience, studios increasingly turned to the so-called woman’s film: melodramas set in bourgeois domestic spaces, featuring female protagonists struggling with complex moral questions and competing emotional bonds (see Walsh 24).
³
One subgenre aimed at women (and often female-authored) was the Gothic, in which a female protagonist is confined to a house, menaced by a mysterious male figure, and oppressed by a secret from the past. Though usually perceived as a masculine genre, noir is not entirely distinct from Gothic: the two forms overlap stylistically, narratively, and thematically. In addition to their dark visual styles, both frequently employ retrospective narrations, deal heavily with questions of guilt and complicity, incorporate sexual violence, and involve investigation.
⁴
Several films I have discussed (e.g.,
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, No Man of Her Own, My Name Is Julia Ross
) employ Gothic conventions. Hence, as Steve Neale declares, “any absolute division between noir and the gothic woman’s film is unsustainable” (164). More important for our purposes is that, as Lizzie Francke points out, hybrids of melodrama and film noir “became a staple genre for female screenwriters” (51). Femme noirs—that is, films noir written, produced, or directed by women—share many traits with the “woman’s film”: female protagonists; gender anxiety; ambivalence, or downright cynicism, about marriage.
⁵
In addition to treating women’s issues, then, these films blurred generic boundaries and brought strong women characters into formerly male territory.