Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (11 page)

Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), the protagonist of Jacques Tourneur’s justly celebrated
Out of the Past
, also tries to reinvent himself (in an odd coincidence that recurs several times in noir) as a gas station owner. He has changed his name to Bailey and started a new life in the small town of Bridgeport. Whereas once he engineered glamorous escapades in Acapulco and San Francisco with a beautiful, dangerous woman, he now seeks to satisfy himself as a modest businessman catering to the mobile lives of others. But his masquerade unravels when an old associate, Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine), shows up in his convertible and undoes Jeff’s conversion. Jeff, too, did something wrong once: not only did he fail to fetch Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), the girlfriend of gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), as he was paid to do; he ran off with her and then stood by as she murdered his partner, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie). Lacking Sam Spade’s rigorous ethics (“when a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it”), he has never paid for either error. From the beginning Markham is self-divided, and when he becomes Bailey, he brings his dual nature with him. Thus, although Jeff does a lot of moving in the film, his identity isn’t really mobile: he can’t reinvent himself because he doesn’t really want to.
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To illustrate Jeff’s cloven self, the film contains numerous symmetries and doublings. First and foremost are the settings: on the one hand is bucolic Bridgeport and environs, on the other the corrupt cities where shady business transpires. Tahoe, where Whit maintains a house, lies between the two, and provides the setting for many of Jeff’s pivotal decisions. The early scenes in Bridgeport use
horizontal lines, whereas the city scenes emphasize verticality. In bright, sunny Bridgeport everybody dresses casually (and the night scenes are shot day for night); the city scenes take place after dark (are shot night for night), and people dress more formally. Thus, when Stefanos first appears in Bridgeport, he looks ludicrously out of place in his dark suit and trench coat (and even more so later when he hunts Jeff in the woods, wearing the same getup). When Jeff obeys Whit’s summons and drives to Tahoe (during which he reveals his past to his girlfriend, Ann), he dons his old trench coat and fedora. Ann (Virginia Huston) and Kathie reflect the same duality: the nice, trusting small-town girl versus one of noir’s most dangerous, duplicitous, and bewitching dames. For each woman Jeff vies with another man: Jim (Richard Webb), a dull government employee, is in love with Ann (but she doesn’t love him, being more intrigued by “the mysterious Jeff Bailey”); Whit, the corrupt gambler, loves Kathie. If Jim is the man Jeff is trying to become, Whit is closer to his aboriginal self. Indeed, Jeff and Whit are doubles, as both are in love with Kathie, and Jeff initially acts as Whit’s proxy.
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Jeff’s wishful identity is embodied by his protégé in Bridgeport, a young, unnamed deaf boy (Dickie Moore) who works at his gas station (and who also drives a convertible, representing Jeff’s hoped-for conversion). Having remained mute about his past, Jeff has rendered others deaf to his motives and actions: he never told Whit about running off with Kathie, and he never came clean about his complicity in the death of his partner. The motif of hearing permeates the film. For example, when Stefanos first arrives in Bridgeport and enters Marny’s Cafe, she insinuates that Jeff and Ann are lovers: “I just see what I see.” Jim replies, “Are you sure you don’t see what you hear?” She later tells Stefanos, “Seems like everything people ought to know, they just don’t want to hear.” Later Whit asks Jeff, “Can you still listen?” Jeff answers, “I can hear.” But he can’t hear Whit’s real motives—or his own. If Jeff first acts as Whit’s surrogate, the deaf boy later acts as Jeff’s, using his fishing rod to pull Stefanos from a cliff to his death, and at the end allowing Ann to believe that Jeff was in love with Kathie, so as to free her to marry Jim.
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Jeff does tell the truth—or what he believes to be the truth—to Ann during the drive to Tahoe: that he aims to square things with Whit, pay for doing something wrong once, and dismiss Markham forever. But not only is Whit setting him up as a fall guy; Kathie is manipulating both men for her own ends. Indeed, she is Jeff’s closest foil in the film: both are riven by conflicting emotions and allegiances, and their resemblance is suggested repeatedly through dialogue, blocking, and cinematography. The most significant moment in their relationship occurs after Jeff and Kathie return from their Mexican “dream” (“maybe we
thought we’d wake up … in Niagara Falls”) and, after parting, meet again in a secluded house. But Fisher has tracked her and demands the forty grand she insists she doesn’t have. As the scene unfolds, Jeff is gradually engulfed in shadows; then, in a superb quasi-expressionist sequence, the two men fight while Kathie, clearly enjoying the spectacle, looks on. At the very moment Jeff appears to have knocked out his ex-partner, Kathie shoots and kills Fisher, then absconds. The scene’s shadows convey Jeff’s emotions—depression, guilt, and shame for being duped—and his recognition of his complicity (it is
his
flashback). During the fight sequence the two men’s shadows are indistinguishable as they play over Kathie’s face: she doesn’t care who wins, so long as she gets the dough. Fortuitously, she leaves behind a bankbook revealing that she has indeed stolen Whit’s $40,000. As Jeff stares at the evidence, his shadow, now larger than he, stands beside him: it is the second self his actions have created, an embodiment of the misdeeds that will eventually come calling. This scene, which culminates Jeff’s flashback, is the moment when he first grasps Kathie’s true nature: she is a liar and a cold-blooded killer. It’s also the moment when Jeff understands his own role: he’s the fish and Kathie the fisher. The shadows also presage his death, which will be the ultimate consequence of his entrapment in Miss Moffat’s web. But when he buries Fisher, he is neither sorry nor sore: “I wasn’t anything,” he tells Ann. Precisely. Having vanished into Kathie’s shadow, he became no one at all. In the aftermath he never truly comes to life as the humble Jeff Bailey, for he still loves Kathie and the Jeff she made.

When he next sees her, at Whit’s, he insults her (“you’re like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another”), mostly to convince himself he doesn’t still want her. To pay his debt to Whit, Jeff becomes enmeshed in his plot to avoid paying income tax, but he soon realizes that, as he tells the cabbie who drives him around, he is “in a frame”—that he’ll be set up for the murder of the lawyer Eels, actually committed by Stefanos. Fittingly, during these city scenes, Markham is constantly framed by doorways, windows, or small rooms. More to the point, he is boxed in by his own self-division. Like Reardon, Jeff finds the underworld more exciting than Bridgeport, lethal Kathie more enticing than bland Ann. He thinks he
should
desire Bridgeport but has left his heart in San Francisco. Hence, when Kathie professes to love him, protesting that she “couldn’t help” signing an affidavit framing him for Fisher’s murder, he can’t resist her allure.

Even after Kathie sends Stefanos to kill Jeff, and then murders Whit, Jeff—though he does take time to phone the police and set her up to be captured—admits that they “deserve each other.” But he makes sure they are caught on the road, virtually assuring that he’ll be killed either by them or, as actually happens, by her. He’s not good enough for Ann but spares her the pain of loving him, while managing to take Kathie down with him. It is tempting to read his final gesture as a heroic sacrifice, which would imply that the good Jeff Bailey is his real nature, the Markham side (marked for death, perhaps?) merely a shadow brought to life by Kathie. But it’s not Jeff who spares Ann; it’s the deaf boy. Jeff remains split throughout the film, lying to Ann and to himself, veering wildly in his attitude to Kathie; although disgusted by the reflection of himself he reads in her, he can’t bring himself to discard it. Ultimately, as James Maxfield summarizes, Kathie embodies “the evil that he now recognizes within himself” (64)—the evil that he also loves. Bailey/Markham never reinvents himself, never exchanges his dark dream for a bright one, not because fate or Whit or Kathie prevents him but because he remains his
own
double. Whereas Ole Anderson’s identity switch fails because he has no self to change, Jeff’s identity is frozen in its schizophrenic state, as he clings to the wrong he committed, unable to sever his attachment to a past that he loves more than anything else, even himself.

Despite their visual and thematic riches,
The Killers
and
Out of the Past
both use their female characters primarily as plot devices or aspects of the male protagonists. But two other switched-identity noirs place women at the center, and their female-authored screenplays employ the missing person device to enable critical analyses of marriage.
My Name Is Julia Ross
(written by Muriel Roy Bolton) and
No Man of Her Own
(scripted by Catherine Turney and Sally Benson) use their Gothic plots to suggest that all married women undergo identity conversions. Though each film supplies a conventional Hollywood ending, complete with a happy couple, their critiques of marriage and gender roles linger beyond their perfunctory conclusions. Each film also scrutinizes the dream of social mobility, as their struggling lower-class protagonists are thrust into the upper class, surviving only through lies and violence. The films question the central institution of middle-class society and cast doubt on the American mythos of infinite class mobility.

Though American-made,
Julia Ross
takes place in England, but if its setting universalizes its dissection of marriage, it scarcely blunts it. Julia (Nina Foch), a newcomer in London who claims to be absolutely alone (though she has a new boyfriend, Dennis Bruce [Roland Varno], who has just broken off his engagement for her), visits an employment agency and finds a job as the secretary for a wealthy family, the Hugheses.
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Upon taking the job, she is drugged, dressed up, and driven to a mansion in Cornwall, where she is told that she is really Marion Hughes, the wife of Ralph (George Macready), the lord of the manor who stabbed the real Marion to death. He and his mother (Dame May Whitty) aim to persuade Julia, along with the servants and townspeople, that “Marion” is mentally ill so that they can kill her and eliminate any lingering suspicions about Ralph
(this scheme makes little sense, but never mind). When Julia first awakens in her room at their mansion, a quick survey reveals the monograms “HH” and “MH” on her bedclothes and toiletries; the large picture window opens onto a sharp drop to the ocean. Like
Spellbound
’s Ballantine, Julia is a pair of initials—but these are not her own. Unlike that of the male missing persons, Julia’s “amnesia” is sustained only by those around her; she remains firm in her original identity, despite the nefarious machinations of the psychopathic Ralph and his blandly sinister mother.

These sensational Gothic trappings mask a more sober investigation of female identity and social roles. For example, in a scene not long after Julia arrives at the manor, the maid, Alice (Queenie Leonard), tells Julia that she has “a beautiful home, nice relations, pretty clothes—everything a woman would want”; she should be satisfied with these things instead of “letting [herself] be took up by illusions, letting it gnaw at [her]. … It’s all in the mind.” This canny working-class woman would abide a marriage to a man she doesn’t love, so long as she had “everything” else.
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According to Alice, “Marion” should just grit her teeth and get used to it—even if she really
is
Julia Ross. Later, while walking on the beach with Ralph, Julia pretends that she has accepted her new identity but can’t remember her old one. He informs her that, like Julia, Marion had no family or loved ones. In other words the real Marion Hughes was just as trapped as Julia is and was killed because she hated the husband who had forced her to take his name. (He had also lied about his income but now lives on her legacy.) As Ralph confides that he loves the sea because it “never tells its secrets. But it has many, very many secrets,” Julia peers over his shoulder, only the top half of her face visible. Santos writes that this moment indicates “the threat of her slow disappearance from the world as she fights to hang on to her reason, signified by her gaze.” This claustrophobically close shot, she continues, is a disorienting moment for the viewer, who “experiences a kind of vertigo on the cliff with Julia” (152). More to the point, the shot transforms Julia into Ralph’s appendage—just as Marion was. Julia’s plight, in short, is that of any woman, alone in the world, who marries into a wealthy family: she is at their mercy. Her condition is a synecdoche for the legal vertigo of female self-erasure through marriage. Any woman who became Mrs. Hughes would become Mrs. X.
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The switched identity plot, then, demonstrates how marriage can be a form of abduction.