Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (37 page)

Betraying Prenta is difficult for Ethel because he is, like her, a lower-class striver. So instead of setting him up, she tries to warn him. But Castleman finds out, slaps her around, and then kills Prenta as a “lesson in political science.”
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“Lorna” metaphorically dies with him, and as Ethel drives off in her convertible, we’re driven back to the beginning. The circular narrative structure indicates the lesson that noir protagonists never seem to learn: as Emerson reminds us, no matter what name you assume, you always end up in bed with yourself. Lorna/Ethel’s story is one of failed reinvention, but not just because she can’t shed her
aboriginal self. No: although she can imitate the ruthless grasping of powerful males, and can change her name, she can’t change her sex. Thus she remains subject to the law that a woman’s only real property is her body, which is transferred to the male who purchases (or marries) it. A distaff
Nightmare Alley, The Damned Don’t Cry
reveals how pursuing the American Dream drives the disenfranchised into criminality. But its ultimate lesson in political science is this: when a woman becomes a commodity, she relinquishes agency.

Ethel Whitehead doesn’t qualify as a femme fatale, for she is, like Mildred and Gilda, as much victim as violator (the film was in fact first submitted to the Breen Office under the title
The Victim:
PCA file). In the work of screenwriter Ketti Frings, the lines between victim and violator are blurred even further. Frings (nee Katherine Hartley) wrote two provocative noirs for Hal Wallis at Paramount that depict strong but self-divided women hemmed in by social and gender roles and forced into crime.
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Their guilt is shared by the equally conflicted men with whom they are involved. Frings’s scripts exemplify how, according to Walsh, moral choices are typically presented in women’s films as “complex … and as embedded in a network of interpersonal relations” (43). Indeed, the key theme in the two films I discuss,
The Accused
and
The File on Thelma Jordon
, is complicity.
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In the former, Dr. Wilma Tuttle (Loretta Young) kills a man who tries to rape her and then must wrestle with her conscience and confront her sexuality; in the latter, Thelma Jordon (Barbara Stanwyck) entices assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) into abetting a murder plot but is a reluctant party to the scheme, which is engineered by her lover, Tony (Richard Rober). Though the plan succeeds, Thelma’s emotions are torn to pieces.

Cleve Marshall is a willing victim. As the film opens, he is drunk, wallowing in self-pity and feeling emasculated by his wife, Pam, and her wealthy, domineering father. Thelma exploits his craving for liberation. As she sits in the driver’s seat, preparing to depart from his office, Cleve thrusts his head through the car window and declares, “I’m harmless and I’m lonesome.” Soon the car becomes the lovers’ alternate home, their amoral space where all rules are suspended. The next evening, Thelma intimates that she, too, is “tired of being on the outside looking in,” and the following night they park in the woods and make out “like a couple of teenagers.” But they can’t stay in the car forever, so Cleve, fearful of his reputation, assumes a series of phony names—Thompson, Johnson—whenever
he calls on Thelma. We learn later that Thelma first mistook him for his boss, Miles Scott, who was the original target. Cleve isn’t the only person with multiple identities: after her date with Cleve, Thelma kisses a man named Tony Laredo, even though she has just told Cleve that Tony is her husband but no longer in her life.

Cleve’s identity becomes the key missing piece in the subsequent crime—the murder of Thelma’s rich Aunt Vera—and investigation. The murder sequence, with its spidery staircase, deep shadows, nail-biting suspense, and shrewd use of sound (we hear the old lady fall but don’t see the murder) displays director Robert Siodmak’s skills. But the screenplay is ingenious in its own right, as it depicts Cleve, pretending to be Mr. Johnson, phoning Thelma, then helping her alter evidence. He believes her story that Tony, without Thelma’s help, killed Aunt Vera for her emeralds. The next day Thelma is interrogated by the police, who know about her phone call from “Mr. X”; they also inform Cleve that Tony was in Chicago that night and that Thelma was never married to him. Despite this evidence of Thelma’s mendacity, Cleve anonymously hires high-powered defense attorney Kingsley Willis (Stanley Ridges) to represent her. The canny Willis describes criminals as having split personalities so that their “left hand never lets the right hand know what it’s doing.” As the right hand to Thelma’s left, Willis doesn’t want to know if she’s guilty. Of course, these words also fit Cleve who, after giving Willis information that forces Cleve’s boss to recuse himself, now must argue the case against his own lover. His left hand defends; his right hand prosecutes.

At the trial he works at cross-purposes, antagonizing jurors while also presenting damning evidence against Thelma. Willis exploits Cleve’s ambivalence, evoking reasonable doubt by raising the specter of Mr. X, who, he shows, could have committed the murder. Cleve’s alter ego (his defender self) thus undermines his case, and Thelma is acquitted.
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But Mr. X
is
guilty of a crime: Cleve is an accessory to murder after the fact. His responsibility becomes clearer in the aftermath, when Tony, pleased with his “lifelong annuity,” celebrates with Thelma. But she remains as conflicted as Cleve, first refusing to leave with Tony, then telling Cleve (perhaps to protect him) that she has always loved Tony and that she killed her aunt for her jewels. “You were the fall guy, Cleve, right from the beginning.” Cleve knew, but didn’t want to know; hence, when he threatens to indict Tony for “complicity,” he is also naming his own crime. But Thelma recognizes her own complicity (Tony remarks in an early version of the script that she is a “chameleon” who “changes colors” depending on which man she is with), and, as she and Tony drive away, she burns him with the car’s cigarette lighter, causing a
wreck that kills him.
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On her deathbed Thelma describes her lifelong struggle: “Willis said I was two people. He was right. You don’t suppose they could just let half of me die.” The old Cleve—the attorney—dies as well; his divided self exposed, he is disbarred but does finally acquire integrity.

Like Phyllis Dietrichson, Thelma Jordon elicits the antisocial impulses lying dormant in her victim. But unlike Phyllis, Thelma is herself under the sway of a powerful man and therefore not completely responsible. An embodiment of complicity, she doesn’t know what she wants.
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The same is true of Dr. Wilma Tuttle, the psychology-professor protagonist of
The Accused
. In that film’s opening sequence we watch a guilty-acting Wilma return to her apartment (staring into the mirror, she seems not to recognize herself), then recall administering a quiz, the previous day, about conditioned reflexes.
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“Think of your needs, your hungers, your fears,” she advises her students, for these “rule most of us.”
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One student, Bill Perry (Douglas Dick), needs no encouragement to think of his hungers: he ogles Wilma, copies her gestures, and violates her space. She agrees to meet him in her office (along the way speaking with another student, Susan, whom Bill is harassing), but when he doesn’t show, she leaves him a note, then encounters him outside. Their chat causes her to miss her bus—a pretext for Bill to give her a lift home in his convertible. On the drive she analyzes him as a divided soul: overindulged by one parent and overdisciplined by the other, he lacks balance. The drive leads to a drink, Bill’s sharing of his passion for hunting abalone (“it’s the fight they give you that’s important”), then to parking at the palisades above the beach, where he proposes a moonlight swim. “You’re even more unbalanced than I thought,” Wilma declares. Bill manhandles her, tries to kiss her; Wilma flees, briefly resists, then kisses him back. “You little firecracker. Don’t pretend you don’t like it!” he exults. But when Bill squeezes her arm and hurts her, Wilma grabs a metal spring (used for opening abalone shells) and beats him to death.

The screenplay contains no hint that Wilma returns Bill’s kisses; nonetheless, it’s clear that Wilma’s diagnosis of Bill applies to herself, for she too is conflicted, unable to recognize her sexual feelings: at first passive, she becomes willing, then abruptly turns aggressive.
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As the investigation, led by Lt. Dorgan (Wendell Corey), proceeds, the police read Bill’s exam, in which he describes a certain woman as a “cyclothymiac” who “swings wildly from one side to the other” and whose long hair comes undone “because her emotions are coming undone. She’d like to break loose but she can’t.”
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His diagnosis of her (like his earlier comparison of her to a shell-bound abalone) is as accurate as hers of him. Although she tells
herself in voice-over that the killing was justified and that she has nothing to feel guilty about, she covers up her actions, writing a second note to Bill when the first one vanishes and changing her hairstyle so as not to fit Bill’s description. Like that other psychologist/killer, Prof. Wanley of
The Woman in the Window
, Wilma “accidentally” incriminates herself by arguing with the forensic expert investigating the case, Dr. Romley (Sam Jaffe). He speaks so callously about Bill’s body that Wilma bursts out with “you miserable ghouls!” (the harsh lighting on Jaffe reinforces the description) and accuses them of falsifying evidence. In short, Wilma acts guilty.

Bill’s guardian, attorney Warren Ford (Robert Cummings), aids the investigation and begins a relationship with Wilma. Dorgan, too, is attracted to her but nevertheless begins to suspect Dr. Tuttle once he rereads Bill’s exam.
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But she is “so nice, so intelligent!” Romley adds, “so tense, so emotional.” After researching cyclothymia Dorgan realizes that Wilma fits the bill, and plans to trap her by inciting her anger. Ford does it for him, however, by bringing Wilma to a boxing match where one of the pugilists resembles Bill and the bloodthirsty crowd evokes memories of the crime. As a woman behind Wilma screams, “Kill him, kill him, kill him!,” a shot from Wilma’s point of view shows the young fighter being pounded into submission, his face dissolving into Bill’s. “Bill, you’re hurting me,” Wilma shouts, then dazedly adds, “I didn’t mean to!”
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Though Ford suspects the truth, he protects her, then asks her to go away with him. He can’t comprehend why she demurs: why would a woman’s “two-penny job” matter?
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The next morning, Dorgan asks her to play the role of “juror number one,” while he restages the murder with miniatures and a mannequin. After Wilma grabs the spring and whacks the mannequin Bill’s head viciously and repeatedly, Dorgan reveals that her attempt to hide the crime by writing a second note confirmed her guilt: only the murderer would have known that Bill didn’t see the note and would have written a second one. In other words Wilma incriminates Dr. Tuttle. But both of them have a good lawyer in Ford, and their case is compelling: it was self-defense, her only crime being concealing evidence. Ford helped her conceal it: like Cleve Marshall he is complicit, an accessory after the fact. In his closing statement Ford intones, “Out of fear she killed. And out of fear she concealed and evaded. But if we’re to hold Wilma Tuttle accountable in fear, then the world must be held accountable. For these fears are not born in us; they are man-made.” This speech, devised by Frings (it doesn’t exist in the novel or in others’ drafts: see
The Accused
final draft), seems to excuse Wilma, yet its “fears” remain vague. Does he mean her fear of sex? Rape? Lost reputation? We can’t be
sure because, like Thelma Jordon, Wilma Tuttle doesn’t testify at her own trial; a man speaks for her. Indeed, though Warren wins Wilma by rescuing her, his insistence that she quit her job and marry him seems only a gentler version of Bill’s brutal advances. Speaking for her, using the force of the law to save her from herself, Warren is like a father curbing his daughter’s sexuality through marriage. He is his nephew’s counterpart—a Bill who won’t bite. This denouement also squashes the fascinating questions that the film has raised about Wilma’s conflicted character and her complicity in her own victimization. Bill would have raped her, so her violent response was justifiable. Yet we sense that the murder was as much a reaction to her own repressed sexual feelings as to her fear of Bill, for a part of her was flattered by, and welcomed, Bill’s attentions.

Yet unlike
Thelma Jordon, The Accused
places us inside its female protagonist, evoking sympathy for her plight while exposing her lack of self-knowledge. Frings’s early drafts take pains to analyze and empathize with Wilma’s self-contradictions (though they don’t make it into the film; see
Strange Deception
, 20). Like the novel, albeit more subtly, the film suggests that Dr. Tuttle relies too much on her brains, so when her emotions are aroused, she has no idea what to do with them. These implications echo the patronizing assumptions made about
Spellbound
’s Constance Petersen and reflect the mistrust of intellectuals (especially psychologists) evident in the films discussed in
chapter 1
.
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But though the key situations and events are found in Truesdell’s novel, Frings’s screenplay not only improves the story’s narrative (by changing the flashback’s placement and cutting extraneous material); it also nudges the story in a more progressive direction by showing respect for Dr. Tuttle’s career and by loosening the novel’s traditional views of gender. In the finished film Wilma is mostly guilty of not knowing herself. Frings, by contrast, did know her worth: she not only earned more for her work than any of the male writers who contributed to the script. She deserved it.
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It is useful to compare
The Accused
to another movie about rape made the following year—
Outrage
, cowritten and directed by Ida Lupino, who effectively uses overhead shots and silence to depict the entrapment of Ann Walton (Mala Powers) by the rapist. Ann does nothing to encourage the rapist, and
Outrage
portrays more explicitly than
The Accused
the sexist culture in which she lives.
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Her controlling father, for example, loathes her fiancé, Jim (Robert Clarke), and objects to their marriage plans, and Jim can’t understand why Ann, after being raped, finds his too-insistent advances “filthy.” In the aftermath Ann is subjected to rude stares and whispered comments. The stamping of papers and the drumming of nails at her workplace seem unbearably loud, and her shame compels her to
run away. The message is clear: rape merely exaggerates the oppressive sexism that underwrites her world.