Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (33 page)

And so, apparently, does the music, for Brown’s gang is identified with big band jazz. In one of the most brutal scenes in all noir, the thugs use the hearing aid of Brown’s lieutenant, Joe McClure (Brian Donleavy), to torture Diamond with loud, frantic jazz. As the tune plays, Mingo forecasts a “real crazy” drum
solo that will render Diamond insensible. Clearly Brown and jazz are associated with pain—Diamond’s and Susan’s—as well as with transgressive sexual practices. Susan, Mingo, and Fante, and even Diamond, are all thereby noired, or at least thoroughly browned. Because the title melody is the sound of Brown’s power, it all but disappears when he is absent or weakened—for example, while he softly recalls his first wife, Alicia (Helen Walker). And though we hear the melody when Susan persuades Alicia to testify against Brown for killing his former boss, in that scene it is only played softly on violin. Both women have felt Brown’s bruises, but his aural power is softened by Susan’s feminine timbre.

Ultimately Brown is captured by Diamond, with the help of Susan, who shines a spotlight on him as he skulks, ratlike, in the corners of an airplane hangar (John Alton’s cinematography enhances the atmosphere immeasurably). Lit from behind, so that they appear as silhouettes against the cloudy white background, Susan and Diamond walk into the murk, the soprano sax keening the moody theme as the film closes. But since Brown has been brought down, why does his melody linger? The answer is that although the film explicitly endorses law and order, its latent content tells a different story. Throughout the film Diamond envies Brown, who taunts him unmercifully: “The only trouble with you is you’d like to be me. … You think it’s money. It’s not. It’s personality. You haven’t got it, Lieutenant.” He’s right: Diamond (remember, this is a cop whose girlfriend is a stripper) would love to possess Brown’s sexual and financial power, instead of breaking his back for $96.50 a week. More broadly, the film implies that no law can quell the darker impulses represented by jazz, which Susan, Diamond, and the film’s viewers (many of whom, I’ve learned, find the charismatic Brown more interesting than the plodding Diamond) carry within. And although the theme melody modulates to a more optimistic A major in its final cadence, it seems less triumphant than resigned, as if implying that all who live in this city are as black and blue (and brown) as the protagonists. The suffering doesn’t vanish; Brown lingers in the music just as his combo has been woven into the city, and just as all that Brown represents forever resides in human hearts.

The Big Combo
suggests that jazz—and only jazz—adequately captures the complex emotions and motivations of contemporary urbanites. No longer consigned to basement jam sessions and out-of-the-way clubs, it is imbricated in the intimate lives of modern Americans. The music thus both emerges from and expresses the black, blue, brown—and fallen—twentieth-century world. This world is fully displayed in the scintillating late noir
Sweet Smell of Success
, in which big band jazz again serves as the aural equivalent of urban corruption. Elmer
Bernstein’s bluesy, minor-key title theme (its triplet figures recalling “Blues in the Night”) specifically represents the domain of sadistic, Winchellesque columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and Tony Curtis’s weaselly publicist Sidney Falco.
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Like the film’s sardonic, crackling Clifford Odets/Ernest Lehman script, its score bespeaks a world as corrupt as Brown’s (indeed, Brown kills people, but Hunsecker destroys souls). Yet Bernstein’s main theme is not the only jazz in the film. When Sidney is on the make, we hear a peppy motif that reflects his unflagging energy. More significantly, the Chico Hamilton Quintet performs in a couple of club sequences and exemplifies a more progressive image of jazz.

Hamilton’s biracial group features an unusual front line of guitar (Martin Milner, as guitarist Steve Dallas) and Fred Katz’s cello; its modernist modal music is the polar opposite of the retro big band orchestrations in Bernstein’s score.
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Sweet Smell
is thus the first film noir to include a jazz group performing music that was cutting edge at the time of its release. Guarded, cool, and serious, its musicians are also as far removed from the frenetic grinders of
D. O. A
. and
Phantom Lady
as New Orleans is from New York. Steve Dallas has nothing but contempt for the Sidney Falcos of the world. As for Hunsecker—whose sister, Susie (Susan Harrison), is dating Dallas—Steve deems him “some kind of a monster.” The film thus sharply distinguishes between the jazz of Hamilton and Dallas—an advanced, highly intellectual art—and the brand that underscores Hunsecker’s city of lies and innuendoes, a realm that lives by what one character calls “the theology of making a fast buck.”
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Not that Hunsecker and Falco don’t try to spread this gospel. The film’s plot revolves around Hunsecker’s attempt to smear Steve so that Susie, with whom Hunsecker has a creepy, quasi-incestuous relationship, will break up with the guitarist. To keep his own hands clean, Hunsecker enlists Falco to do his dirty work. A hustler who has buried his conscience beneath mounds of smelly ambition, Sidney is a willing proxy, despite his jealousy of J. J. Believing that nearly everyone else is as much a whore as he is, Sidney even pimps out his girlfriend, Rita, to rival columnist Otis Elwell, then passes on to Elwell Hunsecker’s lie that Steve is a Communist and pothead, in exchange for J. J.’s promise of future columns. Steve is then forced to request Hunsecker’s help in clearing his name—in exchange for being “good” to Susie. Oddly enough, Falco actually respects Steve and doubts he’ll accept the favor from J. J., who asks (his face half in shadow), “What has this boy got that Susie likes?” Sidney: “Integrity. Acute, like indigestion.” J. J.: “What does this mean, ‘integrity’?” Sidney: “A pocketful of fire-crackers, waitin’ for a match.” Even Hunsecker asserts that he’d never let Susie date
a man like Falco, who, he says, lives in “moral twilight.” But Falco at least feels a twinge of remorse for his acts: if he’s in moral twilight, Hunsecker is shrouded in total darkness. When Falco angrily informs J. J. that Steve had accused Hunsecker of planting the smear, J. J. feigns outrage. Yet Steve holds his ground, asks the intimidated Susie to speak for herself, and when she can’t, cusses her brother out.

That outburst seals his fate: Susie promises never to see Steve again, and her brother gives her a patronizing kiss. J. J. seems to have won. Yet at that moment the main musical theme is played on cello, as if to indicate that Dallas’s jazz (and integrity) has begun to challenge Hunsecker’s. And though Falco puts marijuana in Steve’s coat and gets him arrested, both he and J. J. are defeated after Susie faces down her brother, who then turns in Falco for planting the cannabis on Steve. Butler concludes that “the ‘taint’ of the decadent corruption that surrounds Steve and his band is so overpowering that the film’s audience can easily recall Steve’s progressive jazz as being emblematic of the corruption and not an antidote to it” (136). His reading is exactly backward. The film clearly presents Dallas and Hamilton as the antithesis of Falco and Hunsecker, and though the brassy Hunsecker theme plays at the end, its swaggering swing has been replaced by a determined marching thump that propels Susie’s hopeful walk into the morning, suitcase in hand. Falco and Hunsecker lose the jazz war to Steve Dallas, as moral twilight gives way to dawn.

The stolid Dallas contrasts starkly with the grimacing, sweaty jazz musicians of 1940s noir. He is no petulant, oversensitive kid like Johnny Ingram or Stan Maxton; nor an addict, weakling, or womanizer, like Keith Vincent, Marty Blair, or Stan Grayson; nor a fatuous “jigger” who just happens to have a gift. In his person jazz is an island of integrity in a sea of corruption. Though “noired” by his association with the music, Dallas is never befouled and never merely black and blue, for he hands out as many blows as he receives. Of course, Steve Dallas is a white man. How different would the story be if Susie were dating Chico Hamilton! Hence, despite laudable progress in presenting jazz and its musicians as real artists, both this film and
The Strip
still depict African Americans as instruments for the refashioning of
white
identities and relationships. The promise of true equality in the films—as in real-world America of the late 1950s—remains mostly a dream deferred.

As African Americans were gradually incorporated into the mainstream of American life, noir’s jazz musicians began to lose their degrading traits. When blackness needed not be translated into mental illness, addiction, or violent rage, it began to be heard as an essential—perhaps
the
essential—voice in the American
chorus. In most 1940s noir, jazz musicians represent the secret fears and fascinations of a nation grappling with race relations and changing notions of masculinity, productivity, and gender: jazz cats were a focal point for the nation’s dreams
and
nightmares. In 1950s noir, however, jazz musicians are more often presented as working professionals—regular Stans or Steves—refining their art and pursuing a modest version of the American Dream. Increasingly recognized as a music requiring discipline and rigor, jazz gained respectability even as its popularity waned. It must be said, however, that Steve Dallas is a less interesting character than Marty Blair: he has shed his complexity along with his complexes. Perhaps, then, it is no accident that the music he plays betrays few traces of the blues. In serving up jazz musicians as paragons of authenticity and integrity, filmmakers risked stripping them of the depth that makes such characters so fascinating. Indeed, the blues is not only a key influence on the birth of jazz; it is also an essential element that, in two other 1940s films, permits musicians to transmute their bruises into badges of courage.

In Raoul Walsh’s
The Man I Love
, named for the Gershwins’ famous song, torch singer Petey Brown (Ida Lupino) languidly delivers the title song’s lyrics during a late-night jam session at the “39” club in New York:

Some day he’ll come along
The man I love
And he’ll be big and strong
The man I love
And when he comes my way,
I’ll do my best to make him stay.

Though she sings the song “as if she has lived it” (Stanfield,
Body
136), her no-nonsense manner belies its endorsement of submissive domesticity.
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As Stan-field notes (138), it’s not Petey who is a “soul in torment” but pianist San Thomas (Bruce Bennett), the title character whose “emotive piano workouts” evince a tumultuous inner life. When Petey fails to capture San, she is not devastated by the experience, as the lyrics would suggest. Instead, though bruised by life’s knocks, she emerges with her integrity and artistry intact.

Petey is a figure frequently seen in film noir: the female nightclub singer.
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But though her songs lament lost loves in tones “dreamy and sad” (to quote “One for
My Baby,” a song Lupino performs in
Road House
), she herself is pragmatic and resilient. Indeed, Petey gains strength through her voice: as Adrienne McLean notes, women who sing in Hollywood films thereby become “active communicating” subjects rather than passive, acted-upon objects, as their songs permit them to tell their stories and master their experiences (4). Two films in which Lupino plays singers, moreover, provide counterpoint to noir’s troubled male musicians by presenting jazz as a path to liberation through artistic labor. Lupino’s chanteuses extend the tradition founded by classic blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, whose style turned black-and-blueness into female empowerment. As this lineage implies, Lupino’s singers are “othered” through association with blackness (also indicated by the prominent blue notes in the melodies of “The Man I Love” and “One for My Baby”); but unlike their male counterparts they are not ruined by their noiring. Instead they use it to model a progressive identity built on improvisation that embraces life as an extended jazz solo.

Though directed by Raoul Walsh,
The Man I Love
is a female-centered and -coauthored picture, with a script by Catherine Turney (and male writer Jo Pagano), adapted from the novel
Night Shift
by Maritta Wolff.
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It presents several realistic scenes of women working together, supporting each other, and showing strength (the exception is a woman named Gloria [Dolores Moran], who cheats on her husband, Johnny, and neglects her baby). But at the center of the film—which lies on the fringes of noir—is Petey, a sharp-tongued, sardonic woman who seems to need nobody.
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After Petey travels to California to visit her sisters Sally (Andrea King) and Ginny (Martha Vickers), she becomes involved with shady club owner Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda), for whom her brother Joey works, and eventually with San Thomas.
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Petey wants to help them but also aims to advance her career and auditions for Toresca by singing the Kern/Hammerstein standard “Why Was I Born?” in a jaunty style that contradicts its gloomy lyrics about dreaming of a lover but waking up “all by myself.” Though both this song and “The Man I Love” confess creamy romantic yearnings, Petey is more concerned with hard cheese—practical matters such as staving off Toresca’s advances and monitoring her brother’s illicit activities.

After she meets San, the couple take a romantic stroll on the boardwalk as the title song plays on the soundtrack. Later San performs it in a flashy, two-handed arrangement (Bennett appears to be actually playing sections of the piece). But alas, he tells Petey, his recording of the song never caught on. “You were ten years ahead, that’s why,” she replies, though it offers nothing that Art Tatum and Earl Hines hadn’t already been serving up for more than a decade. San “ran down like
a clock” because he “tried to make the piano do a lot of things I guess no one guy can do.” After his wife, Amanda, left him, he started drinking and lost his muse. Here is the now-familiar figure: a male jazz musician too sensitive to function in the real world. Although San claims to be comfortable with his “blank” life, the theme music contradicts his assertion by swelling extradiegetically, as if coaching him to tell Petey that she might give him back his “spark.” Sure enough, even after he warns her that he’ll make her “sing the blues,” they melt together in a kiss. Petey seems to be living out the title song’s lyrics after all. But ten days later, San stands her up for a date, and, on returning home, Petey hears him play “Body and Soul” on her piano. The tune’s famous lyrics—