Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (48 page)

1
. At that time (1947) the word
geek
bore none of its current associations with computer engineers, their allegedly poor social skills, or their highly developed analytical powers. Yet the word’s current connotations—describing a creature at once superhuman and disabled—may derive from this earlier incarnation.

2
. Gresham, like so many writers of the period, had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s; he later married poet Joy Davidman (to whom
Nightmare Alley
is dedicated). He underwent psychiatric treatment and later became a devout Christian. None of his other works achieved the success of this, his first novel. See Polito’s “Biographical Notes” in
Crime Novels
for further details (980–81). In an irony appropriate to his grim, deterministic tale, Gresham committed suicide in the same hotel where he wrote
Nightmare Alley
(Williams, “Naturalist” 137).

3
. Because the film’s Stan is an orphan, the movie omits most of the novel’s Oedipal conflict, in which young Stan, after witnessing his mother having sex with her lover, is bought off with a toy magic set (Gresham 618–22). His magic acts automatically invoke his filial betrayal, and his guilt over this betrayal and his confused feelings about his parents make him susceptible to Lilith’s machinations.

4
. In the novel she tells him he has imagined himself as his mother’s lover and deliberately takes the mother’s place (688). She is said to be “hooked” to him by “an invisible gold wire” (689); in the film her power is illustrated by the weblike barred shadows that surround her in her office.

5
. In the novel Grindle had impregnated Dorrie and persuaded her to have an abortion. The girl died of septicemia afterward, and Grindle has been tormented ever since. In 1947 Hollywood it was forbidden even to mention abortion, so the film cleans it up, thereby obviating Grindle’s most powerful motive.

6
. These scenes in the novel are much more gloomy and expansive, as Stan is driven crazy by violent, paranoid fantasies. Gresham implies that Stan is caught in a classic double bind: all along he has desired to be his nemesis—his mother’s lover, Mark Humphries—but once he has become him, he can do nothing but ruin him (771). While on the run, Stan also meets an African American Communist labor organizer, Frederick Douglass Scott, who is on his way to fight Grindle’s union-breaking efforts. Scott’s presence indicates Gresham’s political allegiances and, as Williams
notes, signals a path that Stan “could have taken” (“Naturalist” 129; Gresham 767–76). Stan then kills a policeman whom he confuses with his father (Stan’s demons are all associated with gray stubble): this is his “own personal corpse” (781), the alter ego he both fears and inhabits. Finally, Stan shows up at a carnival, and on the novel’s last page, he is given the geek job (796).

7
. This influence has been analyzed in many critical books on noir. Among many others see Foster Hirsch (53–58), Andrew Spicer (11–16), and Brook, who (not always persuasively) finds in American noir a specific set of German Jewish cultural tropes and patterns. For an erudite reflection on this influence see Elsaesser (420–44), as well as studies of individual directors; among the best of these latter is Gunning’s magisterial book on Fritz Lang.

8
. Recent illuminating books examining noir’s debts to hard-boiled fiction include those of Abbott and Irwin.

9
. Critical studies have treated noir using methods ranging from psychoanalysis (Oliver and Trigo; Žižek), narratology (Telotte,
Voices
), gender and race theory (Kaplan; Flory; Krutnik; Wager,
Dangerous
), to philosophy (Conard) and urban planning (Christopher; Dimendberg). New scholarship has unveiled further contexts and concerns:
“Un-American” Hollywood
includes pathbreaking essays about the Hollywood Left; Biesen’s
Blackout
helpfully traces the war’s material effects on early noir; and Hanson and Grossman have challenged conventional wisdom about women’s roles in the films.

10
. Dennis Broe notes that the one-year interval following V-J Day was the “greatest strike period in US history” (32).

11
. Steve Neale likewise comments that Zeitgeist adherents “find themselves arguing that
noir
registered a dominant ideological mood that was at the same time subversive of dominant values. Such a position is hard either to sustain or to verify” (158).

12
. See Osteen, “Face Plates.”

1
. Negative footage was also used in the dream sequence in an earlier version of the story, the 1939 film
Blind Alley
, directed by Charles Vidor. Both films were adapted from a play by James Warwick.

2
. For versions of this statement see, among many others, Borde and Chaumeton (24), Christopher (206), and Oliver and Trigo, who describe noir as “a type of Freudian dream-work marked by condensations and displacements of unconscious desires and fears” (xv).

3
. Siegfried Kracauer wrote in 1927 that “the game that film plays with the pieces of disjointed nature is reminiscent of
dreams
in which the fragments of daily life become jumbled” (qtd. in Dimendberg 143).

4
. Santos provides a useful survey of the roles of psychiatry and psychiatrists in noir.

5
. Ringel cites two midcentury psychoanalysts who explicitly compare psychiatrists to detectives “searching for clues to uncover the mystery” (173).

6
. Gabbard and Gabbard note that the work of the psychiatrist in cinema is often “indistinguishable from that of clergymen, caseworkers, school guidance counselors, or even newspaper advice columnists” (xxiii).

7
. Ernest Hartmann, for example, argues that dreams’ symbolic material is much less important than their dominant emotion, which can be expressed through a variety of scenarios (3–4, 117).

8
. Dream symbolism is, for Freud, the language of the unconscious. The dreamer’s conscious mind cannot gain access to the unconscious; if he or she could, the unconscious would wither away (Rieff 52).

9
. States, reinterpreting Freudian “condensation” in literary terms, argues that metonymy creates most dream imagery in this way (94–123).

10
. Comandini was an experienced screenwriter who had been working in Hollywood since the mid-1920s. Among her other credits is the 1934 adaptation of
Jane Eyre
and the 1945 Warner Bros. noir
Danger Signal
(“Adele Comandini”).

11
. Perhaps it is only an accident that the missing letters, rearranged, spell “act king.”

12
. If we consider director Ulmer’s biography (raised in Vienna, he arrived in the United States in the 1930s and directed a series of well-regarded Yiddish-language films before signing with the Poverty Row company PRC, where he made
Strange Illusion
), we may also find in the film the story of a man struggling to reconcile his Old World past (represented by Muhlbach, with his German name and continental accent) and his emergent American self. For further details about Ulmer’s life (as well as some dubious speculation about the “Jewish” characters in the film) see Brook 147–48, 158–59.

13
.
The Big Night
is adapted from Stanley Ellin’s novel
Dreadful Summit
, for which the passage from
Hamlet
serves as epigraph and in which the crude phallic symbols of gun and cane are even more blatant. Though credited to Ellin, the screenplay was actually written by blacklisted radicals Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner Jr.

14
. The film was originally told almost entirely in flashback, but producer Philip Waxman changed it during the editing: see Ciment 116–17.

15
. Young Barrymore’s relationship with his father was apparently not much different from that of George and his father. Losey spent a great deal of time on and off the set with Barrymore, in effect adopting him during the making of the film. In an irony worthy of noir, after Losey went to England in the wake of his blacklisting, the FBI employed Barrymore to trace and report on Losey (Ciment 116, 118).

16
. In this regard his words as he downs a Metaxa—“to the Greeks!”—acquire an additional, creepy significance.

17
. The novel’s singer, Terry Angelus, is obviously modeled on Billie Holiday, down to the flower in her hair, ubiquitous dog, and nickname, “Ladybird” (Ellin 111–14). In the novel her singing makes George yearn to pull out his, well, gun (112). In both versions, after the show he tries to compliment her but muffs it when he says, “I think you’re beautiful too, even if you are a ——” (in the novel he uses the word
nigger:
114).

18
. The novel’s conclusion is somewhat different. Frances dies from complications of an abortion that Andy convinced her to undergo, and George’s mother is not married to another man but in prison. The novel also carries out Andy’s sacrificial role to completion: George shoots Judge after returning to Andy’s house, and Andy is killed by a policeman during a climactic struggle with Judge (Ellin 174–75). Flanagan tries to persuade George to let the police believe that Andy killed Judge, but ultimately George decides to emulate his father, who “took what was coming to him,” and clears Andy’s name by confessing (181).

19
. It is possible that
Harry
’s ending was influenced by that of
Woman in the Window
, which premiered a few months before
Harry
was completed.

20
. The question of whether Hitchcock is a noir director is a vexed one. Although some of his films display what are considered noir conventions, his work differs in tone and narrative style from most noirs. For thoughtful examinations of Hitchcock’s relation to noir see Naremore, “Hitchcock,” especially 267–71; and Orr, who adduces as evidence the director’s quite different attitudes toward gender (many Hitchcock protagonists are women) and murder, along with the famous Hitchcock transfer-of-guilt motif (156–64).

21
. Freedman notes that
Spellbound
marks the first time in American cinema that psychoanalysis is “the means of solving a crime, not a means of committing one” (83). Although Dr. May E. Romm (David O. Selznick’s own analyst) is listed as the film’s technical adviser, Hitchcock seemed to view the psychiatric elements mostly as a gimmick and once dismissed the picture as “just another man-hunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis” (qtd. in Truffaut 165). Hitchcock later distinguished between “psychological” films and “psychoanalytical” films like
Spellbound
, predicting that the latter were merely a “passing phase” (qtd. in Nugent 21).
Spellbound
’s simplistic depiction of psychoanalysis is but one of its many weaknesses (along with its overwrought score, implausible story, and stilted performance by Gregory Peck, as noted by Hyde 153). Yet it was also among the twenty highest-grossing Hollywood films released between 1945 and 1950 (Chopra-Gant 18). Hence, the film is a telling example of midcentury Americans’ fascination with psychiatry and dreams.

22
. Freedman later proposes that
Spellbound
holds out the possibility that “psychoanalysis when broadly accepted and thoroughly understood could provide a solution to all problems” (95).

23
. As Gabbard and Gabbard observe, she also embodies the problematic notion that women are better off as lovers than as professionals (54).

24
. Originally a much longer and more elaborate dream sequence was planned, but it was truncated for reasons of time and money. For information about the production of the sequence see McGilligan,
Alfred Hitchcock
360–63.

25
. As Brill comments, the tale of Ballantine’s illness and cure is closer to a fable about “the curse of the evil sorcerer … [and] an enchantment … overcome by a heroic kiss” than to a realistic story about scientific treatment (259).

26
. Brill lists
Rebecca
and
Vertigo
as sharing this theme, but one could also include Hitchcock’s
Psycho, I Confess
, and
Marnie
, as well as films noir such as
Murder, My Sweet; The Killers; Out of the Past
; and a score of others, including many I discuss in later chapters.

27
. Hitchcock, meanwhile, was engaged in remaking himself as an American director, aided—or was it hindered?—by the notoriously controlling producer David O. Selznick. Hence, we might also read in Ballantine’s and Constance’s attempts to reinvent themselves a little of Hitchcock’s own frustration in learning to cope with American studio heads who insisted on overwriting his dreams with their own.

1
. Like the dream movies, some switched-identity pictures obliquely allude to the biographies of their directors or performers, many of them émigrés beginning new
lives, sometimes with new names, and carrying an ambivalent attachment to their original homelands and identities.

2
. The editing and blocking in this scene have been meticulously analyzed in Porfirio, “
The Killers
.”

3
. Ian Jarvie correctly describes Jeff’s dubious morality (see 177).

4
. This brilliantly constructed film contains other such doublings. For instance, Whit hires Jeff twice (first to find Kathie, and then to fetch the incriminating papers from his lawyer, Leonard Eels), and Jeff dupes him both times. Jeff goes on the run twice but escapes neither time.

5
. The film’s fishing motif is another of its intriguing touches. For example, Jeff’s partner’s name is Fisher, and the lawyer for whose murder he is framed is named Eels. In the early scenes with Kathie in Acapulco, the lovers are seen on the beach surrounded by a net. Later Jeff swears to Whit that he isn’t a “sucker.” Whit does his own fishing, trying to catch Jeff by using the deaf kid as bait; later Jeff uses the boy as a decoy to throw off the police. Obviously, as a PI Markham is also a kind of fisherman. He is also being fished out of his other life by Whit and is a fish out of water in Bridgeport. There may also be an allusion here to the myth of the fisher king, with Jeff the exiled monarch who must be sacrificed so that his land becomes fertile once again.