Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (44 page)

Ficco meets with Tucker and agrees to join Tucker’s combination but wants Joe removed. Interrupting their meeting, Joe learns that Leo has been killed, his body dumped in the Hudson River. Suddenly the phone rings, but nobody answers—at first. Then, as Joe recounts their criminal schemes, he lifts the receiver so that whoever is on the line can hear him implicate Tucker and Ficco in the murders. Ficco fires his gun and the lights go out. A shot of Joe crawling across the room cuts to a shot of the phone; the next shot shows a man, his features immured in shadows, creeping toward the door. Since we have just seen Joe crawling, we assume it is he; Ficco shoots the man and is killed himself. As he dies, a pair of feet kick the gun from his hand and a hand picks up the phone. Only then do we see that the survivor is Joe Morse, who tells the listener he is turning himself in. The shadows imply, of course, that Joe, despite his lawyerly excuses, is indistinguishable from Ficco or Tucker. All are guilty of capital crimes.

In a final gesture of penitence Joe descends a long series of steps (“it was like going down to the bottom of the world”) to retrieve Leo’s body. A shot of him against the wall, then beneath the George Washington Bridge, illustrates his diminishment. In voice-over he speaks: “He was dead—and I felt I had killed him.
I turned back to give myself up … because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way—like rubbish—then something was horrible and had to be ended one way or another, and I decided to help.”
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Though anchored in a specific location in New York, the descent is also symbolic: tunneling into his conscience, Joe finds his dead brother—the one he helped to kill—as well as the old Joe Morse. The bridge further suggests that Joe, the “legitimate” lawyer, crossed to the other side by working with a gangster; Leo, the good-hearted crook, crossed back over to appeal to his brother’s loyalty and morality. Each one forced the other to face his own self-deception: thus, as Polonsky asserted, in this film “every act of love is also an act of betrayal” (“Abraham Polonsky” 488). Perhaps most ironic of all: Garfield’s character becomes what Garfield died trying
not
to be: an informer.

The personal story is political. That is, although Joe’s concluding speech (created to satisfy the Breen Office) suggests that the special prosecutor will clean everything up, the rest of the film implies that neither gangsters nor slimy lawyers are the real problem. Rather, it argues, the fault lies with capitalism itself, which is not only criminal but inevitably leads to other crimes. This is not a critique of American ideals so much as an indictment of their perversion: the numbers racket baldly dupes those gullible enough to believe that they alone would think of “776” on July 4, but “legitimate” businesses cloak their thefts more cleverly behind phony patriotic slogans about free enterprise.

A small band of men, each with some extraordinary power, team up for an important mission. They plan with meticulous care, each member playing his assigned role. Because their organization aims to challenge a sovereign power, the plan must remain secret. One mistake, however, undermines the mission, and one member betrays the others; the team unravels and one or more members die.

This plot could be that of a superhero tale or medieval quest romance, but it also describes the stories of a noir subgenre that emerged in 1950: the heist picture.
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Films such as
The Killers
and
Criss Cross
feature collaborative robberies as part of their stories, but the true heist film places a “caper” or collective theft at its center. One of the first such films,
The Asphalt Jungle
challenges the emerging law-and-order ethos by enabling viewers to empathize with a gang executing a jewel robbery.
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Although direct leftist critiques were rapidly vanishing from Hollywood (
Try and Get Me!
and
The Prowler
, the two last blasts of the Left, were
released in 1951), Huston’s film shows that anti–status quo messages were still possible if camouflaged in a pro-law-and-order framework. Released between the initial HUAC hearings and the second round,
The Asphalt Jungle
not only smuggles in critiques of corporate crime and red-baiting; it also dissects the ethics of secrecy and betrayal that lay at the heart of the blacklist era. J. P. Telotte asserts that the heist film questions the dominant culture’s “efforts to codify, to impose conformity, … to eliminate the enigma of individuality from society” (“Fatal Capers” 165). But
Asphalt
is less about individuality than about teamwork, loyalty, and honor—paramount values in societies under repression.

The gang’s mastermind, Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe), just released from prison, recruits Louie Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso), Gus Minissi (James Whitmore), and Sterling Hayden’s Dix Handley for the caper. Two others are involved as well: Cobby (Marc Lawrence), a high-strung bookie who provides seed money, and crooked lawyer Emmerich. This team plays a high-stakes game.
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Moreover, like most gangs in heist films, they display the characteristics of a secret society, as brilliantly anatomized by Simmel. Such groups, he writes, create a “second world alongside the manifest world” (330)—or, as the film has it, a “city under the city.” The secret plan endows each member with “inner property”—an enormous boon for these lower- or working-class men, who possess little tangible property. Yet secrets also carry the seeds of betrayal, as each one contains a “tension that is dissolved in the moment of its revelation” (Simmel 333). The secret, that is, simultaneously exists to prevent betrayal
and
creates the possibility for it: a secret at once unites and divides those who hold it. Hence, as Telotte notes, multiple double crosses “are the ultimate law” of heist movies (“Fatal Capers” 165): the secrets in these pictures seem to exist
in order to be betrayed
. Simmel speculates that secret societies such as criminal gangs are a by-product of the money economy itself: modern money’s compressibility, abstractness, and “effect-at-a-distance” promote alienation that fosters the growth of secret societies (335). Further, Simmel suggests, “the secret society emerges everywhere as the counterpart of despotism and police restriction” (347). Thus, as HUAC cracked down on Hollywood and the red scare swept through America, subversive groups were pushed underground. The repression of radical organizations created criminals by relabeling once-lawful activities as illicit. Just as secret societies in the noncinematic world bubbled up like the return of the repressed, so heist pictures emerged when direct challenges to capitalism and law and order became taboo. And yet, as Simmel astutely observes, secret societies often become a “counter-image of the official world” and end up imitating the structures and values of the society they had
aimed to repudiate (360). As gangs fall apart, solidarity is supplanted by greed, loyalty by betrayal, teamwork by retribution. In
The Asphalt Jungle
not only does the underworld both mirror the legit world and permeate it; ultimately, the film suggests, there is no difference between the two.

The film’s opening minutes establish the setting in an unnamed midwestern city where crime is said to be out of control yet where police track Dix as he walks the streets and enters Gus’s “American Food” diner (situated next door to the “Pilgrim House”).
⁴⁰
Dix’s rap sheet paints him as a career small-time criminal. But even if he is guilty of some recent holdups, he is less corrupt than Lt. Ditrich (Barry Kelley), who is on the take from bookie joints (including Cobby’s) and under pressure by Commissioner Hardy (John McIntire) to solve the crimes. The police seek Riedenschneider, but he eludes them long enough to introduce his plan to Cobby; during their conversation Dix, who owes Cobby $2,300, interrupts to ask Cobby for more time. Later, when Dix complains to Gus that owing money to the slimy bookie damages his “self-respect,” Gus lends him $1,000; a call to his friend Louie—whose tiny apartment houses him, his wife, and baby—yields another thousand. Soon Dix is visited by Doll Conovan (Jean Hagen), who has lost her job and apartment; he agrees to put her up at his place, no strings attached. Clearly these criminals are actuated by humane values such as loyalty and generosity. Yet they are also trapped: Gus in his seedy diner, Louie in his cramped apartment, Dix by his gambling addiction.
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They are thus ripe for the promise of quick money.

Doc outlines his plan to Emmerich: $1 million in jewelry is waiting to be taken from Belletiere’s; all he needs are the right men and some seed money. Because “men get greedy,” the “helpers”—a “boxman” (safecracker), driver, and “hooligan”—will each receive a flat wage rather than a cut of the take: $25,000; $10,000; and $15,000, respectively. Reynold Humphries aptly notes that this scene resembles nothing so much as a corporate board meeting “from which the workers and their representatives have been excluded”: the proletariat are neither involved in the planning nor partake of the profits (237). The class difference between the owners of the means of production and the workers extends even to the underworld. As mere “functional units” in a “Fordist division of labor” (Mason 99), the boxman (Louie), driver (Gus), and hooligan (Dix) (their descriptions indicate their low status) become alienated workers. Doc and Emmerich, however, share a taste for elegant apparel and young women (Emmerich’s mistress, Angela, is played by a ravishing young Marilyn Monroe). Huston also provides parallels between Emmerich and the other criminals: he has an invalid wife and Louie a sick kid; both Emmerich and Cobby wear bow ties (Humphries 237). Although the underworld and the “legit” world mirror each other, the lower-class criminals are more honorable than the smug, slippery Emmerich.
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This “antiphrasis” (J. Hirsch 85) is most obvious in the case of Dix. According to Doc, hooligans are necessary but repellent figures, and Louie declares that they all have “a screw loose somewhere.” Yet we have already seen that Dix, though ragged and gruff, is kind. What drives him is not greed but a nostalgic dream involving a “tall, black colt” named Corncracker that he rode back on his ancestral Kentucky farm, Hickory Wood. Dix’s obsession with gambling on horse races is the residue of his pastoral fantasy: he hopes to use horses to make a killing and buy back the farm. When he gets there, he tells Doll, the first thing he’ll do is “take a bath in the crick, and get the city dirt off me.” His American dream is not of Franklinesque self-invention but a romantic, Emersonian vision of recovering his aboriginal self through nature and of undoing the asphalt jungle’s contamination. Self-deluded though he is, Dix is honorable (he pays Cobby back)
and strong; that’s why Doll, who “never had a proper home,” loves him. Unlike the lovers in the lamming noirs, then, this pitiable pair turn to crime not as a path to upward mobility but as a road to rediscover a lost innocence and sense of belonging.
⁴³

Doc carefully outlines his meticulously conceived plan to his crew. Similar planning scenes appear in every heist film to emphasize that to succeed, the men must behave like machines, as if they were, indeed, working in a factory. Although the planning scene’s single-source overhead lighting casts shadows on the men’s faces and doubts on their success, once they enter the jewelry store by way of a manhole—“the city under the city”—the robbery comes off almost perfectly, except that a security guard, alerted by alarms going off nearby, comes to the door as the men are escaping. Dix punches him; the man’s gun falls and shoots Louie in the gut. With this mishap the scheme begins to unravel. In fact, as Simmel would predict, the gang’s solidarity had started to disintegrate even earlier. The loose thread is Emmerich, who is broke and plans to double-cross the others, take the jewels, and disappear. But when Doc and Dix meet him and his co-conspirator, a private eye named Brannom (Brad Dexter), afterward, they don’t buy Emmerich’s story. Brannom pulls a gun and wounds Dix before he himself is killed.

Soon the police arrive at Emmerich’s house, inquiring about Brannom, whose body was found in the river; Emmerich claims he was with his mistress that night. After they leave, he reassures his wife with the words about “left-handed endeavor” quoted above. In their proximate context, as I have noted, the words seem a feeble alibi for amorality, but they express red noir’s larger theme that crime and capitalism, crime and law enforcement, are not just mirror images but symbiotic enterprises. About to be arrested, Emmerich kills himself. Things go further downhill from there: Louie dies from his wounds and Cobby, after Ditrich slaps him around, turns stool pigeon, leading to Gus’s arrest.
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So much for solidarity.

That leaves only Dix and Doc, who has the jewels but no way to turn them into money. Yet he is mostly upset that all his planning has gone for nothing (“What can you do against blind accident?”) and blames himself for not killing Emmerich: “Greed made me blind.” Far from greedy, Dix gives Doc $1,000—but he never has a chance to spend it. Lingering in a diner to ogle a dancing teenaged girl, Doc is arrested. The brilliant, meticulous planner is foiled not by blind accident but by simple human weakness. Yet he scarcely matches the picture of criminals painted by Commissioner Hardy, who delivers a speech to the press
after Doc’s (and Ditrich’s) arrest. “People are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped. … It’s the same in every city of the modern world. But suppose we had no police force, good or bad? … The battle’s finished, the jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over.” Most dangerous of all, he insists, is Dix, a “hooligan, a man without human feeling or human mercy.” His words ring hollow, for we already know that Dix is generous and loyal (indeed, if anyone seems to lack human feeling or mercy, it’s the commissioner, with his brusque manner and obsession with order). A dissolve to Dix’s final moments further undercuts Hardy’s pronouncement. Although (according to the doctor who diagnoses him) Dix “hasn’t got enough blood left in him to keep a chicken alive,” he makes it back to Hickory Wood, only to collapse in a pasture. In the film’s powerful concluding shots the camera rests on the ground next to Dix’s body; his unseeing eyes stare up at the sky while a mare and colt nuzzle him. A long shot shows his tiny figure dwarfed by the vast expanse. Dix has made it home—but it’s too late to wash off the city dirt.