No. 32  I  2021	A Publication of the Film Noir Foundation

Dana Delany on Gloria Grahame

LAVENDER NOIR

S.A. Cosby o n

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Noiroscopes I  The Reckless Moment  I  Max Steiner I  Seconds I  Noir at Home I  MORE!

The Film Noir Foundation is a non-profit public benefit corporation created as an educational resource regarding the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of film noir as an international cinematic movement. It is our mission to find and pre-serve films in danger of being lost or irreparably damaged, and to ensure that high-quality prints of these classic films remain in circulation for theatrical exhibition to future generations. Once these films are unearthed, restored, and returned to circula-

tion, the chances increase that the films will be made available on Blu-ray and/or via online streaming for future generations of film lovers to appreciate.

To date, the Film Noir Foundation has fully funded the restorations of The Prowler (1951), Cry Dan-ger (1951), Try and Get Me! (1951), Too Late for Tears (1949), Woman on the Run (1950), The Guilty (1947), Los tallos amargos (1956, Argentina), The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950), Trapped (1949),

La bestia debe morir (1952, Argentina), and El vampiro negro (1953, Argentina). The Foundation has initiated and partially underwritten the restoration of Repeat Performance (1947) and High Tide (1947), and financed 35mm preservations of Nobody Lives Forever (1946), Three Strangers (1946), High Wall

(1947), The Hunted (1948), The Window (1949), Southside 1-1000 (1950), Roadblock (1951), Down Three Dark Streets (1954), Loophole (1954), The Underworld Story (1950), and Cry Tough (1959), plus the Argentine films Apenas un delincuente (1949), No abras nunca esa puerta (1952), and Si muero antes de despertar (1952). Most recently, in partnership with UCLA Film & Television Archive, the FNF has completed restoration on The Argyle Secrets. This 1948 film by director Cy Endfield is the second End-field film undertaken by the FNF; the first being 1951’s Try and Get Me! restored in 2012 and premiered at NOIR CITY 11 in 2013. The FNF plans to premiere The Argyle Secrets restoration in 2022.

NOIR CITY, the annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival, began in January 2003. It grew into the largest film noir-specific yearly event in the United States, the centerpiece of the Film Noir Foundation’s public awareness campaign. Viewers have been drawn to San Francisco every January from all over the world, eager to submerge themselves in a ten-day extravaganza of rare films, special guests, music, literary tie-ins—a communal celebration of all things noir.

The Film Noir Foundation is pleased to announce the return of NOIR CITY: D.C. at the AFI Sil-ver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, October 15 - 28. This festival is the first NOIR CITY in-theatre event since the COVID-19 curtain dropped in March 2020. Details on NOIR CITY: D.C. 2021 to come!

Please consider supporting our mission with a donation to the  Film Noir Foundation.

NOIR CITY

ISSUE 32

Publisher

Eddie Muller

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Vince Keenan

MANAGING EDITOR

Steve Kronenberg

Art Director/DESIGNER

Michael Kronenberg

PROMOTIONAL director

Daryl Sparks

Contributors This issue

Nathalie Atkinson, Sean Axmaker, S.A. Cosby, Dana Delany, Randy Dot-inga, Nora Fiore, Paul A.J. Lewis, Christina Newland, Ben Terrall

Film Noir Foundation

Board of Directors

Foster Hirsch

Brian Hollins

Andrea Kasin

Dr. Joseph K. McLaughlin (1948–2014)

Anita Monga

Eddie Muller, President

Alan K. Rode

Advisory Council

Gwen Deglise

James Ellroy

Bruce Goldstein

Marsha Hunt

Vince Keenan

John Kirk

Dennis Lehane

Leonard Maltin

Rose McGowan

Jon Mysel

Fernando Martín Peña

Michael Schlesinger

Imogen Sara Smith

Todd Wiener

Communications Director

Anne Hockens

Social Media Coordinator

Danilo Castro

Website / E-services

Ted Whipple

 filmnoirfoundation.org

Follow us on  Facebook and  Twitter

Published quarterly by the

Film Noir Foundation

®
 NOIR CITY  e-magazine now  on Facebook!

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SPECIAL FEATURES

12. actor to actor

Dana Delany on Gloria Grahame

Dana Delany

32. lavender noir

How Hollywood Hid Gay Characters in Plain Sight

Randy Dotinga

42. noiroscopes

Portrayals of Astrology in Classic Crime Cinema and Film Noir

Nora Fiore

50. the good asian

Q&A with writer Pornsak Pichetshote

Nathalie Atkinson

56. suburban strife

The Domestic Drama of

The Reckless Moment

Christina Newland

60. The leper with the most fingers

The Art of “Ely Legerdemain”

Eddie Muller

REGULAR FEATURES

8. the third degree

Conversation with Velvet Was the Night author Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Vince Keenan

64. PRIME CUTS:

My Favorite Neo-Noir

Point Blank

S.A. Cosby

NOIR CITY®
THIS ISSUE

NO. 32  l     2021

12

32

42

50

66. noir or not

Seconds

Steve Kronenberg

70. BOOK VS. FILM

Tucker’s People/Force of Evil

Ben Terrall

74. under surveillance

Delusion

Paul A.J. Lewis

DEPARTMENTS

5. From the Desk of Eddie Muller

An introduction to the issue from the Czar of Noir

7. VINCE KEENAN’s

Cocktails & Crime

Three-dot journalism lives in Keenan’s corner of Noir City

76. Noir at Home

Reviews of new Blu-rays and DVDs:

Cast a Dark Shadow/Wanted for Murder; The Man in Search of His Murderer; Pickup on South Street; and Nightmare Alley

78. Book Reviews

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitch-cock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense; The Unquiet English-man: A Life of Graham Greene; Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna; Compet-
ing with Idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a Dual Portrait; Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life
of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer

*Clicking title jumps to article

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 TM & © 2021 Turner Classic Movies, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

Remembering Champions and Friends
Yoram Kahana was one of the Film Noir Foundation’s greatest allies. We first met at one of the earliest noir festivals at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. At the end of the evening Yoram approached me, the first time I’d see what would become a familiar visage: tangle of white hair, bemused smile, a lived-in outfit (complete with

photojournalist vest) suggesting a war correspondent in some humid, hostile outpost (nah, just Hollywood).
“You’ve really got something here,” he said, surveying the crowd. “You can do some-thing with this.” It was one of the sparks that led me to create a foundation to rescue and restore noir films. In due time, Yoram became the Foundation’s champion within the Hol-lywood Foreign Press Association, of which he’d been a member since 1963. He orchestrated our grant submissions and was bullheaded on our behalf, arguing that we deserved to have projects fully funded, as the HFPA did for the higher profile Film Foundation. It became evi-dent Yoram had as many detractors as he had allies, no doubt because, in addition to a keen photographer’s eye, he had a hypersensitive BS detector that would go wild around poseurs and hypocrites. But his taciturn armor guarded a warm and affectionate man. If he accepted you, the twinkle in his eye always shone.

Yoram was indefatigable in his support of the FNF because we truly are a non-profit; he

demanded HFPA officials scrutinize our bookkeeping, to see that all the money went to the films, not to overhead, bloated salaries, or questionable expenses. After we received a $25,000 grant from the HFPA’s Charitable Trust to help with the cost of restoring Woman on the Run, Yoram talked then–HFPA president Theo Kingma into providing another $40,000—meeting the full cost of the restora-tion. That was the first chapter in the partnership between the FNF and the HFPA, one that has withstood several changes at the top of the HFPA as well as polarizing political infighting. The one constant was Yoram’s unwavering commitment to our mission.

Although I knew him as a professional colleague for more than twenty years, Yoram revealed little about his extraordinary life. Most of it I learned from his family after his passing on June 15, 2021. Yoram was born in Tel Aviv on January 1, 1939, which, at that time, was still Palestine. He was taught to read at four years of age by his grandfather Abraham Kahana, a renowned biblical scholar. In high school, his girlfriend’s father owned a cinema, where Yoram learned English working the subtitling machine. He joined the Israeli army at sixteen, but his independent spirit earned him a stint in the brig, which in true Yoram fashion he turned into a vacation, reading James Joyce and penning letters for illiterate prisoners.

After studying archaeology for a year at the University of Jerusalem, he left his homeland, cadging newsman’s credentials and bluff-ing his way into the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair press corps. Later in New York, Yoram managed a year at Columbia before winter spurred a transfer to UCLA. There he met the love of his life, his partner and wife, Peggy. They married in 1962 when Yoram was twenty-three, and made award-winning educational films under the banner Kahana Film Productions. Both earned master’s degrees in film at UCLA, and Yoram also received a master’s degree in journalism.

Yoram chronicled the tumult of the 1960s as a photographer for the Los Angeles Free Press, documenting historical and cultural movements, music festivals, the Black Panther and anti-war movements, musicians, authors, artists, celebrities, and politicians. He became a leading lensman for Shooting Star, a major photo agency for celebrity photography.

He joined the HFPA in 1963 and held numerous positions on the board. He attended the Golden Globes annually, and until his final days he was committed to steering the association toward reform. “Mentorship was crucial to his being,” said his children, Tal and Paz. “He led by example, and was an advocate and lent support to photographers, journalists, and bright, eager minds. He championed the underdog, spoke for the silenced, and was a moral compass.”

I’m also saddened to report the passing of another colleague, Mark Fertig. Mark was one of the first and finest friends I made in the film noir community, and his passing is especially painful because he was much younger than me. He died, after a long illness, at only forty-eight. But he put the years to good use, being a much loved and respected professor of graphic design at Susquehanna University, and authoring three popular books: Film Noir 101: The 101 Best Film Noir Posters from the 1940s–1950s; Take That, Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War; and the soon-to-be-released Hang ’Em High: 110 Years of Western Movie Posters, 1911–2020. Given our mutual interests, Mark always seemed like the younger brother I never had. He is survived by a wonderful family, some of whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting: his wife Josie; daughters Madeleine and Berkeley; and sisters Holly Day and Amy Wojtaszek.

Rest in peace, comrades.

—Eddie Muller

filmnoirfoundation.org  I  NUMBER 32  I  NOIR CITY	5

 BLU-RAY AND DVD NOW AVAILABLE

CRITERION.COM

COCKTAILS AND CRIME

Vince Keenan

	and Jon Hamm as Hope’s grandparents and		
It’s  that  timefellow citiagain,-		
zens of the shadows. Time for enterprising	Griffin Dunne as Lang … Sticking with the		
Tinseltown types to try bringing Raymond	podcast beat, the latest entrant in the for-		
Chandler’s Philip Marlowe back to the big	mat is—James Ellroy?!? Yes, the novelist		
screen. Some tantalizing talent is involved	(and recipient of the FNF’s Modern Noir		
in this latest go-round, with Liam Nee-	Master award) steps up to the mic for Hol-		
son as Marlowe, Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa)	lywood Death Trip, debuting soon. Ellroy		
behind the camera, and William Monahan	will narrate this five-part adaptation of his		
(The Departed) penning the script. The	true crime reporting. Cases covered include		
catch: it’s not really Chandler’s Marlowe.	the murders of actor Sal Mineo and Ellroy’s		
Monahan  is  adapting  The  Black-Eyed	own mother, a tale the author told in his		
Blonde, written by novelist John Banville	memorable memoir My Dark Places. The		
under his crime fiction nom de plume Ben-	author promises a fully immersive experi-		
jamin Black. Your humble correspondent	ence complete with period music, archival		
read the book when it appeared in 2014,	radio, and elaborate sound design.		
and I confess I can’t recall much about it …			
Speaking of such lapses, I still haven’t for-			
gotten Memory, which may well be Don-			
ald E. Westlake’s masterpiece. The novel,			
about  a  vagabond  actor  stricken  with			
amnesia after he’s attacked by his one-night	SpeakingofEllroy,thebest tele-		
stand’s husband, was written in the 1960s			
and published posthumously in 2010. Ryan	vision yours truly has caught of late was		
Gosling is set to star in the film version, to	a rare June screening of the 2018 pilot of		
be called The Actor. Duke Johnson will	L.A. Confidential at the online ATX TV		
cowrite and direct, with Johnson’s Anom-	Festival.  I’d  heard  whispers  about  this		
alisa codirector, Academy Award–winning	show, scripted by Jordan Harper and star-		
scribe Charlie Kaufman, on board as execu-	ring Walton Goggins as Jack Vincennes		
tive producer.	and Shea Whigham as Dick Stensland, and		
	it exceeded every expectation. CBS erred		
	mightily when it didn’t pick up the series		
	… Another noir film of note received better		
	news about its small-screen spinoff. Show-		
	time gave a full-season order to American		
	Gigolo, a reimagining of Paul Schrader’s		
OneofHollywood’smostscan-	1980 movie from Ray Donovan producer		
	David Hollander. Jon Bernthal, familiar		
dalous crimes is a sordid story right out	to noir fans from movies like Wind River,		
of film noir, featuring some of noir’s great-	takes over for Richard Gere as male escort		
est practitioners. Producer Walter Wanger,	Julian, newly sprung from prison after serv-		
convinced his wife Joan Bennett was hav-	ing a fifteen-year sentence for murder and		
ing an affair, shot the suspected lothario,	returning to the Los Angeles sex industry		
agent Jennings Lang—with Bennett the one	… An array of artists illustrated Slow City		
whose career suffered. Expect an excava-	Blues, writer Samuel Haine’s noirish comic		
tion of these events in the ten-episode pod-	about a cop who, in the aftermath of an		
cast Love Is a Crime, which began August	accident, becomes trapped in the cityscape		
17 from Vanity Fair, Karina Longworth of	of his own mind and must battle his sub-		
the acclaimed You Must Remember This,	conscious in order to escape. The full five-		
and filmmaker Vanessa Hope, granddaugh-	issue run was made available in June via the		
ter of Wanger and Bennett. The production	comics crowdfunding platform Zoop.		
boasts a starry cast, with Zooey Deschanel			

Takeit from UncleLo—Alonzo Emmerich, that is, played by Louis Calhern in The Asphalt Jungle: “Crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.” Surely this profound southpaw-centric sentiment warrants a cocktail of its own.

The Left Hand isn’t named for John Hus-ton’s heist classic, but it does owe its moniker to a more contemporary crime drama. It was christened in honor of Al Pacino’s Lefty, the mafia lifer who unwittingly lets an undercover FBI agent into his crime family in Donnie Brasco. The drink is the brainchild of Sam Ross, who belongs in the pantheon of mod-ern bartenders thanks to his other notable creations, the Penicillin and the Paper Plane. It’s often described as the blessed union of the Negroni and the Manhattan, though I prefer to think of it as a twistless twist on the Bou-levardier. A chicken-and-egg bit of inspira-tion must surely be the Right Hand, devised around the same time by Michael McIlroy, then Ross’s colleague at the storied New York bar Milk & Honey. It’s essentially the same cocktail made with aged rum.

My personal preference is to make the drink with Cocchi Vermouth di Torino. Its notes of cocoa are heightened by the choco-late bitters, giving the drink an extraordi-nary texture. However you prepare it, you’ll want to drink this one with both hands.

The Left Hand by Sam Ross

1 ½ oz. bourbon

¾ 	oz. sweet vermouth 

¾ 	oz. Campari 

2 dashes chocolate bitters

Stir. Stain. Garnish with a cherry.

’Til next time, raise your glasses and lower your hopes. Here’s to crime.

filmnoirfoundation.org  I  NUMBER 32  I  NOIR CITY	7

THE THIRD DEGREE  sIlvia moreno-garcia

NOIR CITY: Your new novel Velvet Was the Night is set in Mexico in the 1970s. How do you introduce readers unfamiliar with the Dirty War to the politics of the situation? SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA: This year in June was the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre that opens the book. And nobody has ever been brought to justice, or ever will be brought to justice, I’m pretty sure. One of the problems is that when it comes to cultural context, most people around the world have a context for the United States, but the reverse is not true. Many people in the United States have no idea what was happening elsewhere during this time period—or any other time period—so it becomes harder to introduce them to that kind of environment. In fantasy and science fiction, the term is world-building. There are times where you’re not going to understand everything completely, but you’re given enough pointers so that you can navigate. I believe in giving people enough pointers so they can navi-gate, and I depend on their good will to accept that they will not know everything. That requires a bit of humility on the part of readers when we go into a different culture, a different time period. Some of the rejections that we got from editors said nobody would ever read this book because it was set in Mexico and people wouldn’t care about anything set there. That reflects a closed-mindedness on the part of the industry that I hope is not reflective of readers. I believe that readers are smarter than that, that we just don’t give them chances to explore other possibilities, and that is why they have a difficult time with it.

NC: What do you want readers to understand about Mexico, then and now? SMG: Mexico is an area that is in constant conflict. All of Latin America is. People sometimes wonder nowadays why folks from Central America are crossing Mexico to get into the United States, and some people seem to think they did it because they wanted to go for a hike. The reality is that they are escaping a land that has been decimated by a conflict that began in the 1960s and ’70s, when the United States intervened in other nations to help depose legitimate democratic rulers and replace them with rulers that were conveniently aligned with their politics—and then left the area, creating this kind of mess. I wanted to show the threads that are pulling the pup-pets in the background in a more subtle way. The United States and the Soviet Union are enacting a battle on a global scale, and Mexico is one of the theaters where they are affecting the world. It’s their battle, and we’re the secondary players. But we’re zooming in on those secondary players. I wanted to tell a story that was slightly more underground, in Mexico, from the point of view of Mexican characters.

NC: Your protagonist, Maite, isn’t a conventional noir character. Basically, she just wants her neighbor to pick up the cat she agreed to watch for her. How did Maite find her way into a noir novel?

SMG: It’s about deconstructing noir. I love noir, I love all genres. You have the expectation of a femme fatale in noir fiction, right? A beautiful woman who’s a female Byronic hero—mad, bad, and dangerous to know—and she’s going to drag you to your doom. There’s also the good woman in noir, the woman who’s going to save you. Maite is neither. She’s just this dumpy little secretary who has these wild fantasies and is in the middle of a noir novel. I like mundanity, I like mundane characters. I don’t necessarily like heroic characters who know all the answers and are quick with a gun. People imagine that they would be heroic given the right cir-cumstances, and it turns out that’s not true most of the time.

NC: Many of Maite’s fantasies come out of her love of romance comic books, which is beautifully woven into the story.

8	NOIR CITY  I  NUMBER 32  I  filmnoirfoundation.org

Ninón Sevilla, the musical star whose rumberas films often shaded over into noir
SMG: Mexican comics are like long soap operas. It’s like watching a new episode every week. They’re also a lot more escapist. They don’t engage with the current politi-cal landscape at all. In the world of Mexican romance comic books there’s no women’s lib, there’s no Cold War. In the American ones of the period there are some of these elements. You might have a young woman who’s worried whether should she finish her last year of college or get married, or maybe she has hippie friends and they’re a bad influence. The Mexican ones are like a neutralizing bubble. Nothing enters it. You’re escaping to a parallel reality. That’s what I wanted to reflect with Maite and her love of comic books. It’s not just reading a romantic story. She really is stepping into a completely different world. It’s like going to Mars. That’s the kind of person that she is. And then she’s suddenly being smashed into reality against her will.

NC: Music is also a huge part of the story. Can you talk about its political significance?
SMG: The clashes that you’re seeing culturally and gen-erationally on the streets of Mexico are also happening

on the music scene. You have a lot of questions about autonomy. “That music is a foreign invasion. That music is trying to destroy our culture.” Initially, radio play was limited to covers of songs. But people become curious about this music, and start making their own songs. Bands form that are not just copies of American bands. This becomes extremely dangerous for the Mexican government. They go on to enact the suppression of rock music in the 1970s. Live concerts are not allowed. They’ve been outlawed. Any kind of original rock production has to go underground. It’s almost a lost decade of music.

NC: You built a playlist for the book. Did you have a favorite discovery?
SMG: There was a band I was not familiar with. I think my father, who was a very big music fan, mentioned them. They were called Los Dug Dug’s, and they have a very weird sound. They’re from the part of the world that I’m from, northern Mexico. They were one of the bands who sang in English. They started in Mexico, then went to New York to do songs that are more experimental. They deserve a whole documentary of their own. I don’t know if Los Dug Dug’s are still playing, but they haven’t made a studio album since the 1970s.

NC: In the acknowledgments you thank Rafael Bernal, author of the 1969 novel The Mongolian Conspiracy, and the other writers of old noirs. How would you characterize Mexican noir fiction?

SMG: Noir in the United States was pulp, produced in an easily dis-posable format in its heyday. Comic books are the disposable pulp format in Mexico, but they’re not noir. Mexican noir does exist in film, but in the printed form it really has no real shape. When the 1960s roll in, you start to see Latin American writers who want to take American noir and do something different with it. This feeling ramps up in the 1970s, and that’s when you get writers like Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and Bernal, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, a Spanish writer from Catalonia who wrote a long series of noirish police novels and was a proponent of crime novels in Spanish. There are books that I consider proto-noirs, but in parts of Latin America you don’t see this movement happening until the 1970s.

NC: Any Mexican noir films that you’re a big fan of?

SMG: I’m a big fan of what I call the musical noirs. Ninón Sevilla is one of the people who made those. It’s a very weird subgenre that evolved because the protagonist works in some kind of dance show or cabaret, so there are these musical numbers interspersed with the action. You’ve got a very serious scene about a plan to rob a bank, then we pause for a musical number onstage with the mobster’s girlfriend. I love this subgenre because it’s just so odd. I think the most noirish movie that Ninón Sevilla made was called Sensualidad, which translates as Sensuality. It’s a 1951 film directed by Alberto Gout, who directed her several times. This is my favorite Ninón Sevilla film. She works at an entertainment establishment, so we get to see her dance and hear her sing. She’s a femme fatale who was sentenced to prison for two years for her part in a robbery, because she was the mobster’s girlfriend. Now she’s out, and she has vowed revenge against the judge who sent her to prison. She basically makes him fall in love with her in order to destroy him, and from there we go on. One of the downsides of noir in that time period is that you have to punish people by the last reel, so that does happen. But it’s just this great character. She’s bad and she knows it and she dances, and I’ve always loved this movie. I accepted these movies completely when I was a child. It wasn’t until later when I saw American noirs that I asked, “Where are the musical numbers?”

NC: Why was noir the right genre for telling this story?

SMG: I think Mexico’s story is one long noir, and we’re just getting different chapters of it. If you had to define a country by a genre, we think of the Western as the one that defines the United States. Maybe Britain is a costume drama, like Downton Abbey. If Mexico had to represent itself at a film festival, it should go as noir. It should go in a trench coat. It’s noir country over there.

Velvet Was the Night was published by Del Rey Books in August 2021. This interview has been edited and condensed.

—Vince Keenan

filmnoirfoundation.org  I  NUMBER 32  I  NOIR CITY	9

 The Mysteries of Roy Huggins and  the Deportation of Harry Carlisle

 Novelist/screenwriter Roy Huggins named eighteen colleagues to HUAC when subpoenaed in 1952.

 The Mysteries of Roy Huggins and the Deportation of Harry Carlisle explores the creative output  of Huggins and the eighteen members of the Hollywood Communist Party before and after being  labeled by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and also uncovers Huggins’ involvement  as a witness in the INS deportation hearings of writer Harry Carlisle, a British immigrant who was  exactly what Huggins and those he named were not – an agent of the U.S.S.R.

 Available on Amazon

™

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GloriaDanaDelanyonGrahameg

Gloria Grahame has been my muse since I was seventeen. As a child growing up in the 1960s, I would race home from school every day to watch The 4:30 Movie. My father was a film buff, and I was a daddy’s girl. But the leading ladies never interested me. It was the secondary roles, the B-girls, that fascinated, like Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain or Doro-thy Malone in Written on the Wind. During my senior year, a teacher screened In a Lonely Place and that was it. Gloria Grahame became my inspiration as an actor—and occasionally my warning as a woman.

Her Hollywood career spanned a mere fifteen years, from 1944 to 1959. In 1952, Fran-çois Truffaut said, “It seems that of all the American film stars, Gloria Grahame is the only one who is also a person.” She has gone from fame to infamy to obscurity and back again. Having now acted professionally for over four decades, I have some perspective on the why of Gloria Grahame.

Postwar women were expected to conform to the American dream: love your ex-GI hus-band, buy a house in the suburbs, raise 2.5 perfect children. But like the girdles they wore, one size did not fit all. Women felt constricted. That was my mother’s life, and I did not want

to repeat it. Being the “wife” was limiting, both sexually and creatively. I wanted to be the broad, the dame who lived life to the fullest, maybe even tragically. Gloria Grahame was all of that. She was made for noir, where B-girls were the leads. She didn’t conform to the faux feminine ideal. She was a sashaying contradiction.

What made Gloria perplexing as a person made her magnetic as an actor. She had a lively curiosity—a mixture of innocence and her own internal disquiet. Always wanting to improve, to learn, be better, be loved. The eternal seeker.

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ley Clements in 1945, without her mother’s approval or knowledge. Merton of the Movies (1947), starring Red Skelton, is rarely funny. But Gloria is hilarious, honing her quicksilver turns of smart/ dumb and sexy/aloof. As silent film star Beulah Baxter, she looks gorgeous in gowns by Irene and Helen Rose and Sydney Guilaroff’s period hairdos. Her beautiful dimples, which mysteriously disap-pear in later films, are prominently featured. When Beulah, dressed like a queen, makes her grand entrance to the pirate ship set, Skelton says, “She didn’t talk . . . she didn’t have to.” Then Beulah squeaks:

“Do I really have to sit in a bird’s nest?” “Crow’s nest, darling.”
“Well, if there’s crows in it, I’m coming right down.”

Gloria speaks in her natural voice, at that time high and girl-ish. It’s hard to imagine Jean Hagen wasn’t imitating her as Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain. The two were often up for the same roles and competed for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1952. (Gloria won.)

A second loan-out to RKO changed her life. Crossfire (1947), directed by Edward Dmytryk, is where she first earns her noir cred, but also where she develops a more sophisticated style of film act-ing. Gloria has been quoted as saying she never relied on directors, at times pointedly ignoring them. Her mother, Jean Hallward, was a

“Decorative, isn’t she?”: Gloria, here opposite Marshall Thompson, made her film debut in Blonde Fever

Her prime years can be divided into every actress’s Hollywood trinity: ingenue, leading lady, character actor. What’s remarkable is that she made the full journey between the ages of twenty and thirty-five.

Having already been on Broadway, Gloria made her first film, Blonde Fever (1944), under contract to MGM. And what a debut. She plays Sally Murfin, who hands out rolls at Café Donay, where rich ladies go after a Reno divorce. Gloria looks like a blonde Kew-pie doll in a tiny striped uniform with matching toque, prompting Mary Astor—at thirty-seven, already relegated to playing the belea-guered matron—to dryly observe, “Decorative, isn’t she?”

Gloria gives an incredibly self-assured performance for a twenty-year-old. Her stage training is evident in how she handles the quick dialogue (the script is based on a Ferenc Molnár play). She knows the power of her youthful appeal, and works men into a tizzy with her pinball feminine logic: “Is it my fault that men have to be so silly?” Whether through tears or kisses, she will get what she wants. Gloria’s gift for comedy cannot be underestimated. She knows where the joke is, but tosses it off lightly. Already she is playing opposites—her Sally is an innocent with a gimlet eye—an approach that in her later work keeps the other actors, and the audience, on their toes. Even in a comedy, she is deliciously dangerous.

While MGM tried to figure out what to do with her, Gloria made five movies between 1945 and 1947. Much has been written about her performance as Violet Bick in RKO’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), another “good-time girl” who could possibly go bad. Here’s where we first see Gloria’s refusal to play sentimental. She never feels sorry for herself and is always searching for the next good thing. She thought she found it when she married actor Stan-

Gloria brings a touch of noir to Bedford Falls as Violet Bick, the good-time girl who could possibly go bad, alongside James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life

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 Gloria’s “Ginny, from Virginia” is the  only hope for a serviceman played  by George Cooper in Crossfire

respected acting coach who had tutored her daughter from a young age and consulted with her throughout her life. Sadly, Jean outlived her daughter. So did her father, Michael Hallward—a charming and sensitive man whose absence, following her parents’ divorce, came to define Gloria’s lifelong need for male approbation. Gloria seemed to trust only her mother, while also resenting their code-pendent relationship. An instinctual actor, Gloria had firm ideas about how she saw her characters. But she gave credit to Bill Watts,

	“Gloria Grahame was made for noir, where B-girls were 

	the leads. She didn’t 

conform to the faux feminine ideal. She was a sashaying contradiction.

dialogue director on Crossfire, who “first made me realize how to play movies. It’s thinking. . . . All he did was talk to me about who the character was, where she was, what she was, until I was so immersed in what she was all about. After that, maybe I just did it for myself.” She is describing what the newly opened Actors Studio began teaching in New York in 1947. Gloria just did it naturally.

She spent two days playing “Ginny, from Virginia” and was nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar at age twenty-four. We

Crossfire netted Gloria her first Academy Award nomination at the age of twenty-four

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first see her in soft focus, bathed in a halo of golden light, heralded by a trumpet. She dances, dizzyingly, between tough and vulnerable, wanting to believe the corny GI who wanders into her dancehall. In a scene with his fretting wife, she lashes out: “Where were you when he needed you?” Then she drops her defenses for one beauti-ful moment of truth—“I liked him. I felt sorry for him.” —before dark clouds cover the sun again. It’s the first time we see an inner life to her acting. She may have been cast because of Violet Bick, but all affected cuteness is gone. In two scenes, we see a lifetime.

Roughshod (1949) deserves more attention. It’s a Western noir save for the tacked-on happy ending, one of the few in Gloria’s career. Directed by Mark Robson from a story by Peter Viertel and script cowritten by Daniel Mainwaring (Out of the Past), it tells of the journey through the Sonoma Pass of wrangler Clay Phillips (Robert Sterling) and four dance-hall girls. Kicked out of Aspen, the girls are heading west. Roughshod is most interesting when viewed through their eyes. They have few choices in life and grab what they can. Mar-tha Hyer leaves the group to get married even though Gloria flatly declares, “It never works.” The envy and loneliness in her eyes, how-ever, belie that statement. An ailing Jeff Donnell (who would become one of Gloria’s few female friends), cast off from home, returns to her parents; we’re not sure if she has had an abortion or syphilis, but it’s not good. The darkest turn comes for Myrna Dell, who finds hap-piness only to have it brutally extinguished. John Ireland plays her angel of death, the black and silver close-up of them so stunningly

The Western Roughshod deserves to be better known, thanks in part to cinematographer Joseph Biroc and the presence of some old noir hands behind the scenes

beautiful that the connection between sex and death is disturbingly erotic.
Then there’s Gloria, giving another cunning performance. Robson had sent her mother pack-ing from the Sierra Nevada location once he real-ized that she was coaching Gloria. Probably for the best, because her performance is pure carnal-ity. There is a shot of her basking under a tree in the sun, where Gloria seems part of the natural elements—Eve tempting Adam with either eter-nally innocent pleasure or permanent doom. It’s the most openly romantic we will ever see her. However, once rejected she quickly snaps back to reality: “Alright, you don’t love me.”

There would be many more scenes like this in her career—photographed on her back, wait-ing for pleasure, for fulfillment, to get a rise out of a man. One can picture her having that con-versation with the director: “Maybe I should be lying down?” But this scene in the grass was the beginning, and masterful cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc knew how to present her as every man’s fate.

Gloria’s own fate was sealed when she was directed by Nicholas Ray. Their relationship would bring her the work she always desired, along with great personal turmoil. Both now signed with RKO, the pair met on A Woman’s Secret (1949), written and produced by Herman

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The cigarette shared by Gloria and Nicholas Ray on the set of In a Lonely Place may be lit, but their marriage was down to the embers

“Many have speculated that In a Lonely Place is

about the end of the Rays’ marriage ... The irony of

In a Lonely Place, a movie about mistrust, is that Ray and Gloria clearly trusted each

other on set.

Mankiewicz. This convoluted tale allows Gloria to show off her full range, from cute and funny wisecracker to femme fatale harboring a secret, with hairstyle changes to match. Her deadpan wit comes through, saying proudly that she hails from “Azusa, everything from A to Z, USA.” There is something off-kilter about her, and you can understand why Ray was entranced. Costar Maureen O’Hara looks like she wishes she were in another picture because Gloria, ricocheting between humor and deceit, steals every one of her scenes.

On June 1, 1948, after a six-week residency in Las Vegas, Gloria obtained a divorce from Stanley Clements and married Nick Ray that evening. He had to be dragged from the craps tables, where he quickly returned after the ceremony to lose the rest of his money. Gloria was already five months pregnant; when Timothy Ray was born, the RKO press office went into overdrive to explain the “pre-mature” birth.

“ . . . That my husband shall be entitled to direct, con-trol, advise, instruct, and even command my actions dur-ing the hours from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., every day except Sunday, during the filming of In a Lonely Place, a San-tana production for Columbia Pictures in which I costar with Mr. Humphrey Bogart.” Yep. Even though she called it “slave labor,” Gloria agreed to her In a Lonely Place (1950) contract terms and “to acknowledge that in every conceivable situation [Ray’s] will and judgment shall be considered superior to mine and shall prevail.” She was forbidden to “nag, cajole, tease or in any other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him.” It became known as the “Mr. and Mrs.” contract and was shame-lessly released as a publicity stunt.

Perhaps producer Robert Lord was worried about a

Strange bedfellows: Nicholas Ray directs Humphrey Bogart as a man falling hard for Gloria, the woman Ray himself would soon divorce

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“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” Dix and Laurel both find themselves In a Lonely Place

It’s Bogart who has the mood swings opposite Gloria as In a Lonely Place’s Dix Steele

married couple working together. Perhaps Bogart was unhappy that his wife, Lauren Bacall (whom Jack Warner refused to loan out because Bogart had left the studio), was not playing the role of Laurel Gray. The fact is Nick Ray thought his wife was right for the part, and the result is one of the best, if most un-Gloria-like, perfor-mances of her career.

Many have speculated that In a Lonely Place is about the end of the Rays’ marriage; Ray rewrote much of the script himself, deviat-ing from Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel. But the film is also a dark valentine to Hollywood. Yes, it’s full of cynicism about the hierarchy of power, the fragility of talent, the ups and downs of fame. But it’s ultimately quite fond of the Tinseltown ecosystem: the loyal agent, the fallen actor, the club owner who always has a booth ready and your eggs cooked just the way you like them.

For me, In a Lonely Place is closest to Greek drama. Perhaps that’s what Ray saw in himself. A volatile, paranoid man with addictive demons, he could also be tender and emotional. However, like Dix Steele, he could not escape his innate character. If the film is about their marriage, it’s oddly self-blaming. In life, Gloria could give as good as she got, but here she seems to be playing the woman Ray wishes she were: “A good guy.”

Her initial entrance into the courtyard of the Beverly Patio Apartments is underscored by George Antheil’s theme for Laurel. She’s dressed simply. Her hair is short and tight, her makeup mini-mal. Yet she glides like a puma. It is her restraint that makes her sexually intriguing. When she finally speaks, her voice is lower than

ever before. There’s no gilding in this performance. She listens and watches with a gleam in her eye. She’s straightforward: “I noticed him because he looked interesting. I liked his face.”

In every previous role, Gloria is actively pursuing something. Here, she reacts. “I said I liked it. I didn’t say I wanted to kiss it.” It’s the softest and warmest she’s ever been. She’s not playing opposites as she usually does. Instead, it’s Bogart who has the mood swings.

Ray noted “No fluff, please” in his script in reference to Gloria’s wardrobe. It is the only film where her body is modestly covered head-to-toe, except when she sleeps in the nude. Ray was making a point about where Laurel was most vulnerable, except that was eclipsed by the controversy it caused.

Like the unities of Greek drama, there is a single action that must be followed: Is Dix guilty? And if so, of what? There is nothing extraneous in In a Lonely Place. It is the work of a director with a vision, who knew Gloria so well he stripped away her youthful tics and affects, unveiling her first leading-lady performance. The alchemy between director and actor is mysterious, fragile, rare. Par-ticularly for someone like Gloria, who was such a literal thinker. One piece of confusing direction and it’s hard to regain your natural instincts; you get stuck in your head and all the juice is gone. But Ray was known as the “actor whisperer,” and she listened.

The irony of In a Lonely Place, a movie about mistrust, is that Ray and Gloria clearly trusted each other on set. However, in reality Ray had moved out of their home on Sunset Boulevard and was sleeping in a dressing room on the Columbia sound stage. Neither he nor Glo-

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Making something from nothing: Gloria felt she had an insignificant role in Macao, opposite Robert Mitchum, and audiences agreed with her

ria let on until filming was over. After a five-month separation, the troubled couple reconciled and Gloria and Tim joined Ray in Malibu.
Gloria was next assigned a woefully underwritten supporting part in Macao (1952) with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. She knew that once In a Lonely Place was released, she’d be offered better roles. Sure enough, George Stevens personally called to offer her A Place in the Sun. But Howard Hughes would not release her from her RKO contract, and the plum role of Alice Tripp went to Shelley Winters. Although A Place in the Sun is almost perfect, I wish Gloria had played the part. The choice that George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) has to make between Alice and Angela (Eliza-beth Taylor) would have been much different. Gloria would have been more of an enticement, making it clearer that George had selected Angela because of money and class, not attraction. Plus, I think Gloria would have worked well with Stevens.

Almost as punishment, RKO gave Gloria fifth billing in Macao. She later claimed she tried to act as badly as possible in it. But she doesn’t. She can’t. As Margie, croupier at the Quick Reward Club, the boredom she projects works for her. But then Mitchum and Rus-sell are also acting like they couldn’t care less. In contrast to Jane’s flashily clad hourglass figure, Gloria is dressed in tasteful black and white or a bejeweled shrug. She blows on the dice without playing the overt sex card. She’s a “sphinx,” and everything she does is tossed off, as if she’d learned from Nicholas Ray—“Do less.”

Months later, when Macao was tested in Pasadena, audiences said the film made little sense and Gloria deserved a better part. RKO brought in Nicholas Ray to replace Josef von Sternberg and shoot additional scenes. Ray would not direct Gloria.

In their year of reconciliation, Ray appeared to prefer drinking, drugs, and gambling to being with his young wife. That didn’t stop him, however, from hiring a private investigator to follow her. Like

Dix Steele, Ray seemed compelled to manifest his paranoia. The hearsay is that during this time, an intimate relationship developed between Gloria and her stepson, Anthony Ray. Nick Ray then vindic-tively forced his son to record everything that occurred so he wouldn’t have to pay alimony. There are many different versions of this story; we will never know the truth of what happened because none of the three people involved have ever spoken publicly about it. The fact remains that Tony was thirteen years old to Gloria’s twenty-seven. The repercussions would follow her the rest of her life.

Ten days before the reshoots on Macao began, Ray and Glo-ria separated. Her scenes were directed by Mel Ferrer. When they divorced a year later, Gloria asked for no alimony.
	“Almost as punishment, RKO gave Gloria fifth billing in Macao. She 

later claimed she tried to act as badly as possible in it. But she doesn’t. She can’t.

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Jack Palance finds it difficult to walk out on Gloria in Sudden Fear

Newly released from her marriage, Gloria made eight films between 1952 and 1953, several considered classics. Sudden Fear (1952) was a discovery for me, meta-Gloria in a sweet noir pack-age. Joan Crawford not only stars in the picture, she produced it. Her furs, gowns, jewels, hats, lingerie, and hostess gowns—not to be confused with the other gowns—get a full title card. Meanwhile, Gloria’s wardrobe was bought off-the-rack and intentionally toned down so as not to compete with Joan’s. Gloria’s mother was in San Francisco during filming and knew all about veterans’ tricks to sabotage a younger actress. She needn’t have worried; Gloria looks more real and youthful in her full skirts and wide-brimmed hats.

As much as Joan emotes, Gloria’s character, Irene Neves, drives the film. She is not only blackmailing Jack Palance’s Lester, she designs the plan that will net them Joan’s money. And she’s having a ball doing it, while torturing Joan at the same time.

In the scene that sets the murder plot in motion, Lester confronts Irene about why she’s in town. “An old friend of mine married a San Francisco girl,” she says casually, knowing she’ll get a rise out of him. When he shoves her down into the couch, Gloria allows a tiny smile as he starts to exit. “Thanks, thanks a lot,” she says. “Thanks for what?” Gloria is once more on her back, lighting a cigarette as she purrs, “For still loving me.” Her knee sways, a suggestion that her entire body is throbbing with sinister plans. Palance is no longer exiting.

In Sudden Fear, Gloria is full-on sexuality, and she plants the seeds of future roles. It’s the first time she adopted a fancy mid-Atlantic tone, dropping her Rs as in “Lestah, I have a gun.” To which Palance replies, “I’m so crazy about you I could break your bones.” So romantic! Gloria got on well with director David Miller, but was banned from the set during Joan’s scenes. Perhaps it was because Gloria slept with Jack Palance first. Or maybe she just liked taking the piss out of Joan.

When Gloria won the Academy Award for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), directed by Vincente Minnelli, it was at the time the shortest onscreen performance (nine minutes, thirty-two sec-onds) to take home a Supporting Actress Oscar. As southern belle Rosemary Bartlow, her running gag line is “James Lee, you have a very naughty mind . . . I’m happy to say.” Despite the Oscar, it’s not my favorite Gloria Grahame performance. Her manipulation of her husband (Dick Powell) is meant to be charming in its transparency; we are supposed to find her as endearing as he does, because we see her acting. In fact, MGM production head Dore Schary insisted that Gloria play Rosemary, who was based on his adorable wife. But by this point Gloria was capable of more subtlety. Because of the award, she was cast in similar roles a few more times, and not to great effect. In later years, she told Edward Dmytryk she thought she really won the Oscar for Crossfire.

The Glass Wall (1953), set mostly in Times Square, is reminis-cent of Crossfire, a socially conscious thriller about immigration rather than anti-Semitism. It’s directed by Maxwell Shane, but more importantly the cinematographer is once again Joe Biroc, who could work in any style. (I was lucky to work with him on one of my first TV movies, when he was eighty-three.) Here he shoots in a black-and-white neorealist style equal to any Rossellini movie. It’s one of my favorite Gloria performances, because it’s like no other.

Gloria’s brief role in The Bad and the Beautiful led to an Academy Award and an even briefer acceptance speech: “Thank you very much”

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There is nothing charming or witty about Gloria’s performance in The Glass Wall, in which she stars with Vittorio Gassman; the result is some of her finest work

We meet Gloria at an all-night café where she’s filching hot water and eating someone’s leftover donut. Then she swipes a coat and gets chased by cops into Central Park. Vittorio Gassman, a refugee who has jumped ship, helps her escape. Nocturnal New York, set to a bebop jazz score, is the tawdry glamour queen here, not Gloria. She is stripped down to a black sweater and wrinkled skirt. Her hair and makeup are simple—and she is beautiful, her jaded cat eyes glinting in the light.

Her best moment comes when she steals from kids busking on the sidewalk, planting her worn-out shoe on a couple of their dimes. When the kids call her a crook, she coolly tells them to “Hit the road.” Gassman can’t believe she would take money from children. “Look, you want to stay alive, or don’t you?”

There is nothing charming or witty about this performance. She doesn’t smile, doesn’t lower her guard, is constantly plotting her next move. Gassman tells her, “You’re not so hard as you appear.” Gloria rarely shows vulnerability in her acting, except through deflection. One gets the sense it was something she was uncom-fortable with in life as well, as if it was anathema to her Scottish heritage. Never sentimental, instead leading with anger or sexuality. But when Gassman gives Gloria his last seven dollars and half an orange, she is so taken aback by his kindness, she doesn’t muster her usual tough-girl reaction. The hug they share isn’t about sex. It’s pure humanity.

This was the first time Gloria had trouble with a director, almost walking off the movie. Also, Shelley Winters had wanted the part in order to work with Gassman, then her husband. But Gloria, fresh off an Oscar, got the role. When an actor starts receiving awards, they feel the pressure to live up to new expectations. Gloria had already begun to change her looks during A Woman’s Secret. Nick Ray claimed it was his idea to stuff cotton under Gloria’s upper lip

to plump up her pout. I’m happy to give him the dubious credit. Unfortunately, it led to Gloria thinking she could always look bet-ter. She continued with constant fixes—often to fix the previous fix. I don’t know any actress who hasn’t internalized that scrutiny and judgment. In Gloria’s case, as happens tragically often, what made her uniquely beautiful soon got lost.

After The Bad and the Beautiful, Gloria found her true calling in character parts. Signing a new contract with Fox, she went to Germany for Man on a Tightrope (1953), directed by Elia Kazan right after his HUAC testimony and before On the Waterfront. It’s inspired by the true story of the Circus Brumbach, which escaped from Communist East Germany. It seems Kazan was making a point.

“Nocturnal New York, set to a bebop jazz score, is the tawdry glamour

queen here, not Gloria ... Her hair and makeup are simple—and she is beautiful, her jaded cat eyes glinting in the light.

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Blowsy Gloria in full effect: reveling in her character’s outsider status, Gloria gives a physical, richly idiosyncratic performance in Man on a Tightrope

Man on a Tightrope boasts palpable chemistry between Gloria and Fredric March

The film is a wonderful revelation. Kazan knew how to support what was unique in an actor, so he allows Gloria to revel in her outsider status. I love blowsy Gloria and she goes for the full effect here—chewing gum, spitting out tobacco, lounging in her kimono. Lolling on her back (did she suggest it?), she writes her name, Zama, on the caravan wall with chalk between her toes and listens to a contraband radio while everyone else works. She is “excess baggage” and “not of the circus”—but Fredric March thinks she has the most beautiful feet in the world. He adores her.

The chemistry between March and Gloria is palpable. When she lays into him (“Why don’t you stand up to them like a man?”) March calmly listens, then SLAPS her. When he asks if she knows why he did it—the look on her face! Surprise and love, but mostly lust. “You should have done it a long time ago,” she purrs, kissing his hand like a feral cat licking a paw. March’s expression shifts from horror to lust to happiness to fear. What have I created? Who have I married? He pulls his hand away and Kazan moves in on a soft-focus close-up of Gloria’s face. She has unleashed the animal in March. Woman as destroyer, the goddess Kali.

The moment that follows is equal to Brando’s glove scene in On the Waterfront in its idiosyncrasy. With post-sex bedhead and dressed in a sailor blouse looking like a demented Mary Pickford, Gloria begins kissing March’s hand again. We only see her eyes. “Karel, when do we go?” she asks, as if escaping is the hottest thing he’s ever done. She jumps up to get ready, only to realize she’s told a dangerous lie. She then wraps her blouse around her head in agony, obscuring her face while she admits the truth. It’s weird and wonderful and human. And not like anything you would see from another actress of her time.

When she worked with directors who knew not to squash her instincts, the result was magic. Nicholas Ray (who was mentored by Kazan) tapped into Gloria’s attraction to troubled men. Kazan

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Working with her greatest taskmaster, director Fritz Lang, led to the most glorious Gloria role of her career: as Debby Marsh alongside Glenn Ford in The Big Heat

saw her need for sexual affirmation. These elements would come together when she worked for her greatest taskmaster, Fritz Lang, in the most glorious Gloria role of her career.

The hallmark of her performance as Debby Marsh in The Big Heat (1953) is a restless physicality. Even though we first see her (yes) lying on a sofa, she quickly scrambles over the back of it. She jangles, shimmies, and bops to her own personal rhumba beat. She says she’s bored, but Gloria is never bored. She is always searching, playing, testing—and she drove Lang crazy. She never stuck to her marks or played a scene the same way twice. She figured that’s who Debby Marsh was, so that’s how she should act. She invented her own method of Method.

Entering Glenn Ford’s room at the Hotel Marlin, she quips, “I like this. Early nothing.” It was something her new beau, comedy writer Cy Howard, had said upon first seeing her apartment. Con-cerned that she had no memorable lines in the script, Gloria asked Cy to punch up her scenes, forever trying to make things better. The hotel room scene is classic Gloria. She prowls, preens, plumps the pillows, perches on the bed with her legs tucked under her. She knows who she is and is unapologetic. She likes Vince (Lee Marvin) and she likes the life. “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me—rich is better.” One of the best lines in cinema.

When she returns to the same hotel room later, burned and ban-daged, we briefly see one area of discomfort in Gloria’s acting. Crying was not her strong suit, as if she found it needy or self-indulgent. But

actresses in particular are asked to shed tears ad nauseum, especially in that era. As Katharine Hepburn, a great crier, said, “Acting is not crying.” What Gloria excels at is anger. “I was followed when I came here with you. That’s how I got this!” After tearing off the bandages to reveal her scarred face, she does a beautiful flip into good-natured fatalism: “You gotta take the good with the bad. I can always go

	“In the end, Gloria is the moral compass. She takes action 

to right the wrongs while the men play their

little games.

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“I can always go through life sideways”: Vince Stone (Lee Marvin) is confronted by Gloria’s Debby Marsh and the consequences of his actions

through life sideways.” There is humor, and a life force, in Gloria that always prevails.
Lang’s view of women was cynical. B-girls get tossed to the side of the road, and married women don’t fare much better; they’re either blown up or cheated on. But in the end, Glo-ria is the moral compass. She takes action to right the wrongs while the men play their little games. Her death scene is very moving. Head propped up by her mink coat, vanity (“I must look awful”) makes her cover the scarred side of her face with the fur collar. She is sweetly vulnerable as she says, “Dave, I’m going to die

. . . ” in a gorgeous close-up of her profile. This is no femme fatale, she’s a giver of life.
Over the next three years, Gloria’s perfor-mances were hit-and-miss, coinciding with her relationship with Cy Howard. They were known for their battles. While she relied on him for advice, it often felt controlling, and he was jealous of the time she devoted to her career. He convinced her she was being type-cast and she needed different roles, which resulted in some strange choices.

After seeing The Bad and the Beautiful, James Woolf, the London-based executive

producer of The Good Die Young (1954), wanted no one but Gloria for the role of the “occasional actress” wife of John Ireland. Her opening scene is fun, pulling from other parts she’d played. But her performance devolves. She affects a la-di-dah accent, overemphasiz-ing words like “Eddie dee-ear, you have a naw-sty mind, don’t you?” She knows where the humor is but doesn’t inhabit the role, reaching for comedy instead of reality. It comes off as arch in an otherwise gritty film. You wonder if Cy, the gag writer, was coaching her at night.

Naked Alibi (1954) was a happier experi-ence. Producer Ross Hunter made all the dif-ference. He understood Gloria and wanted her to thrive. The movie rips off both In a Lonely Place and The Big Heat, except Ster-ling Hayden’s cop is the possible bad guy and Gene Barry’s killer the family man. The first third is shot cheaply on the Universal lot and it shows. But once we reach “Border City” (Tijuana), we’re into night and neon, shadows and smoke; director of photography Russell Metty seems to be prepping for Touch of Evil. Welcome to El Perico Cantina.

At first, we only see the back of her, sitting

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A lesser film with a great performance: Gloria in Naked Alibi

at the bar in a low-cut black dress of angelskin satin. As Gloria starts singing “Ace in the Hole,” she turns and perches on the bar. One leg starts swinging, then the hips roll, finally her slender arms come down like she’s operating a jackhammer and her whole body vibrates. Her performance rivals Rita Hayworth’s “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda. But Gloria is not a professional dancer; there is no joy in this number. She just throws it away, not bothering to muster a smile as she gyrates for the besotted patrons. It’s her job, and she knows it’s a shithole. When she bends over the stool for one last piston pump of her hips, it is so blatantly sexual you understand why they had to cut away to a close-up of her barely interested face.

Naked Alibi was a familiar role for Gloria, which makes her that much more captivating to watch. She is relaxed yet in com-mand. There is also a more vulnerable sadness. She’s picked the wrong guy once again. She knows she’ll end up alone. With fatal-istic acceptance, she tells Hayden, “I shoulda met you sooner, Joe . . . Who knows, you might have even fallen for me.” Some-times actors do their best work in lesser films, where there is more freedom to trust their instincts. The movie doesn’t quite come together, but the actor shines. Gloria loved working on Naked Alibi. The opposite would be true of her next experience, reunit-ing with Fritz Lang for Human Desire (1954).

Gloria jokingly called herself “The Replacement” when she learned Lang had offered the role of Vicki Buckley to Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth—and Olivia de Havilland, which would have been an entirely different movie. He finally decided Glenn Ford and Gloria were a good team. “She represents today’s femme fatale,” Lang said of Gloria. “While this type changes

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“Gloria is asked to make many melodramatic

turns in this movie, and it’s obvious that even she doesn’t buy some of them. She’s trying to convince herself, as an actor, as much as Glenn Ford.

Gloria would reunite with director Fritz Lang and costar Glenn Ford for Human Desire, based on a novel by Émile Zola

with the period, their power over men always comes from a combi-nation of a calculating nature and a glamorous body.”
First sight of Gloria: once again on her back with a leg in the air, snacking. “I’m in the bedroom, Carl!” Her husband (Broderick Crawford) has been fired, yet she is positive and supportive, think-ing this may be a way out of Dullsville. She even offers to get a job. But no, Carl wants to use her, to have her “sweet-talk” the boss into giving Carl his job back.

“Mr. Owens?” she asks. “Why Mr. Owens?” The cloud passing through Gloria’s eyes say it all. Something bad went down with Mr. Owens. There is history. And this is where Gloria brilliantly sub-verts what Lang expects of her. She hints at an abusive past, so any action she takes is not calculation, but survival.

“I’d rather not, Carl,” she replies, the camera holding on her back as she looks out the window. Crawford wheedles, pleads, and pouts as Gloria thinks, weighing things. “Are you sure you want me to call him?” Because she knows that once she does, Pandora’s box will be opened.

In the 1938 French adaptation of Émile Zola’s novel La Bête Humaine, directed by Jean Renoir, the wife (played by Simone Simon) is portrayed as existentially bad. In Lang’s version, men keep using Vicki until she understandably seeks any way out. That means manip-ulating train engineer Jeff Warren (Ford) into killing her husband.

Gloria is asked to make many melodramatic turns in this movie, and it’s obvious that even she doesn’t buy some of them. She’s trying to convince herself, as an actor, as much as Ford. And because he’s a man, she has to spell it out for him: “IF ONLY SOMETHING HAPPENED TO HIM IN THE YARDS.” Idiot.

Her next film marked the beginning of the end of Gloria Gra-hame’s Hollywood career. Ironically, it was her most recognizable and highest paying role. Gloria did not want to appear in Okla-homa! (1955), turning it down even though Richard Rodgers called her his first and last choice. Blame the curse of The Bad and the Beautiful, the cute little southern girl who drove men wild. Except Gloria couldn’t sing. And Rodgers didn’t care. Cy Howard talked her into it, which was regrettable.

Even though she had lip-synched numbers well in three movies, Gloria had to record her songs note by painful note. For someone who is not a natural singer, nothing is more excruciating. Aside from that, musicals have a heightened quality that did not suit Glo-ria. She had played characters like Ado Annie in many movies—Yes, I like sex. What’s wrong with that? I’m just a girl who can’t say no. But in this beloved musical, you can see Gloria’s discomfort, per-forming with broad gestures and funny faces. She has an idea—or was told—that she had to plant herself and sing, whereas the other actors use the songs as a way of communicating. As a child, I adored

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Left: Gloria in her third film with Robert Mitchum, the overwrought Not as a Stranger; Right: a primal Gloria in The Cobweb

her performance. Now I see an actor in pain.

In an effort to salvage their relationship, she and Cy Howard married during the making of Oklahoma! Aware her femme fatale image was wearing thin—“My god, haven’t I made enough trouble in pictures?”—Gloria looked to Howard for advice. He seemed to think darker hair and redder lipstick was the answer. Her next two films, Not as a Stranger (1955) and The Cobweb (1955), are Glo-ria’s “id” movies, in the Freudian sense. She is the apex of frustrated female sexuality in the 1950s.

Her desire is unbridled in Not as a Stranger, where she is the owner of a stud farm and Robert Mitchum is a young buck doctor married to a dutiful Olivia de Havilland. Getting little help from first-time director Stanley Kramer, Gloria delivers a wiser, more mature woman than we’ve seen before. She is detached, knowing “it’s no good” to fall in love with Mitchum. Smart move, because Kramer does all the heavy breathing for her. In a bonkers scene beneath a full moon, he cuts between two horses rearing in heat while the actors stare at each other—until Mitchum finally lets the stud roam free, gruffly pulling Gloria toward him and the camera. I guess it caused a stir at the time.

One reason Gloria continues to fascinate is the way she freely expressed carnal desire without shame. But by 1955, audiences started to turn on her, complaining about messy hair and unkempt looks. By today’s standards she looks wonderfully modern. It was easier to focus on her looks than admit the fear she stirred up in both men and women. In The Cobweb she plays the frustrated wife of psychiatrist Richard Widmark. It’s an overripe movie directed by Vincente Minnelli that questions who is crazier, the patients or the doctors? Or maybe it’s just about new drapes. It’s mostly a bore except when Gloria and Charles Boyer, as a womanizing doctor, are on screen. It would be easy to dismiss Gloria’s work here as worn-

out. She once again perches on the bed, primps in the mirror, and wears sex on her bare shoulder. Except this time, she’s the wife and Lauren Bacall is the levelheaded other woman. Sex is her coinage, but now it’s unwanted, undervalued. Her scenes with Widmark are charged and honest. He wrongfully tries to slut-shame her when she accuses him of giving his patients more attention than her.

She is every wife of a 1950s professional who believed that once she married and had kids, life would be peachy. Instead, she is a capable woman who is ignored and left without a purpose. When she goes to Boyer for help, she knows what her commodity is and she’s not afraid to use it. “I don’t weep,” she says. Instead, she gets even. However, as in Human Desire, she needs a shower afterward.

Gloria is feral in this film. She goes from white-gloved garden club lady to wild-eyed animal ripping down curtains. When she blurts out to her husband, “You don’t make me feel like a woman. I have to feel DESIRED!” it is so primal, it’s painful. Maybe because I heard the same argument during my own childhood.

Gloria’s marriage to Cy was on the rocks and it was affecting her work. She was learning for herself that marriage was not the prom-ised panacea in postwar America. Her joy, purpose, and fulfillment had always come from acting. Sadly, her next film would feature her last great performance.

The Man Who Never Was (1956), a procedural based on the real-life Operation Mincemeat, is a fun surprise. Gloria gets second billing after Clifton Webb, and Stephen Boyd makes a dashing debut as an Irish double agent. Her role isn’t large but it’s pivotal as she unwittingly becomes part of a plot to deceive the Nazis.

Once again, she is introduced lying on her back (it must have been in her contract), smoking a cigarette and contemplating sex. Or is it love? She is “Lucy, the languishing librarian,” who is man-

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Behind the scenes of Gloria’s turn as “Lucy, the languishing librarian” in The Man Who Never Was

crazy in London under siege. “I don’t know how you stay away from those boys,” she says to her more proper roommate. But she ruefully ends up falling for one. When her flyboy goes on a mission, she helps craft a “Dear Willy” love letter that, unbeknownst to her, saves the Allies’ secret operation.

What’s wonderful about this performance is that Lucy is clueless about what’s going on, but Gloria plays it with great canniness. The humor and pathos of her earlier films is now internalized and thoughtful. She worked only seven days on the movie, yet it’s clear she and director Ronald Neame got along.

In the scene where she learns of her fiancé’s death, Gloria plays against the stereotypical histrionics, rendering it more poignant. And her drunken speech when she returns to her flat—funny, sad, ironic, and ultimately heartbreaking—is as emotionally revealing as Gloria ever allowed herself to be on camera.

Unfortunately, her appearance distracts from her wonderful work. The years of cosmetic fixes had gone too far; there is an oily sheen to her skin and her face is puffy. Within months, she and Cy Howard would be divorced. Worse, the acting offers stopped coming.

Gloria Grahame’s final noir and last prestige movie was Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Produced by Harry Belafonte’s com-pany, it’s a powerful statement about racism framed as a heist story. Gloria had two scenes, shot over five days. Director Robert Wise had asked blacklisted Abraham Polonsky to write a character spe-cifically for her. She had split with Cy, had a new baby daughter, and wasn’t getting work. Looking more real (except for the beauty mark she added to the character), she plays Helen, a neighbor who wants

	“Even though Gloria was only thirty-six, she’d lived a lifetime. 

Twenty-seven movies in sixteen years, three husbands, two children.

Robert Ryan (of all people) to babysit her kid. Her first line suggests other motives: “What’s going on in here? An orgy?”
Gloria was nervous about being back in front of the camera, and it shows. I have a difficult time with this performance. I ache for her. Her every line is premeditated and over-enunciated, as if she had prepared ahead of time down to the last gesture so as not to be thrown. Or maybe she’d read reviews of The Cobweb that said she sounded like she had a mouthful of mush (not true). By contrast, Ryan is as relaxed as a crocodile in the sun—very dangerous.

One of Gloria’s great strengths as an actor had always been her ability to think on camera. Here, the pauses and hesitations merely indicate that she is thinking. Her instincts kick back in, however, once sex is the motivator. Her question to Ryan, “How did it feel when you killed that man?” is honest and heated. We have Gloria back—curious, lustful, almost innocent as she goes to kiss Ryan

Gloria and Robert Ryan in Odds Against Tomorrow, her final prestige film

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“ . . . Just this once.” Which, of course, is the film’s leitmotif: just this one Gjob,justthisonerisk,justthisonechance...butitneveris.Asmuchas Wise wanted Gloria in the film, there is a certain cruelty in how she is used.

The character seems a grotesque version of her previous roles, as if she’s being viewed through the smutty lens of a schoolboy crush.
Even though Gloria was only thirty-six, she’d lived a lifetime. Twenty-seven movies in sixteen years, three husbands, two children. In 1960, Gloria married for what she hoped would be the last time. Tony Ray had come back into her life. He was now an actor (see his striking turn in John Cassavetes’s Shadows). Despite the rumor mill and misogynistic accusations of nymphomania, Gloria and Tony had a genuine connection. He tapped into her sense of play and girl-ishness, and she gave him the family that he longed for. They naively thought the world wouldn’t care. When they had two boys of their own and tried to combine families, Cy Howard cited the atypical arrangement as a means to sue Gloria for custody of their daughter. He also leaked intimate details to the press, and the humiliating battle went public for years. Eventually, the pressure proved too much. When Gloria started hearing voices of persecution, she was forced to drop out of a Wisconsin summer stock production of Tunnel of Love in 1964. After flying back to Los Angeles, she received fourteen shock treatments.

During her fourteen-year marriage to Tony, Gloria mostly worked to sup-port her family. There were TV shows like The Outer Limits and Burke’s Law with her old friend Gene Barry. And of course, the usual 1970s horror flicks

(where older actresses go to die) and an occasional wonderful performance in g a not-so-great movie. I recommend The Loners (1972) and Mama’s Dirty Girls

(1974) for classic Gloria, full of wit and spit.

After divorcing Tony (who had inherited the family addictions) in 1974, Glo-ria discovered she had breast cancer. Like Steve McQueen and many others in the 1970s, she turned to alternative medicine and macrobiotics. Once in remis-sion, she went back to work, fiercely determined to appreciate life. She played John Heard’s kooky mother in the indie film Chilly Scenes of Winter (1978), coproduced by my friend Amy Robinson, who remembers Gloria’s great com-mitment and generosity. Not only did Gloria pay to have her costume negligées made by her Beverly Hills tailor, she offered Amy her ring when she admired it. “We all called her ‘Glo,’” Amy said, “because, well, she just glowed.”

As if divesting herself of all dross, Gloria returned to her first and constant love, the stage. Still wanting to learn and grow, she performed in theaters large and small in both America and England. Often, we remember what makes us most happy when we know it will soon be gone. Gloria herself said, “I don’t think I ever understood Hollywood.”

In the spring of 1981, I met Gloria Grahame. I was a young actor in New York, having just closed in my first Broadway play. My father had recently died of pancreatic cancer at fifty-six, and I was a bit at sea. One Saturday, I attended a makeup seminar at Stagelight Cosmetics in the Film Center. As we sat waiting for the teacher to arrive, another student walked into the sixth-floor studio dressed in tight leather pants and a white fox jacket. I knew imme-diately who she was. No one else had a clue. While we waited, my heart raced. “What would Gloria Grahame need to know about makeup?” Here was my idol, and I could not find the words to tell her how much she meant to me. My Irish stoicism had rendered me mute. When it was clear the teacher was never going to appear, Gloria and I shared an elevator down to the street. We talked about Lauren Bacall and how wonderful she was in Woman of the Year, which had just opened on Broadway. We said it was nice chatting and parted ways on Ninth Avenue. Four months later, Gloria Grahame died of cancer at age fifty-seven. I like to think my father introduced us.

Enormous thanks to Vincent Curcio’s thoughtful and even-handed biography,

Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame. I devoured it on publication in 1989 and still have my dog-eared copy on the shelf.

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Lavender

Noir

By Randy Dotinga

How		he 1947 movie Desert Fury, starring		
		Mary Astor, Burt Lancaster, and Liza-		
Hollywood	beth Scott, wants you to take your		
	classic cinematic love triangles and		
	throw them at a geometry teacher. Threesomes are cli-		
Hid Gay	Tché,andfoursomes only work on the tennis court. How		
		about five for lust?		
Characters	Eddie  wants  Paula.  Johnny  wants  Eddie.  Paula’s		
	mother also wants Eddie, an old flame, although she’s		
	unhealthily obsessed with . . . Paula. As for Eddie, he can		
in Plain		basically have whomever he wants. Lucky for Eddie, until		
		he isn’t so lucky. Enter another player—Tom.		
Sight		The odd one out may have been the audience. It’s hard		
		to imagine most mid-century moviegoers would have		
		picked up on all the hints about multiple cases of same-		

sex attraction, with a hint of incest for not-so-good measure.

Still, many Hollywood filmmakers, especially those making “noir,” knew exactly what they were doing—and showing—when it came to gay characters. Never mind that portraying homosexuality onscreen was officially banned. The love that dare not speak its name still managed to flicker into life at the Bijou, the Roxy, and the Vogue. And no genre embraced gay characters and storylines more than the one devoted to exploring and exposing the passions that drive us—sex, power, and money.

It makes sense that lesbians and gay men, who mostly lived secretive lives in the 1940s and 1950s, would inhabit the noir world. “What is film noir except a place of shadows and darkness and things hiding?” asks film historian Richard Barrios, author of Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2002), in an interview.

In fact, gay characters made a place for themselves in film noir from the very beginning, becom-ing a fixture just like guns-for-hire and femmes fatales. For proof, we need look no further than another flick featuring the passions of Mary Astor.

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ously gay, at least to those of us who think we’re sophisticated. But maybe we’re wrong. And sometimes, they could go either way—often in more ways than one.

“Perversion” and the Rise of the Code

Sexuality, like cinema, doesn’t always fit easily into categories. To make things even more complicated, the Motion Picture Production Code (popularly known as the Hays Code) made it especially chal-

	lenging to be explicit about sex.		
	The code, written in 1930, declared that “no picture shall be		
	produced which will lower the morals of those who see it.” As for		
	gay characters and gay subplots, the Production Code was vague yet		
	strict: “Sex perversion or any inference to it is prohibited.”		
	By the mid-1930s, when the height of code censorship began,		
	movies had mostly eliminated the flamboyantly gay male characters		
	who inhabited pre-Code movies. Also banished were blatant hints		
	of same-sex female attraction like those in Morocco (1930), where		
	a tuxedo-clad Marlene Dietrich steals a kiss from a female audience		
	member during a performance, and Queen Christina (1933), with		
	Greta Garbo playing the bi-curious Swedish royal.		
	Hollywood censors were alert to the possibility that filmmakers		
	would take advantage of the Production Code’s wrongdoers-must-		
	pay rule and cram films full of misbehavior before the final reel.		
	Censorship czar Joseph Breen even said he was on guard for “the		
	subterfuge of attempting to wipe out a protracted wrong by one last		
	line of dialogue affirming the right.”		
Passing the smell test: Peter Lorre wafts his way through The Maltese Falcon	But somehow, as film historian Thomas Doherty writes in Holly-		
	wood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Adminis-		
The Scent of a Not-So-Manly Man			
	tration (2007), the censor “found the squalor in the noir atmosphere		
In The Maltese Falcon (1941), the movie considered by many to	impossible to dissipate. The protracted wrong-ness seemed to soak		
be the first film noir, the gardenia isn’t just a pretty flower. It’s the	into the very celluloid.”		
scent of the perfume that wafts from the calling card of one Joel	How did noir manage to develop such a gritty style despite the		
Cairo, a rather fastidious fellow who walks into the office of private	Breen office’s insistence on strict limits? “It’s partly just by being a		
eye Sam Spade, sits down, and carefully fusses over a single white	genre of crime melodrama that wasn’t taken seriously, and maybe		
glove. Then, as he speaks, Cairo fondles his			
cane with a bare hand. The handle heads			
toward his mouth, as if he wants to smoke it			
like a pipe. Or something.			
As played by Peter Lorre, Cairo is a			
flashing neon sign that screams “GAY!”—at			
least to those who know a phallic walking			
stick when they see one. (We’ll see another			
shortly. Stay tuned.) But the sexuality of			
another character in the movie is a bit more			
hazy. The weaselly hood Wilmer, played by			
noir mainstay Elisha Cook Jr., is referred to			
by his boss Kasper Gutman (Sydney Green-			
street) as a “gunsel”—a Yiddish word that			
could mean a crook or a young man kept by			
an older man . . . or maybe both.			
So is Wilmer gay? Gay-adjacent? Could			
he see gay from his house? We can’t know			
for sure, but we sure can wonder.			
Turns out that identifying gays in noir is like			
defining noir itself: it’s a mighty fuzzy business			
with plenty of room for debate. Are they or			

aren’t they? Sometimes characters seem obvi-  Elisha Cook Jr., seen here with Humphrey Bogart, plays a “gunsel” – Yiddish for a crook or kept gay man

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John Dall and Farley Granger never hold hands on screen, but director Alfred Hitchcock still manages to give an erotic charge to Rope

didn’t get as much scrutiny. Film noir became the one genre of film during the code era that could include lot of things that were basi-cally forbidden,” says film historian (and NOIR CITY contributor) Imogen Sara Smith, author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City (2011), in an interview.

Censors also “missed the forest for the trees,” as Barrios puts it. “They were so focused on what was being spelled out that they didn’t pay attention to the subtleties. They were more concerned about overt things like cleavage than metaphorical eroticism. Really good filmmakers could surmount the code when they had subtlety, intelligence, and guts.”

A Game of Censor-and-Mouse

Director George Cukor, who was gay himself, may have put it best: “Sometimes I think there was more sex with the code than without it.” Still, directors often fought with the censors in a never-ending game of what-can-I-get-past-the-prudes.

Alfred Hitchcock became a master at trickery. He once confided that he’d distract a nearsighted British censor at screenings by call-ing his name before any “offending piece of film”: “He turned his head toward me, and the objectionable scene went by on screen without his seeing it.”

When he filmed Rope (1948), loosely based on the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case, Hitchcock had to stretch his decep-tive powers to the sticking place. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two young lovers in 1920s Chicago who kidnapped

and killed a fourteen-year-old boy for the thrill of it. Both wicked and wicked smart, they were far from typical gangster-style kill-ers. Hitchcock couldn’t explicitly portray the two lead characters in Rope as romantic partners. No kissing, no hand holding, no smoldering glances—all the clues that could be used to suggest het-erosexual couples were heterosexual couples.

But Hitch could hire whoever he wanted, and he turned to a gay screenwriter (Arthur Laurents) and two actors who weren’t

“And no genre embraced gay characters and storylines more than

the one devoted to exploring and exposing the passions that drive us—sex, power, and money.

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straight (the bisexual Farley Granger and John Dall, widely consid-ered to be gay). Laurents later said the homosexuality behind the scenes—including his own affair with Granger—“tickled” Hitch-cock. “It was all titillating to him,” Laurents said, “not out of mal-ice or a feeling of power but because they added a slightly kinky touch, and kink was a quality devoutly to be desired.”

In Hitchcock and the Censors (2019), mystery author and film historian John Billheimer writes that the director initially wanted to cast Montgomery Clift and Cary Grant in the Granger and Dall roles. According to Laurents, the two actors—both rumored to be attracted to men—were too fearful of the film’s gay connotations and turned Hitchcock down.

The censors at the Breen office weren’t quite as perceptive as Clift and Grant, apparently. According to Billheimer, they focused more on toning down the violence and liquor consumption in Rope than weakening the suggestions that the two killers were more than friends. For example, Dall’s character remained close to his mother (a sure sign of a warped mind onscreen) and he wore cologne (an indicator of an unmanly devotion to hygiene).

He’s Very Attached to His Mother, Isn’t He?

Closeness to one’s mother is a sure tip-off that a noir character may not be on the (ahem) straight and narrow. Hitchcock went to this well at least twice more in his long career. First, he depicted Bruno, the vicious killer in Strangers on a Train (1951), as a mama’s boy with an unhealthy interest in a handsome tennis pro (Farley Granger, again). Then, dancing on the ashes of the Production Code, Psycho (1960) introduced Norman “A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother” Bates. Hitch proved once again that a filmmaker’s best friend is a bisexual leading man (Anthony Perkins).

There are other tip-offs in noir that hint at forbidden lust. Con-

Sometimes a salami isn’t just a lunch meat: Earl Holliman (left) got the joke in The Big Combo, but not Lee Van Cleef

sider the double entendre, for example. In The Lineup, (1958), Eli Wallach’s character heads into a steam room at the Seamen’s Club (ahem) for some intel. “You like it thick, don’t you,” says a sailor who’s hoping to make a killing but ends up on the wrong side of a pistol. (Is that a gun in your bath towel or are you just happy to see me? Oh, I see. [Dies.]) And in The Big Combo (1955), bad guy buddies Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman) are—like many a neighborhood—closely knit. They even share a single pair of pajamas and engage in a bit of suggestive repartee.

Mingo: I’m hungry.

Fante: So eat something.

Mingo: I can’t swallow no more salami.

The macho Van Cleef may have been clue-less, but Holliman knew exactly what was going on. He guffawed during a guest appear-ance at a NOIR CITY film festival when host Eddie Muller brought up the salami business: “You got that, huh?” Yup!

Mama’s boy Bruno (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train knows that a boy’s best friend is his mother (Marion Lorne). In fact, there may be no other woman for him

Meet the Effete: Is He or Isn’t He?

An effete manner and an artistic tempera-ment are also hints that a male noir charac-ter may have more than a passing interest in hommes, fatale or non. But things can get quite murky. In Laura (1944), for instance, Clifton Webb’s Waldo Lydecker is imperious and waspish—and also obsessed with Laura (Gene Tierney). Lydecker is “the predatory, cosmopolitan, maybe gay (but maybe not) vil-lain,” writes Michelle Dean in a 2015 New Yorker article about Vera Caspary, who wrote the 1943 source novel. So is Lydecker gay? If so, “the story does not make any sense,” film

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George Macready, whose phallic-cane-toting character likes to spend his time with male strangers at the nighttime waterfront, eyes Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth in Gilda

Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) is obsessed with Laura, but does he actually want her?

historian Smith contends. Or maybe he’s gay and obsessed with a woman. (It’s been known to happen. See: gay men’s adoration for classic-era Hollywood divas.) Or maybe he’s bisexual or asexual? Does it matter that Webb himself was gay?

Whatever the case, Webb again played an effete noir villain with an outlandishly foppish name (Hardy Cathcart) in The Dark Corner (1946). Proving that actors can actually escape typecasting, Webb would become a top star after playing a father in the comedy Cheaper by the Dozen (1950).

Gay characters in noir could also be out-wardly masculine, with their sexuality hinted at by their interactions with other—younger—men. In The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959), for example, an older crook played by Crahan Den-ton seems to have the hots for an oblivious char-acter played by an early career Steve McQueen, and he even hopes to escape to Mexico with his new friend after the deed is done. That’s bad news for the older man’s ex-con partner, who knows he’s being shoved aside for the most dan-gerous of romantic rivals—a hot young thing.

And in the classic noir The Killing (1956), another older crook (played by Jay C. Flippen) seems to be in unrequited love with the younger Sterling Hayden character, even dreaming of the

two running off together.

Gilda: A Love Triangle for the Ages

In Gilda (1946), the most sexually complex classic noir outside of Desert Fury, the telltale gay clue is a variation on the meet-cute: a meet-not-so-cute. The two lead characters, Ballin Mundson (George Macready) and Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), run into each other at the docks where the older Mundson is swanning around with a fancy outfit and a fancy cane. What’s he doing there in the dark at night? Picking up handsome young men, apparently.

Then Ballin starts talking about his cane, which is equipped with a protruding dagger for dispatching unpleasant companions with the press of a button: “It is a most faithful and obedient friend. It is silent when I wish to be silent, it talks when I wish to talk.” Far-rell responds, “You must lead a gay life.” Indeed, especially in a movie in which a Maltese Falcon–style phallic walking stick nearly

“Sexuality, like cinema, doesn’t always fit easily into categories. To make

things even more complicated, the Production Code made it especially challenging to be explicit about sex.

37

Life (2011). However, Ford did say that director Charles Vidor was “very much a sadistic personality” who insisted on mistreating the film crew and seemed especially stimulated when Ford’s character slaps Gilda (Rita Hayworth).

Actress Judith Anderson also claimed obliviousness when she was asked about the sapphic leanings of the creepy Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (1940): “Why no, we never thought of such things at that time.” Might Anderson, who was rumored to be lesbian her-self, have misled her interviewer? After all, as Billheimer tells us, censors raised a red flag about the script, noting “the quite ines-capable inference of sex perversion.” (The censors also demanded the removal of words such as “you ass,” “for God’s sake,” and “damned.”)

The final cut of Rebecca still manages to say plenty as Mrs. Danvers tenderly fondles the lingerie left behind by the dearly departed but ever-present mistress of the house.

Judith Anderson (right), seen here with Joan Fontaine in Rebecca, claimed to not know her lingerie-fondling character gives off gay vibes

becomes a major character. But even in Gilda, which noir czar Muller has called “the most perverse movie made in the 1940s,” we must be careful to remember that people of our era are more aware of the variations of sexuality than those who lived before anyone ever heard of a Kinsey Report.

In 1946, most moviegoers wouldn’t have known that “gay” connoted anything other than carefree and joyful. The censors sure didn’t. If they had, they would have ordered the “gay life” line be cut, especially in light of the rest of the

hints of same-sex attraction (and distrac-tion) in Gilda.

Meet the Ladies Who Like Ladies

Lesbians aren’t as easy to find in classic noir as gay or maybe-gay men, but they’re there if you look closely. They’re more likely than the gay men in noir to be bisexual or at least bi-curious, per-haps because screenwriters—like many a straight man then and now—couldn’t quite wrap their minds around the idea that a woman could only desire women.

While she doesn’t have a first name, Mrs. Danvers does have a “Mrs.” in front of her last name, suggesting there’s been at least one man in her life. In Desert Fury, the mother played by Mary Astor appears to go both ways. She’s a mother, after all.

And the captivatingly complex character of Amy North, bril-liantly played by Lauren Bacall in Young Man with a Horn (1950), seems to play for both teams. “Jo’s interesting, isn’t she?” Amy says about the straitlaced (and straight-laced) character played by

What Did the Directors and Actors Know?

It’s not easy to know exactly what mid-century moviegoers knew—and didn’t know—about seemingly gay characters and plots. But we can consult screenwrit-ers, directors, and performers about what they intended.

Hitchcock, for one, was quite precise about the intended sexuality of the char-acter of Bruno in Strangers on a Train, even if—according to star Granger—he didn’t bring it up during the filming. Bill-heimer notes that director Peter Bogdanov-ich asked Hitch about this: “Was Bruno a homosexual?” The response: “Oh, I would think so.”

But actor Ford told his son Peter that he couldn’t remember explicitly talking about the gay undertones (overtones?) during the filming of Gilda: “I guess viewers see dif-ferent things,” he said in Glenn Ford: A

Kirk Douglas intrigues Doris Day in Young Man with a Horn (ahem), but bi-curious Lauren Bacall is tempted by a hot young artist of the female variety and her “sketches”

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Mercedes McCambridge, seen here in Johnny Guitar, All the King’s Men, and Touch of Evil, was Hollywood’s favorite go-to actress when scripts called for characters who like ladies or at least seem like they’d be more than comfortable at an Indigo Girls concert

Doris Day. “So simple and uncomplicated. It must be wonderful to wake up in the morning and know just which door you’re going to go through. She’s so terribly normal.”

Amy is tempted by the man with the, um, horn—Rick Martin (Kirk Douglas)—and marries him. Clearly, however, she’s deeply conflicted. For one thing, she lives in an apartment full of sculp-tures and paintings of women; some happen to have misplaced their clothes (so careless!). And she accepts an offer of a date with a beau-tiful young woman in a stunning gown, who brings her artwork to Amy’s party.

Amy: I’m dying to see the rest of your sketches.

Miss Carson: We’ll have dinner out and then go back to my place.

Twenty-First-Century Viewer: I’ll bet!

Rick meets the artist, says hello curtly, and seethes a few moments later to his wife: “You’re drunk and you’re sick.” Amy: “I’m sick of you trying to touch me.” Their relationship is over. We can only assume that Amy and Miss Carson live sapphically ever after.

Lesbian-leaning characters aren’t always as attractive as Bacall, however. In Vertigo (1958), Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) isn’t just stuck with the world’s least-arousing name. Bespectacled, plain, and motherly, she seems to have at least once had a crush on the dis-tracted Scottie (James Stewart). At the same time, she designs linge-rie and even explains to Scottie what she’s drawing: “It’s a brassiere. You know about those things. You’re a big boy now.”

Is Hitchcock hinting that Midge knows her way around a bras-siere in more ways than one? Or is our twenty-first-century gaydar a bit too sensitive? Perhaps. Consider Midge’s line about the “gay old bohemian days of gay old San Francisco.” In context, it’s unlikely she means it in the sense we think it does. After all, she’s talking about the nineteenth century, long before Baghdad by the Bay devel-oped its postwar reputation as a kind of ancestral homeland for gays and lesbians.

The Limits of Gender-Bending

Another trope is the butch, manly lesbian of the kind seen in women’s prison movies like Ladies They Talk About (1933). “She

likes to wrestle,” says one prisoner about a burly inmate who’s puffing on a cigar. And in Caged (1950), a sympathetic and gritty portrayal of prison life, the sturdily built actress Hope Emerson plays a prison matron who “brutalizes the women while vice queen Elvira Powell (Lee Patrick) seduces them into prostitution with a sweet smile and a lecherous gaze,” writes the late film historian Vito Russo in his groundbreaking book The Celluloid Closet: Homo-sexuality in the Movies (1981).

Another variation on the lesbian theme is the attractive-but-suspiciously-unfeminine woman, a role that inevitably went to the raspy-voiced Mercedes McCambridge. She turns up as a vengeful rancher who seems to have no use for men in the famously campy Western Johnny Guitar (1954). And in the noir-tinged All the King’s Men (1949), she won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for playing a shameless political mastermind who takes the disturbed gubernatorial candidate Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) to bed but also dresses in tailored, unfeminine clothes. Are her outfits designed to send a message about the character’s work in a male-dominated field? A hint about her sexuality? Or just the costume designer’s choice for her body type with no special meaning? It’s another mystery for the viewer to ponder.

“We must be careful to remember that people of our era are more

aware of the variations of sexuality than those who lived before anyone ever heard of a Kinsey Report.

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Alfred Hitchcock, seen here on the set of Rope, loved to cast gay and bisexual actors as troubled characters with murder on their minds

In Touch of Evil (1958), however, any femininity goes out the (motel room) window when McCambridge appears as a motorcycle gang leader who’s memorably turned on by the prospect of watch-ing Janet Leigh’s character get drugged up and tortured.

Another kind of gender-bending didn’t really make it into classic noir. In mid-century cinema, before the rise of gender-reassignment surgery, transgender people were even further hidden in the closet than gay men and lesbians. And Hollywood—with the notable exception of gonzo director Ed Wood—largely ignored the idea that a person born as one biological gender could live as the other, or even somewhere in between.

However, at least a couple noirs highlighted cross-dressers, those who temporarily dress as the opposite gender and may (or may not) be transgender. In the 1951 noir No Questions Asked, for exam-ple, ladies in a lounge are robbed by two strapping, gun-wielding women wearing jewels and furs. A quick change in a getaway car reveals that they’re men in drag. (Speaking of questions unasked: Who did their makeup?) A few years later, Psycho popularized the trope of cross-dresser-as-crazed-killer, one that would live on—hor-rifying the LGBTQ community—in movies like William Castle’s

Psycho knockoff Homicidal (1961), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Silence of the Lambs (1991).

“Bury Your Gays” and “Dead Lesbian Syndrome”

The 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, based on Russo’s book, highlights how classic Hollywood loves to dispose of its gay characters. Warning: multiple spoilers! Skip two paragraphs ahead to be safe.

Gays are stabbed (Caged), shot (Rebel Without a Cause [1955] and Johnny Guitar), burned to a crisp in a fire (Rebecca) and—as so often happens—mortally injured by a runaway carousel (Strangers on a Train). They also kill themselves (Victim [1961], The Chil-

dren’s Hour [1961], and The Seventh Victim [1943]), among other grisly ends.
This trend didn’t end with the gay rights revolution, and it persists to this day. So many LGBTQ characters have been bumped off in movies and television—hundreds, by one count—that the phenom-enon is known as “Bury Your Gays” and “Dead Lesbian Syndrome.” Should we then assume that film noir is just another movie genre that shamefully paints LGBTQ characters as both deranged and doomed? It may seem that way at first glance. But there’s a big dif-ference, and it’s crucial in understanding how noir pioneered a new

way of looking at gay men and lesbians.

Yes, many of these characters are evil. But they’re often por-trayed in complex ways. Consider Mingo and Fante, the pajama-sharing hoods in The Big Combo. As film historian Smith notes, “There’s something sweet in their relationship. You feel like these are two guys who really love each other.”

Even Rope, with two gay lead characters, doesn’t stoop to ste-reotypes. “What (Hitchcock) liked was not that they were homo-sexual, but that they were homosexual murderers,” screenwriter Laurents said. “If they were just homosexual, he wouldn’t have been interested. If they were just murderers, he wouldn’t have been interested.”

Film noir didn’t just challenge the Production Code—and Ameri-can society itself—by turning gay and lesbian characters into com-plicated human beings. It restored their humanity. In noir, anyone— regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, background, or even age—can be evil. And that’s not all. Just like their straight counterparts, gay characters can be compellingly evil. As Smith puts it: “Noir is all about stories in which you find yourself taking the side of people who are doing bad things.”

Turns out that noir’s delirious “protracted wrong-ness” got something right: gay people aren’t a breed apart. In the darkness, for better and for worse, we’re all alike.

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De-Gayed! Inside the Storylines That Scared the Studios

The 1945 movie The Lost Weekend is missing more than a Saturday and a Sunday. Charles R. Jackson’s original 1944 novel explained the protagonist’s drinking binge in part by suggesting he’d had a forbidden intimate relationship with a fraternity brother. But in the adaptation, one of film’s most memorable examinations of addiction, Ray Milland’s Don Birnam drinks because he has . . .
writer’s block.

The only hint of homosexuality from the book that remains onscreen is an arch, casually cruel orderly at the Bellevue alcoholic ward where Birnam washes up. But this character is subtle com-pared to the novel’s vivid portrait of a male nurse who seems to have more than routine patient care on his mind. And the feeling is mutual: “Don watched him go, the frame and build of a truck-driver sauntering along softly, insolently, like a dancer.”
I’ll pause while you, dear reader, fan yourself. (Not surprisingly, author Jackson turned out to be bisexual.)
What happened to this disorderly orderly in the transition from page to screen? Call it a case of de-gaying, one of several examples of how Hollywood neutered popular noir novels of the 1940s and 1950s in order to make them acceptable for censors and moviego-ers. Purple prose was fine—unless it began to turn a shade of laven-der. Then the cry went out: Get me rewrite!
Rewrites happened to the very best of authors. Noir impresario James M. Cain, author of the novels Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, saw his 1937 book
Serenade get watered down for the 1956 Anthony Mann film of the same name, starring Mario Lanza, Joan Fontaine, and Vincent Price.
In the very strange and very explicit book, an opera singer is torn over an advance made by a music conductor. In broken English, a

Richard Brooks, author of the novel that became the de-gayed noir film Cross-fire, later became a barrier-busting filmmaker. He produced and directed 1967’s In Cold Blood, based on the Truman Capote book. “He loved Truman’s humor and wit. They were truly the odd couple,” said Brooks’s step-daughter Tracy Granger. Photo courtesy of Tracy Granger

Mexican prostitute tells him that “these man who love other man can do much. . . . But no can sing. . . . Sound like old woman, like cow, like priest.” An act of rape puts his voice—and his libido—on a more heterosexual/masculine track as he’s literally saved by sex. The film leaves this horrific storyline behind, which is definitely for the best. But it still manages to be a slog.
Earlier, the 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon scrubs the most blatant suggestions of gay male characters from Dashiell Ham-mett’s novel. Sam Spade doesn’t call effeminate villain Joel Cairo a “fairy” in the movie as he does in the book. And Peter Lorre’s per-formance is subtler than the novel’s depiction of Cairo. Actually, a crowbar to the face would have been less obvious than Hammett’s prose about the perfumed crook: “Black coat, cut tight to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips. His trousers fitted his round legs more snugly than was the current fashion. . . . (He) came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps.”
And the 1946 screen version Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep nixes an offensive reference to a gay man that proves a cer-tain three-letter word has meant something other than cigarette for quite a long time.
But no book-to-screen self-censorship is more notable—and enraging from today’s perspective—than the remarkable de-gaying of the novel that became the classic 1947 noir Crossfire. The film is based on the vivid and immensely readable 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole, which depicts a fatal gay bashing by American troops sta-tioned in the United States during World War II. The movie gets a new title and a new storyline: the victim is Jewish, not gay, and the theme is anti-Semitism.
Crossfire remains ahead of its time, a stark, startling, and unfor-gettable portrayal of prejudice. But Richard Brooks, the novelist who wrote The Brick Foxhole, hated seeing his original plot vanish from the screen.
“He felt he was a writer first and foremost, so being forced to watch his work taken away from him and rewritten was a terrible experience,” said his stepdaughter, film editor Tracy Granger, in an interview. “But he wasn’t famous enough to have the power at that time to fight this battle and keep the character’s story he wanted to tell in the film they made.”
According to Granger, her stepfather had “witnessed homopho-bia while he was in the marines and felt the army’s blind eye should be exposed. I remember Dad telling me that the studio wouldn’t touch gay characters with a bargepole back then. Even all those years later he was still pissed off.”
In fact, Granger said, Brooks “really had a fondness for gay men and women. He was as manly and butch as they come, and there wasn’t a homophobic bone in his body. He was born in 1912, a marine during the Korean War, and from a tough neighborhood in Philly. To have the attitudes he had, I find that incredible.”
Brooks would go on to become a screenwriter, director, and pro-ducer who fought the Production Code while creating such land-mark films as The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960), and In Cold Blood (1967).
“He despised prejudice of any kind,” his daughter said, “and fought it any way he could, mainly via the films he made.”

—Randy Dotinga

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Femme fatale Ursula Georgi (Myrna Loy) uses all her tricks to baffle detective Ricardo Cortez in Thirteen Women
						
		s				
	o	c	o	p		
r						
i							
o					e		
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				“Killer” Madsen						
										
		Mei Lee Ming		capricorn		Joe Gillis				
										
		aquarius				sagittarius				
									
Sergeant Kelly							Nancy Monks		
									
pisces							scorpio		

Leah St. Aubyn		Jim Ackland		
				
		libra		
aries				

Harry Worp		Rita Moore		
				
		virgo		
taurus				

Molly Newman	Alice

gemini	Philip Morgan	leo		

cancer

Portrayals of Astrology in
Classic CrimeCinema and Film Noir

After you’ve read this, you’ll be able to despise Astrology more intelligently.

—Marlene Dietrich, inscription in a book to Charles Brackett, February 1948

By Nora Fiore
“Your horoscope is up there,” Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) quips to voluptuous hash-slinger Stella (Linda Darnell), gesturing toward his hotel room. Although Fallen Angel (1945) involves the spook racket rather than astrology, Stanton’s risqué line epitomizes film

noir’s shady mysticism. Horoscopes, seances, and psychic readings have a way of serving earthly desires.

Yet astrology is more than just another cynical shakedown in classic crime cinema. It can be a weapon, a motive for murder, or a method of detection. Horoscopes evoke the mysteries of human nature and suggest how belief can shape reality. Astrological allusions deepen noir’s preoccupation with the inscrutable forces—real or imagined—that shape individual destinies.

From Pop Astrology to Proto-Noir

The Depression era witnessed the rise of astrology as a profit-able mass-media phenomenon fueled by global uncertainty. Begin-ning with R. H. Naylor’s analysis of Princess Margaret’s birth chart in 1930, Britain’s Sunday Express capitalized on the public’s hunger for predictions. The now-ubiquitous twelve-sign horoscope format took root in US astrology magazines edited by Paul Clancy and soon spread to more mainstream outlets. The format’s empha-sis on a birthday-based sun sign, at the expense of a birth chart’s complexity, made astrology widely accessible.

The astrology trend surfaced in Hollywood cinema, nota-bly in two 1930s crime films with striking parallels. Thirteen Women (1932) and When Were You Born (1938) both center on Asian women who wield their knowledge of astrology for prac-tical purposes: one to destroy her enemies, the other to catch a killer. Though tinged with orientalism, the films’ heroines adroitly navigate between elements of Eastern and Western cultures and challenge white characters’ notions of superiority and rationality.

Taken as a pair, these astrological thrillers foreshadow two key roles for women in noir: the femme fatale and the lady sleuth.
In Thirteen Women, Ursula Georgi (Myrna Loy) exploits astrology to wreak revenge on the racist for-mer schoolmates who bullied her. Georgi seduces the famous astrologer consulted by her foes, then forges

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“Mars has been transiting Jupiter”: Norma Desmond, poolside in Sunset Boulevard, reads an auspi-cious report from her personal astrologer

A 1949 Screenland interview with astrologer Carroll Righter
horoscopes that predict catastrophe. By targeting each woman’s fears and sorrows, Georgi weaponizes the power of suggestion. Despite the whitewashed casting, Loy’s smoldering, mesmeric intensity tempts the viewer to side with Georgi and revel in her schemes. This pre-Code melodrama anticipates noir through its ruthless yet sympathetic antiheroine driven to violence by ran-kling social injustice, and its shadowy, haunted stylization.

“Astrology can solve crime,” mys-tic Manly P. Hall asserts in his pro-logue to When Were You Born. Based on Hall’s story, this B mystery relies on its glamorous astrologer heroine to sell his point. Mei Lei Ming (Anna May Wong) falls under suspicion after forecasting the death of a caddish art dealer. Held at police headquarters, she uses horoscopes to shed light on the suspects’ personalities and the details of the crime. She correctly con-

cludes that the culprit acted in self-defense—and predicts that two more deaths will occur before the case is closed. Brought to life with conviction and a touch of wry humor by Wong, Ming emerges as an insightful cross-cultural figure rather than a plot device. With-out compromising her beliefs or identity, Ming becomes part of the detectives’ team and wins respect for astrology.

The Stars and Their Stars

Hollywood stars and astrology have been a match made in the heavens since the silent era. Associations with unorthodox spiri-

tuality, whether genuine or cooked up for publicity, amplified the romantic aura of movie actors. In a Photoplay interview from 1918 entitled “Does Theda Bara Believe Her Own Press Agent?” the cel-luloid vamp asked Delight Evans, “When were you born?” before spouting astrological gibberish. In 1923, Terraize McDonnell wrote an astrology column, “The Stars and Their Planets,” for Motion Picture Magazine. As astrology gained popular momentum in the 1930s and beyond, zodiac-based profiles and articles in movie mag-azines offered fans another way to identify with their screen idols.

Some Hollywood celebrities dramatically demonstrated their faith in astrology. Director William Dieterle made a film’s first shot

at the most astrologically auspicious time. On the advice of astrologer Carroll Righter, Maria Montez picked the day of her baby’s birth (by cesarean sec-tion), and Ronald Reagan held his first gubernatorial inauguration around midnight. Starstruck waitress Billie Nash (Beverly Michaels) in Wicked Woman (1953) might be thinking of such Hollywood lumi-naries when defending astrology: “It ain’t junk. Some of the biggest people swear by it!”

Norma Desmond’s (Gloria Swanson) belief in astrology makes her emblematic of Hollywood’s new age eccentricity in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Consid-ering whether to hire Joe Gillis (William Holden), she plucks a move from the Theda Bara playbook and asks, “When were you born? I mean, what sign of the zodiac?” Joe’s birthday, December 21, prompts Norma to rationalize: “I like Sagittarians. You can trust them.” So much for sun sign generalizations, as Joe has already lied to her.

Norma exudes starriness while reviewing her horoscope report by the pool in Edith Head’s shoul-der-baring leopard print ensemble. Like the fancy car and flamboyant wardrobe, a personal astrolo-

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Take me to your Libra: the title of The October Man comes from the zodiac sign of Jim Ackland (John Mills)

ger goes with the territory of being a silver-screen grande dame. “Mars has been transiting Jupiter,” Norma announces, ordering Max (Erich von Stroheim) to send her script to DeMille. “Today is the day of the greatest conjunction!” Joe tries to give her a gentle reality check: “I hope you realize, Norma, that scripts don’t sell on astrologers’ charts.” But the reclusive diva bolsters her hopes and further insulates herself from reality with astrology. Norma’s fixa-tion on the stars and her own stardom sharpens Sunset Boulevard’s satire of Hollywood as a hotbed of toxic illusions.

In Rope (1948), Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier) raves about actors in astrological terms. The “attractively sinister” James Mason was born under the sign of “Taurus the bull, you know, very obstinate.” Ingrid Bergman is “the Virgo type.” Spry Cary Grant “leaps” like the goat that represents his sign of Capricorn. Holly-wood and the zodiac distill human qualities into relatable types— and therein lies a major appeal of both star systems.

She Wants to Believe

When astrologer Carroll Righter embarked on a Florida lecture tour in 1940, he relied on a charming young assistant named Robert Mitchum to round up an audience of monied matrons. “After the old guy gave his spiel,” Mitchum recalled, “I’d pitch the women into having a horoscope reading.” (Without difficulty, one can imagine.)

In classic crime cinema, as in Mitchum’s experience, women tend to be the most devoted consumers of astrology. Men who wholeheart-edly trust in horoscopes, like the odious Harry Worp (Philip Truex) in The Trouble with Harry (1955), are less common. A pattern that

persists in this century, more widespread belief in astrology (and reli-gion) among women may reflect their perceived lack of control in a male-dominated society. Indeed, noir’s astrological devotees are often women who feel frustrated or trapped by their circumstances.

Although their problems differ, noir women from both sides of the tracks dabble in astrology for answers and reassurance. Sunset Boulevard and Whirlpool (1950) largely define Norma Desmond and Theresa Randolph (Barbara O’Neil), respectively, by their age and “faded charms,” in the words of Whirlpool’s villain David

	“Noir’s astrological devotees are often women who feel 

frustrated or trapped by their circumstances.

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Advanced Astrology won’t help Wicked Woman’s Billie Nash (Beverly Michaels) fend off the lecher next door (Percy Helton)

Korvo. The films imply that diminished options for mature, wealthy women leave them vulnerable to conniving younger men and dubi-ous astrology—sometimes in the same person.

Noir’s hard-luck dames turn to mass-market astrology as a hope-ful escape from dreary realities. Cash-strapped model Molly (Kay Walsh) reveals the meaning of the title The October Man (1947) when she identifies gallant Jim Ackland (John Mills) as a Libra. Over a drink in her room, Molly bonds with Jim by sharing his horoscope: “October people are affable, suave, dapper, and have a sense of beauty.” As she retrieves an astrology book from her ward-robe and reads aloud, Molly’s eagerness conveys the joy that this prized possession brings her. Erratically employed and dependent on predatory men, Molly seeks solace in an astro-

logical understanding of the world.

A more comical believer, Wicked Woman’s Bil-lie reads her married lover’s horoscope aloud to convince him that they need to act fast on their fraudulent plan. She beams with excitement over the astrology magazine’s prediction: “It is an excel-lent time to make business and financial transac-tions and new associations.” Billie stumbles on the word “procrastinate,” accidentally undercutting the horoscope’s grandiosity. The contrast between the dingy boarding house setting and the flow-ery language—“your star is in its ascendency”— heightens the scene’s grim humor.

his Paris office. Its wizardly cabinet-of-curiosities ambiance emphasizes his remoteness from his neighbors’ ideas of normalcy. Any practitioner of astrology can relate to Hire when he asks for his beloved Alice’s (Viviane Romance) exact birth time. He draws the femme fatale’s birth chart and reads her life story from it. Alas, the stars apparently offered no effective advice on how to resist her.

Dr. Simon Crowdy (Ron Randell) in The Sign of the Ram (1948) acknowledges astrology’s sometimes uncanny accuracy. Margaret Ferguson’s source novel confines the subject to its epigraph from Chiero’s You and Your Star (1934), which sketches a few Aries traits. No character in the book alludes to the sign of the ram. Crowdy, the film’s stolid man of science, is a counterintuitive choice to recite a zodiac profile. But by mentioning Aries’s fiery will to domi-nate, he obliquely calls out the machinations of matriarch Leah St. Aubyn (Susan Peters). A look of surreptitious pride crosses Leah’s face. Informed by an unexpected method, the doctor demonstrates his astute grasp of human nature.

In Rope, Mrs. Atwater complicates the film’s inquiry into the limits of logic and the riddle of evil. Patrick Ham-ilton’s 1929 play, loosely based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, characterizes the victim’s aunt as a smirking

“nonentity” who barely speaks. The film, adapted by Hume Cro-nyn and scripted by Arthur Laurents, transforms the aunt into a voluble amateur astrologer, but not merely for comic relief. Her accurate off-the-cuff horoscope and palm reading of Phillip (Farley Granger)—a susceptible “moon child” whose hands will bring him fame—strike an eerie chord.

James Stewart’s skeptical academic Rupert Cadell mocks Mrs. Atwater on principle. During a volley of astrology and movie prattle between Mrs. Atwater and another dinner guest, Rupert’s deadpan expression and ironic remarks spike the exchange with dry derision. However, Mrs. Atwater’s astrological worldview is no less outland-

The Limits of Logic

Why are people the way they are, often unfairly loved or hated, blessed or cursed? For many, astrol-ogy elucidates those quirks of personality and fate, so resistant to rational explanations. It is fitting that Michel Simon’s misanthropic Monsieur Hire in Panique (1946) would embrace astrology. Hav-ing abandoned his profession as a lawyer, Hire

casts horoscopes for money as “Docteur Varga” in  Curmudgeonly Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon) interprets the birth chart of Alice (Viviane Romance) in Panique

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The zodiac wheel that appears under the credits of The Beast with Five Fingers, in which an unhealthy obsession with astrology drives a man to murder

ish—and considerably less dangerous—than Rupert’s modest pro-posal in favor of murder. By the end of the film, Rupert recoils from the logical extension of his theories and concludes that “something deep inside” of Brandon (John Dall) must have made him capable of murder. Thus Rupert seeks refuge in a vague determinism not so very different from Mrs. Atwater’s horoscopes.

Swindlers and Psychopaths

At its most malignant, movie astrology intertwines with criminal tendencies, warping minds and helping swindlers cultivate their prey. In a final twist, zany B whodunit Fugitive in the Sky (1936) unmasks its dotty astrology enthusiast as a femme fatale scorned. The film opens with prim, birdlike Mrs. Katie Tristo (Nedda Harrigan) buy-ing an issue of What the Stars Foretell at the airport. “I never make a move unless the stars are favorable. It’s dangerous,” she explains with such sincerity that the spooked newsstand clerk consults a copy

	“At its most malignant, movie astrology intertwines with 

criminal tendencies, warping minds and helping swindlers cultivate their prey.

herself. Later, to divert suspicion, Mrs. Tristo tries to convince Capricorn gangster “Killer” Madsen that he stabbed her victim on the plane: “The stars say you did.” Though Mrs. Tristo is a disguise, Katie’s belief in astrology is not. Nabbed at the end, the murderess blames her capture on an astrological oversight: “The earth sign in conflict with the air sign. I missed that one. I couldn’t win.”

In The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), astrology fuels a murderous descent into madness. Though adorned with candelabras and other period trap-pings of Gothic horror, Curt Siodmak’s screen-play departs from the supernatural essence of W. F. Harvey’s story. Instead, the mystery-thriller veers into the more human themes of greed, guilt, and abnormal psychology. Obsessed with recover-ing the secrets of ancient astrologers, Peter Lorre’s unhinged scholar tries to eliminate all who threaten his access to a library of rare books. Early in the film, we see him framed by the circles of an armillary sphere, an instrument that models the sun’s yearly path through the zodiac. The shot of his head and shoulders caged by the instrument suggests a mind already lost in the stars.

Police procedural Bunco Squad (1950) lumps astrology in with the various colorful rackets that ensnare the trust and funds of unwary citizens. After the suicide of a midwestern banker, a detec-tive reports: “Going over some of his belongings, I came across these magazines about horoscopes, astrology, and fortune telling. Thought it might be an angle for the bunco squad.” His inference paints horoscopes as a new age gateway drug, making the public susceptible to more dangerous scams.

Whirlpool’s velvet-voiced con man David Korvo (José Ferrer) describes himself as “a humble astrologer whose only diploma is the gratitude of his patients.” Surprisingly, no such character appears in the film’s source novel, Guy Endore’s disjointed, hallucinatory narrative Methinks the Lady . . . (1945). By concocting a twentieth-

Whirlpool’s astrologer homme fatal David Korvo (José Ferrer) ensnares wealthy victims like Theresa Randolph (Barbara O'Neil) with a combination of mystical quackery and oily charm

filmnoirfoundation.org  I  NUMBER 32  I  NOIR CITY	47

Beware her sting! The Locket’s Nancy Monks (Laraine Day) hears her Scorpio horoscope, foreshadowing the “destructive” side of her nature

century Svengali, screenwriters Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt not only devised a stronger plot, but also downplayed the darkness fester-ing in the heroine’s psyche. Korvo follows in the familiar footsteps of noir quacks like Jules Amthor in Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Alexis in The Amazing Mr. X (1948). As portrayed by Ferrer, Korvo exudes the authority of a doctor, but his unctuous egoism and sleazy insinuations place him outside of medical respectability.

Although Korvo’s hypnotic powers prove to be the real McCoy, he deploys astrology as a parlor trick to further his malicious agenda. Holding court at a society party, Korvo pretends to intuit Count di Ravallo’s zodiac sign, but later reveals that the Count’s fiancée leaked his birth date. Korvo tries to scare his victim Theresa with a horoscopic threat. Preening before a mirror in his office, he warns over the phone: “Oh, and watch yourself, my dear. Mars and the minor planets are entering your Seventh House until the twenty-first. That may mean serious trouble for you unless you’re very care-ful.” It is a prediction that the homme fatal will personally fulfill.

The Ram and the Scorpion

What do Nancy Monks from The Locket (1946), Leah St. Aubyn from The Sign of the Ram, and Norma Desmond from Sunset Bou-levard have in common? These fatal ladies are ruled by the planet Mars, or at least their sun signs of Aries and Scorpio are.1 Marked by Mars’s aggressive energy, Aries and Scorpio are the most warlike signs of the zodiac. “Mars is electric, forceful, active. . . . It gives courage, initiative, punch. It governs sex. It gives IT,” wrote Evange-line Adams in a 1931 issue of The New Movie Magazine. Defined by Mars-ruled zodiac signs, Nancy, Leah, and Norma acquire elevated status through their “electric” charisma. They rule their relation-ships, with disastrous consequences.

In The Locket, a horoscope provides the first inkling of Nancy’s (Laraine Day) dark side. After Nancy gives her birthday as Novem-ber 3, one of her wedding guests reads a Scorpio personality descrip-tion with a rosy outlook. But once Nancy’s fiancé leaves, the reader discovers the more ominous half of the profile: “These Scorpio peo-ple can be exceedingly cruel, selfish, indifferent, and destructive.” The contradictions foreshadow the enigmatic instability of Nancy’s

1  Since the discovery of Pluto, some astrologers consider Pluto and Mars to be co-rulers of Scorpio. However, Mars is the sign’s traditional ruler.

identity. The horoscope functions as a prophecy of Nancy’s frac-tured nature and thus adds to the film’s motif of allusions to Greek mythology, particularly the story of Cassandra.

The most explicitly astrological of 1940s thrillers, The Sign of the Ram links Leah’s ferocious willpower to her sun sign of Aries. Nimbly using a wheelchair, she radiates vitality, a hallmark of the first sign of the zodiac. Her physical courage, a trait associated with Mars, led to her disability; she dove into the Atlantic to save her stepchildren. Leah’s elaborate coiffures recall the horns of a ram. The negative side of her Martian energy manifests through her obstinate desire to be the head of her household and thwart family members’ independence at any cost.

Foster Hirsch has described Norma Desmond as one of noir’s “spider women,” but “Scorpio woman” would be an equally accu-rate label. As she informs Joe by the pool, “DeMille is Leo. I’m Scor-pio.” Norma’s jealousy, secrecy, and legendary allure all align with the popular conception of a brooding, passionate Scorpio. With her finger hooked in a cigarette holder, Norma even resembles a scor-pion holding its barbed stinger at the ready.

Magnetic and dominant, this trinity of Mars-ruled characters reinforces the enduring power of astrological archetypes. Perhaps on some level, regardless of birthdate, all of noir’s dangerous women are from Mars.

My thanks to Indie Memphis Artistic Director Miriam Bale for explaining the foundational concepts of astrology and recommend-ing several invaluable resources.

For a full bibliography, visit  bit.ly/noiroscopes.

Strong-willed and charismatic, Leah St. Aubyn (Susan Peters) is the titular Aries of The Sign of the Ram

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 31 issues available |  $5.99/each + tax at noircitymag.com

THEGOOD ASIAN

“It’s an odd thing,” Lord Henry Wotton remarks in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, “but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.” In Pornsak Pichetshote’s new comic The Good Asian, which debuted in May 2021, the trail of a missing young woman leads self-loathing Chinese American detective Edison Hark to the shadowy streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Written by Pichetshote with art by Alexandre Tefenkgi, the atmospheric nine-part series is set in 1936 and explores the anti-Asian reality of the 1930s and the legacy of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (which banned all Chinese laborers) and the 1924 Immigration Act that barred all Arabs and Asians from entering the United States. NOIR CITY talked to Pichetshote about the spirit of noir, and navigating an identity between two very different worlds.

—Nathalie Atkinson

Q&A

Pornsak Pichetshote

NOIR CITY: You’ve worked in different genres, like horror for Infidel (2018) (the acclaimed series about a Muslim woman who moves into a building haunted by entities that feed off xenophobia). Why did you choose noir for the story you wanted to tell here?

PORNSAK PICHETSHOTE: Whenever I’m looking at what I want to talk about and what I’m interested in—and this hap-pened with Infidel too—I almost spin this genre wheel of fortune, because that’s how my brain works. When I was an editor at Ver-tigo I worked with a writer named Mike Carey and something he said has always stuck with me, that if you plant your tent in the right soil, that’s half the work. The thing I love about noir is that so many of the tropes of the genre fit so well with the ideas that I wanted to talk about. The idea of someone who’s burnt out and jaded—that’s such a noir trope. The bleak uncaring world was perfect for this story, too. But also the idea, in this particular case, of the detective. Edison Hark is a Chinese American detective in the 1930s very much based on Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto.

NC: In the backmatter of issue #1 you explain how Charlie Chan was loosely based on Chang Apana, a real member of the Hono-lulu police department. What was some of your background research for Edison Hark, the racist Yellow Peril stereotype, and the climate of the era?

PP: Yunte Huang’s book (Charlie Chan: The Untold Story [2011]) was a huge reference. Like Charlie Chan, Edison Hark very much borrows from and is inspired by different aspects of Chang Apa-na’s life because I wanted to be as faithful to what the truth could have been for a Chinese American detective of the time. The truth of the matter is that mainland America wouldn’t have an Asian American detective until 1957. It’s one of the reasons I made Edi-son Hark from Hawaii, because it’s the only place someone like that could exist. The thing that really struck me when I started this process is that Apana’s life is pretty much a comic book in and of itself. If you put it in a comic book you’d say, it’s too comic-booky. The man had a bullwhip! He used to be a cow-boy! He had a scar on his eye because someone attacked him

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Infidel writer Pornsak Pichetshote and Outpost Zero artist Alexandre Tefenkgi team up for The Good Asian, a comic rooted in history that remixes and subverts noir tropes

with a sickle. It’s crazy! The other aspect of his life that I thought was super-interesting is that as a Chinese American cop he used to go into Chinese gambling and opium dens to find out who the big troublemakers were, so the cops could raid the place and know the right people to bust. He used to round up Chinese lepers to send them off to Molokai [an island leper colony]. If you look at that by the racial lens of today, there is an aspect of being a race traitor. But how would that look at the time? That was interesting to me. And going back to the title, The Good Asian, it’s a nice conflict and an embodiment of being an Asian American and straddling two lands. In this particular case you’re upholding the law of the land and doing “the right thing” but how right is that when it’s at the expense of your own community?

NC: The Good Asian is already a loaded title. Why did you choose it?

PP: It’s definitely confrontational! I hope the model minority myth is the first thing it conjures up for people. When you hear the phrase “good Asian,” you instantly think of “bad Asian” and what that might mean. There’s a long history that comes with that, this idea that there are certain minorities, ethnicities, and people within a community considered good and therefore worthy of Americanness or citizenship. It’s the way Americans have talked about Asians but also about minorities in general—that only through success and being perfect can you get equality and a certain American accep-tance. The flipside is that throughout our lives my Asian American friends and I talk about being a “good Asian” or a “bad Asian”—it runs through both cultures.

NC: What are the conversations you want readers to have, particularly with the first issue of The Good Asian coming out during Asian Ameri-can and Pacific Islander Heritage Month?

PP: My hope, for anyone who isn’t aware of it, is just realizing that the burst of anti-Asian hate crimes that have been happening

throughout the year didn’t happen in a vacuum. America in particu-lar has a long history of that. It’s baked into the laws of the land. I feel that knowing that context is the first and biggest takeaway.

NC: The character depictions subvert noir and pulp Asian stereotypes, from Edison Hark’s physicality and posture in the panels to the fact that he doesn’t speak in aphorism—and even later introducing a range of sexuality of other Asian American characters as well.

PP: The trick of the book is to embrace all the tropes of the genre while not falling into the traps. Part of noir’s appeal involves a nar-row world closing in on somebody. But looking at it from a con-temporary lens, given what we know about racial and gender poli-tics, you don’t want to get confined by how narrow that world can

“ My hope, for anyone who isn't aware of it, is just realizing that the burst of

anti-Asian hate crimes that have been happening throughout the year didn't happen in a vacuum.

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A key source for capturing the tone and style of 1930s San Francisco was the hardboiled fiction of the period

be—like its definitions of masculinity and femininity. You have to acknowledge all the different aspects that weren’t being represented in noir. I’m always fascinated by the way they would talk about homosexuality in The Maltese Falcon—it’s there but not a big deal, yet they make a point to acknowledge it.

NC: Going into this project, what were your personal noir touchstones?

PP: For me it’s 1930s and 1940s pulp detectives and going back to the novels. Hammett’s Continental Op, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins. But also some contemporary Asian American detectives—Leonard Chang’s Allen Choice, Henry Chang’s Jack Yu novels. They’re the same spirit Edison Hark comes from, taking something noir from the eyes of someone who’s been on the outskirts of society—whether it’s a person of color or any other marginalized community, to reex-amine the genre.

NC: I’ve seen you reference Hammett’s 1925 Black Mask story “Dead Yellow Women.” What specifically about that story did you want to respond to?

PP: What I find fascinating about the time is that we exotify things to give us the leniency to exploit them. So work like “Dead Yellow Women” or any sort of exotification of Chinatown—into a world

of underground tunnels and slave girls, all that sort of stuff—made it easier to overlook the inequality in the community at the time. It allowed an environment where exploitation and apathy are easier to get away with. One reason I wanted to reclaim that and still roman-ticize it [through Alex’s art] is to celebrate what was beautiful and crazy about the time and culture in all the best ways, but not in the way of the Chandler novels or even of Polanski’s film.

NC: In terms of the look of the comics, are you and Alex intentionally referencing film noir with the visual style and color palette?

PP: A lot of the book for me is how to translate that reading experi-ence of those books to a comic book format, less than the cinematic. The fun is how to creatively have a comic that feels like reading those original novels.

NC: Specifically what kinds of imagery was in the visual reference you gave Alex?

PP: There’s a big folder about Angel Island (the station that pro-cessed thousands of immigrants from 1910–40), photography of the time as well as photographs I took when I visited there. A couple of them will run in the backmatter of issue #2 with the park’s per-mission. Some of it is contemporary photos of San Francisco’s Chi-

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Extensive archival research and reference visits to sites like Angel Island inform every panel of the comic

natown now, certain buildings that are still there. And some from the era. There are a lot of photos of different clubs and bars of the time—Forbidden City, USA (2014) by Arthur Dong has tons of great photos.

NC: In traditional comics fashion, you’ve provided an email address and will run a proper letters page in every issue. What do you hope people write in about?

PP: I hope to be educated. The thing about Asian Americans is that if you look at a group like Latinos it incorporates many different cultures from many different countries, but they are held together by a common language. Asian Americans don’t have that—it’s a wide range of countries and cultures and languages. The opportu-nity to hear stories I haven’t heard is something I’m very interested in. The awareness is better than it was twenty years ago but, for example, for the longest time growing up most people didn’t know anything about Japanese internment. We’ll see if people take me up on the offer or not.

NC: Noir- and neo-noir-inflected crime in pop culture seems to be even more popular than usual. Why do you think it strikes a chord in this cultural moment?

PP: I’ve been really curious about that as well. Part of it is just because of how turbulent the times are right now, and the genre is

almost a hundred years old and maybe there’s a familiarity. There’s a comfort-food aspect. And I also think that the world itself is perhaps not as different as we want it to be. This cruel uncaring world, this feeling of loneliness in the protagonist. One of the things I found even before the anti-Asian hate crimes increased is that the level of xenophobia and the economic anxiety of the 1930s felt very resonant to where we are now.

NC: Not to mention the police brutality against certain racial groups, and the general angst.

PP: When I initially pitched it, I thought the timeliness aspect was going to be a community that came of age beneath an immigration ban. That’s what I was looking at at the time, and I talked about the book being sort of speculative fiction set in the past. In the time it took from pitching this book to writing it, that piece faded away and it now feels very reflective of the time. It feels like something that could happen to us, and something that’s still happening.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The Good Asian by Pornsak Pichetshote; art by Alexandre Tefenkgi (Outpost Zero), colors by Lee Loughridge, lettering by Jeff Powell. Published by Image Comics.

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 I loved this book. Although it has played merry  hell with my schedule as I couldn’t stop reading  it. The interviews from thirty years ago are  fabulous. Garnier writes—in a language which is  not his own—brilliantly.

 –Kevin Brownlow

 I discovered and learned so many things in

 Scoundrels & Spitballers. Garnier’s book is a  real accomplishment, exciting, incisive, amusing  and very well documented. A whole part of  Hollywood’s history is resurrected. You feel more  intelligent after reading it.

 –Bertrand Tavernier

 Scoundrels & Spitballers isn’t about Ben  Hecht or Donald Ogden Stewart or any of the  hotshot $5000-a-week screenwriters. It’s about  the substrata beneath them—John Bright and  Marguerite Roberts, Robert Tasker, Rowland  Brown and Buzz Bezzerides, and the culture in  which they flourished, fed by booksellers like  Stanley Rose and Milton Luboviski. Philippe  Garnier’s book is written with enough snap and  sizzle to fuel a noir double-bill, and the head- spinning quotes don’t stop until the last page.

 —Scott Eyman, John Wayne: The Life and  Legend and Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise

 Where has this book been all my life? Hiding out  in France, I guess. Not only did I learn so much  I didn’t know about Hollywood writers, but while

 reading I felt transported back to old Los Angeles  itself. This is a miraculous book, a time machine,  and we owe a lot to Philippe Garnier for tracking  down these epoch-making writers in the nick of  time and preserving their stories for the rest of  us. Oh, and it’s gossipy.

 —Alexander Payne

 A fascinating tour through the overlooked locales

 — the watering holes, radical bookstores, even  jailhouses— through which passed a decade’s  worth of Movieland scribes, from the legendary  names like Cain, West and McCoy to the lesser- known or forgotten newspaper men, press  agents, con artists and others who stumbled into  scripting the first full decade of talking pictures.

 —Karina Longworth

 Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in  Howard Hughes’s Hollywood and  You Must Remember This podcast

 Hollywood broke a few writers’ souls, but it also helped  many — and definitely inspired a few, says author Philippe  Garnier — which is why Scoundrels & Spitballers is to be  read more as a book about writers and Hollywood, rather  than one about screenwriters in Hollywood.

 AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY from

blackpoolproductions.com

The Domestic Drama of The Reckless Moment

Christina Newland

In nearly every respect, The Reckless Moment (1949) is a stark contrast to conventions enshrined in our understanding of film noir. Noir is meant to be sleek and nocturnal, lurching along shadowy corridors and the rainy curbsides of derelict city streets; it is typically about the working class and the low-rent; it

tends to be male-centric. The sunny suburban enclaves of Southern California are among the last settings you’d imagine when thinking of noir, and respectable middle-class house-wives are rarely the protagonists. But Max Ophüls, a German Jewish émigré who made masterpieces on two continents, did not work from any conventional playbook.

After escaping the Nazis in both Germany and occupied Paris before his trip to Holly-wood, Ophüls’s experience was vast. He had already distinguished himself as a filmmaker with an impressive dedication to the art of the complex tracking shot, possessing a visual flair head and shoulders above that of most directors. He primarily established his name in noir with the one-two punch in 1949 of The Reckless Moment and Caught. Concerned as Ophüls’s body of work was with the past, dreams, and the nature of memory—often via the framework of extended flashback sequences—it seemed only a matter of time before he would fit into the mold of noir.

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Protective mother Joan Bennett will go to great lengths to clean up her children’s messes, even concealing an accidental death

The Reckless Moment opens in an affluent coastal town outside Los Angeles. The community looks idyllic, but the circumstances are much less so. The story would not feel out of place if it were set in 1959 rather than 1949, with Ophüls already looking askance at the benign surface sameness of suburbia. As a rule of thumb, women in noir are sexually precocious, untrustworthy, and otherwise fast-liv-ing. In a mainstream cinema where women were depicted either as creatures of the nightclub or the kitchen, noir women were almost always the former. But the women of Ophüls’s films often moved out of this territory—in this case into the clean, brightly lit homes of ordinary Americana.

Up through his final film, Lola Montès (1955), Ophüls showed an interest in strong-willed women caught in webs of ambition and expectation, hemmed in by constructs of social propriety. Along with his thematic interests, the director’s style was grandiose in all the best ways: sweeping tracking shots, byzantine use of cranes and dollies, and a restless, roving camera. Ophüls depicts a claustrophobic and vivid account of a woman’s unraveling in the face of blackmail.

Housewife Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) is the head of the house-hold while her husband works overseas in postwar Berlin. Lucia writes him regular but vague dispatches about the daily business of looking after their two teenage children and an elderly father-in-law. Bennett has a regal bearing, her finely etched features serving her

well in the role of a woman who runs her home with brisk efficiency. The trouble begins with teen daughter Bea (Geraldine Brooks), who seems to be play-acting the femme fatale role. Bea gets in over her head with her sleazy, much older boyfriend, Ted Darby (Shepperd Strud-wick), and in the course of defending herself during a fight she inad-vertently causes Darby to fall to his death. Lucia discovers his corpse outside the family’s boathouse, and in a rush of panic and humiliation takes the body out to sea, with anchor attached, to secretly dispose of it. Complicating matters is the arrival of a blackmailer named Don-nelly (played by a slippery James Mason), who is in possession of Bea’s incriminating correspondence with Darby. Donnelly works for a big-ger fish named Nagel (Roy Roberts), who wants the then-exorbitant

sum of five thousand dollars to keep Bea’s involvement quiet.

While Bennett’s Lucia may initially seem like a victim—a protective mother trying to shield her daughter from harm—it becomes increas-ingly clear that she’s as concerned with protecting her way of life as she is driven by maternal instinct. In a memorable scene, she drives into the seedy urban arena of downtown Los Angeles, leaving the sub-urbs to venture into the maw of dive bars and back alleys. She is both repelled and fascinated. That same fine line dominates her relationship with Donnelly, who exudes large quantities of sleazy charm.

Throughout, Lucia remains a sympathetic character, which Ophüls highlights via Donnelly’s evolving perception of her. When

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Bennett breaks bread with James Mason, who plays her blackmailer, under the watchful eye of director Max Ophüls

she is dragged into the undertow, she desperately tries to maintain a rigid and orderly nature, clinging to any semblance of domestic nor-mality. Ever the pragmatist, Lucia decides not to inform her husband of the situation but to raise the blackmail cash in the most common-place ways imaginable: pawning a brooch, slashing her grocery bud-get, cutting corners off her luxury. Seeing her lonely, stoic struggle to save her family and their reputation, Donnelly is gradually moved and impressed by this woman. Her postwar female prerogative is to keep the home fires burning and the children looked after. She doesn’t allow herself a moment to fall to pieces—or admit her grow-ing feelings for the mysterious Irishman Mason plays so cleverly. Although it never emerges into a fully reciprocal romance, there is a bubbling attraction between the pair, whose shared secret takes on a deeper tone when Donnelly turns on his boss in order to help Lucia.

By 1949, Bennett was well-versed at playing dames. At thirty-nine, she’d already had a long career with many iterations: appear-ing in her first film in 1916, becoming a de rigueur blonde ingenue in the 1930s, then going brunette in the 1940s to usher in her femme fatale persona under the direction of filmmakers like Fritz Lang. But in noirs like The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), she plays the slinky victimizer or the blackmailer, not the victim. For The Reckless Moment, she made herself seem more matronly, a believably bourgeois mother of teenagers. She was more than up to the challenge, giving a restrained performance of subtly mounting anxiety.

At the time of its release in 1949, critical and public response to The Reckless Moment was muted; perhaps its subtleties were lost on audiences accustomed to a genre more populated with action-oriented ex-GIs than nervous, chain-smoking women. Today, its reputation has been revived by fresh pop culture interest in the

malaise-filled Eisenhower era. Buoyed by reprints of Richard Yates and Rona Jaffe novels and the popularity of Mad Men (2007–15), the film has been positively reevaluated by critics. In 2001, the film was remade as The Deep End by the directorial team David Siegel and Scott McGehee, with the formidable Tilda Swinton in the role of Lucia. This time, it is not her daughter but her gay son she is try-ing to protect, proving that the source material—Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s 1947 novel The Blank Wall—was a flexible text for con-temporary adaptation.

Director Todd Haynes has also discussed the film’s influence on his work, particularly in his drama Far from Heaven (2002). “I’ve never studied a shot and copied it to the degree that, in Far from Heaven, I copy Joan Bennett crying on the bed,” he admitted in an interview with Film Comment. Max Ophüls only made a limited number of movies in Hollywood, The Reckless Moment being his last before returning to France for the remainder of his career. The impression he left, however, was enormous.

In a sad endnote for such a great performance, Bennett would eventually fall into a plot none too dissimilar from one in her other noir films. In 1951, her husband, producer Walter Wanger, accused her of sleeping with her agent, Jennings Lang—and promptly shot his rival in the groin. Lang survived, but unlike Lucia, Bennett could not save her reputation. After that incident the roles dwindled, a firm reminder lest we judge Lucia harshly for her desperate attempts to uphold the status quo. Lucia Harper knew what Joan Bennett later learned: a woman’s reputation meant everything in mid-cen-tury America. The Reckless Moment showed that women might be forced to sacrifice their happiness to hold on to it.

filmnoirfoundation.org  I  NUMBER 32  I  NOIR CITY	59

THE
LEPER WITH

THE MOST FINGERS

The Art of “Ely Legerdemain”

By Eddie Muller

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GLORIA GRAHAME #1247 11" x 14" Mixed Media: sketched in pen, laid in with colored pencil and coffee

AUDREY (In Purple), 2017

11 x 14 in. Candy painting on board

Iliked the artwork the minute I saw it. Its allusions to clas-sic film were obvious but unique, and the technique ranged from impressionistic to hyperrealistic—sometimes in the same painting. Inspecting the originals closely, I was even more intrigued. What medium was this? On what sort of odd canvas

was it created? What tool was used for the detailed cross-hatching? Answers: 1) melted jelly beans, 2) a coffee-soaked T-shirt, and 3) the cap of a ballpoint pen.

My introduction to the art of Ely Legerdemain (we’ll get to that) was orchestrated by an artists’ rep named Leslie Lakes, herself an artist and curator. She was familiar with the NOIR CITY festival in San Francisco and suggested the art of “L” (as he signs the pieces) might be worked into the festival’s extracurricular activities. The scans she shared were enough to convince me to view the originals. When we met, Lakes revealed that L’s backstory is as exceptional as his art.

Lakes’s specialty is working with artists who are incarcerated or “uniquely brained,” and she describes the pseudonymous Leg-erdemain (French for “light of hand”) as a “schizophrenic savant, a brilliant self-taught artist who began his artistic journey only a few years ago.” Trauma due to the loss of his father brought on disso-

ciative identity disorder; L has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolarism, and multiple personality disorder. He lives under con-stant medical care in a facility in the Midwest.

Early on, entirely new to the artistic process and experimenting with various mediums, L made pigments from coffee, candy, food coloring dyes, and toothpaste (for added textural qualities). He often used a pen cap and his fingers as implements, or twirled a moist-ened cotton swab to create a desired effect like vaporous plumes of smoke wafting from a cigarette. While some of the work—typically ranging in size from 11 × 14 in. to 16 × 20 in. or larger—is created on art paper, many “canvases” are handmade from towels or sweat-shirts soaked in coffee. This stiffens the fabric, as well as creating a sepia tone. He then “gessoes” it with multiple layers of acrylic paint to achieve a unique effect.

“In his manic states,” Lakes explained, “L lives, breathes, and even dreams art for fifteen to twenty hours a day. From this obses-sive-compulsive energy has emerged a distinctive style.”

In spring 2019, Lakes installed a sizable exhibit of L’s work in conjunction with the California Film Institute, based in Marin County. The show primarily revolved around movies, film noir in particular. It included depictions of scenes from Psycho, Kiss Me

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Left: MITCHUM (Silver & Gold), 2016	Above: VERTIGO
10 x 13 in. Acrylic on coffee canvas	30 7/16 x 27 1/2 in.

Acrylic on handmade canvas (Towel

soaked in coffee, dried stiff, gesso base)

Deadly, This Gun for Hire, Sunset Boulevard, The Third Man, and Murder, My Sweet as well as portraits of actors and directors such as Robert Mitchum, Cary Grant, Ava Gardner, Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart, and Kim Novak.

The work isn’t only cinema inspired. L has done paintings of Native Americans; young ballet dancers; musicians such as Bruce Springsteen, Merle Haggard, David Bowie, Elvis Presley, and many more. It’s not all representative, however. L also creates surrealistic, abstract, erotic, and completely original pieces out of what Lakes calls his “divine madness.”

He titled one painting I’m the Leper with the Most Fingers. “Due to his disorders, L likens himself to a leper,” Lakes explained, “because people with mental illness are ostracized by society at large. But they are still possessed of gifts, talents, and emotions that need to be expressed and shared, not only to connect with others but also for their own health and well-being.”

Lakes has visited L several times, and they talk by phone regu-larly. She shared some of his observations about what drives his creative compulsion. “Creating art provides me with great joy,” he says. “It helps me survive one more day, one more week, one more month. Art is my life raft, my panacea, my cure-all. Simply put, art is my necessity, because I have nothing else. Art is quite literally my life. Art is me. It has to be, or else I will die; be it mentally or physi-cally. Art keeps me alive. It keeps me focused. It gives me purpose. It is my love, my mistress, my wife, my best friend, my therapist, and my salvation. In a deeply ironic fashion, the very hardship that life in a schizophrenic state and agoraphobic isolation presents has forced my subconscious and unconscious minds to marry and give birth to a solution for survival. Which is something I never could have produced on a conscious level. What a miracle!”

Left: RICHARD WIDMARK, 2017
9 x 11 in. Ink and graphite on paper

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PRIME CUTS: My Favorite Neo-Noir

S.A. Cosby

point blank

In the opening credits of John Boor-man’s Point Blank (1967), we see Mal Reese (a smarmy John Vernon, per-fectly cast) imploring his old friend Walker  (a  sneering,  hard-as-cement  Lee Marvin) to help him rob a pair of couriers that work for a criminal organization as they make a cash drop at the abandoned

Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay.

The scene is filled with a manic energy that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Mal’s desperate pleas are replete with the unspoken bonds that often swim under the surface of male friendships. The cool, calcu-

lating Walker will of course help his friend. The money is nice, and he trusts Mal—as much as he trusts anyone.

This is the first indication that Point Blank will diverge from its source mate-rial in unique and interesting ways. For the uninitiated, Point Blank is based on The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, the 1962 novel written under the pseudonym Rich-ard Stark, in which the author introduced his automaton-like thief Parker. Cunning, relentless, and utterly devoid of a con-science, Parker is a tireless engine of acqui-sition in the twenty-four novels in which

he is featured, a professional thief who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals. Parker is the archetypical antihero. He is as unstoppable as fate.

In Point Blank, director John Boorman and screenwriters Alexander Jacobs and David & Rafe Newhouse soften some of Parker’s jagged edges. The most obvious change is the name of the central character. Other changes include adding flashbacks that display the more human side of Walker: meeting his wife Lynne (Sharon Acker), his friendship with Mal. These scenes are shot with the bubblegum-bright cinematography

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Crime in a river: All that hard-as-cement Lee Marvin wants in Los Angeles is his money, exactly ninety-three thousand dollars

Vernon’s Mal may be a bit over the top as villains go, but that only makes you hun-grier for him to receive his comeuppance. When he does, the narrative shifts from personal revenge to dispassionate, profes-sional compensation. Walker still wants his money: ninety-three thousand dollars and not a penny more. With Mal dealt with, Walker sets about dismantling the Organi-zation until someone—anyone—pays him his goddamn money.

It’s here that the film finds it groove as it shifts into high gear. We meet the vari-ous bosses and hoodlums that make up the Organization as Walker systematically takes them apart piece by bloody piece. Boorman employs a brutalism in his art direction as Walker get closer to his goal. The build-ings are monstrosities of brick and steel, the streets are dark pathways that seem to stretch on forever into the horizon. When Walker confront Carter (Lloyd Bochner),

that was prevalent in the 1960s, but under-neath that primary palette is a kaleidoscope of dark grays and blacks that foreshadows the treachery that will nearly cost Walker his life. The beautiful corruption that per-meates the world of Point Blank is stylisti-cally stunning and arresting. It gives each scene an air of menace that swirls around the characters despite the fake smiles plas-tered across their faces. Boorman makes bold choices with his structure and visual composition that give the film a hallucina-tory feel. When Walker shows up at Lynne’s door to confront his wife after she and Mal have double-crossed him and almost killed him, we see him subdue her before shooting her bed several times. As it slowly dawns on Walker that Mal isn’t in the apartment, we watch him smash Lynne’s perfume bot-tles in the sink. The various fragrances run together like melted wax, and we are given a slow-motion flashback of the previous scene. Boorman did a fantastic job of giving us a glimpse into Walker’s mind. To the out-side world, he appears to be a determined man of implacable will. Boorman uses scenes like these to illustrate the malaise in his tortured psyche.

That’s not to say that Point Blank is an exercise in art house experimentalism. It has scenes of stark—no pun intended— violence that are shocking in their brutality for 1967, and stunning in their execution. Walker is without mercy, without compas-sion. His motivations seem simplistic at first. He wants his money. He wants revenge. But

he is also angry and, dare we say, wounded? He was betrayed by his wife and his friend. As the old saying goes, the deeper the hurt, the more vicious the revenge. And Walker has viciousness to spare. The first victim of his vitriol is a henchman of low-level bag man Stegman (Michael Strong). He beats the henchman for Stegman’s location. Steg-man, a sleazy car salesman who moonlights as a cog in the Organization, literally drips with duplicitousness. Walker takes him on the worst test drive of his life in order to get the information he’s after. Stegman tells him where Lynne’s sister, Chris (Angie Dickinson), can be found—and insinuates that Mal has taken up with the young lady.

Lee Marvin gives an utterly believable performance as Walker. Tall and angular with a face like a chunk of chipped con-crete, Marvin is the epitome of the movie tough guy. His craggy features are weath-ered in ways that only hint at the things he’s willing to do to get what he wants. He owns the screen in a way that is rare these days. He exudes confidence and menace in equal measure.

Chris becomes the enticing love inter-est. She is as tough as Walker on the inside while jaw-droppingly gorgeous on the out-side. A rose dipped in brass. An incredible Dickinson imbues Chris with a world-wea-riness that is matched by her smoldering sensuality.

Walker finds out Chris hates Mal almost as much as he does, and she agrees to help him get his money and his pound of flesh.

one-third of the three-headed Cerberus that runs the Organization, he shows that he is not just a leg breaker. His intelligence shines through as he is again double-crossed, only to turn the tables on his enemies.

As the film hurtles to its conclusion, we experience a dizzying array of twists until we arrive back at the beginning, at Alca-traz. The ending is ambiguous, much like a real-life crime.

The influence of Point Blank cannot be overstated. In tone and visuals, it opened the door for films like Get Carter (1971),

Prime Cut (1972), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), and others. Mov-ies that combined the artistic ethos of the 1960s and 1970s with the traditional underpinnings of the morally complex noir film. The hyper-stylized, dreamlike crime films of the 1990s—Red Rock West (1993),

Boiling Point (1993), and Truth or Conse-quences, N.M. (1997) among them—also owe it a debt of thanks.

Point Blank is, in many ways, the line of demarcation between the crime dramas of the 1940s and 1950s and the golden age of auteur-driven films of the 1970s. A bridge that brings classic noir into the modern age.

And Walker remains the king of the badasses. Mel Gibson’s Porter, in the 1999 film Payback, also based on The Hunter, may be a more accurate interpretation of Parker, but Lee Marvin’s Walker would eat him for lunch.

Then wash him down with a Scotch on the rocks.

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NOIR or NOT
Steve Kronenberg

Surgeon Richard Anderson assesses his handiwork as Will Geer whispers words of encouragement to a reconstructed Rock Hudson in Seconds

SECONDS

early every noir involves a Ndeal with the devil. Botched heists, backstabbing lovers, dirty  deeds—all  enmeshed

in diabolical pacts doomed to end badly. “Be careful what you wish for” could be a noir tagline, but the adage was never more darkly realized than in Seconds (1966). Pre-ceded by The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964), Seconds is the third entry in what became known as John Frankenheimer’s “paranoia trilogy.” Adapted by Lewis John Carlino from David Ely’s 1962 novel, Frankenheimer’s film is an eerie allegory that couples Faust with the

fragility of identity. Seconds is generally viewed as an amalgam of horror and sci-ence fiction, but it’s infused with the pitch-black fatalism and stylish photography of the most exemplary noirs.

Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is a fiftyish businessman mired in mid-life ennui. Trapped in a dull job and a loveless marriage to his wife Emily (a heartrending performance by Frances Reid), Hamilton yearns for an escape. His wish is granted when he’s contacted by Charlie (Murray Hamilton), an old friend he thought was dead. Instead, Charlie has been reborn, and he directs Hamilton to a secretive organi-

zation known only as the Company. For a hefty fee, the cryptic corporation will pro-vide Hamilton with a faked death and a new identity: a surgically refurbished face and body, a Malibu mansion, a solicitous butler (Wesley Addy), and a fresh start as a renowned artist. Encouraged by the Com-pany’s fraudulently folksy founder (Will Geer), Hamilton signs up and emerges from a swath of bandages as Antiochus “Tony” Wilson (Rock Hudson). A Com-pany “counselor” (Khigh Dhiegh) delight-edly tells Wilson about the benefits of his rebirth: “You don’t have to prove anything anymore. You are accepted. You are alone

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			Frankenheimer likened Howe’s approach to “semi-documentary		
			realism,” and the cinematographer’s stark style and visual imagina-		
			tion give the film an uncomfortable immediacy. The picture opens		
			with a remarkable tracking shot of a glum Hamilton slouching		
			through New York’s Grand Central Station. Using a handheld cam-		
			era and fisheye lens, Howe shoots Hamilton from behind as he’s		
			being stalked by a Company rep (actor Frank Campanella with a		
			camera harnessed to his back). Howe compresses the station’s cav-		
			ernous interiors, emphasizing Hamilton’s growing claustrophobia		
			and paranoia (Frankenheimer diverted a legion of actual commut-		
			ers by openly staging an intimate tryst between a male and female		
			model). Tight facial closeups heighten the film’s sense of entrapment		
			and dread. When Hamilton boards a commuter train, the camera		
			skitters between his world-weary face and the dismal landscape he		
			views from the windows. With a beautifully composed and inte-		
			grated shot, Howe takes us into the Hamiltons’ shared bedroom.		
			The scene is draped in shadows; low-key lighting peeks around dark		
			corners and sharp angles, denoting the couple’s emotional and phys-		
			ical detachment. For Hamilton’s queasy journey to the Company’s		
			offices, Howe employs a wide-angle lens and deep focus, snaking		
			us through a sweaty dry-cleaning plant belching billows of steam		
			and a blighted slaughterhouse lined with slabs of beef. Shooting		
			directly into a blinding overhead light, Howe depicts the surgical		
			procedure that will change Hamilton’s face and body; the imagery		
As angst-ridden Arthur Hamilton, John Randolph expertly conveys a blend of	is disturbingly cold, clinical, and sanitized (portions of the scene		
confusion, depression, and desperation	were shot during an actual rhinoplasty, causing several members of		
					
in the world.” Despite his oceanfront manse, material wealth, and	Howe’s crew to faint). During a sequence in which a drugged Ham-		
a tentative romance with the free-spirited Norma Marcus (an enig-	ilton imagines himself raping a woman, Howe plays with distor-		
matic Salome Jens), Wilson’s new life is as empty and soulless as his	tion, recalling the hallucinatory camerawork in Murder, My Sweet		
old one. He returns to the Company and requests a redo, one that	(1944), Spellbound (1945), and Vertigo (1958); art director Ted		
he alone can control. The transition comes at a terrible price.	Haworth built a warped set to complement Howe’s contorted visu-		
Seconds was billed as “The John Frankenheimer Film,” but the	als. Under Howe’s unerring eye, Seconds becomes a waking night-		
director	wisely	collaborated			
with a stellar cast and crew			
tightly  focused  on  the  film’s			
tone and theme. Frankenheimer			
tapped Jerry Goldsmith to cre-			
ate an appropriately menacing			
musical score. Saul Bass crafted			
the opening title sequence, a			
jarring montage of fragmented			
facial images perfectly attuned			
to  the  movie’s  emphasis  on			
crushed	identities	and  bro-			
ken dreams. “Tampering with			
humanity  that  way  is  pretty			
scary,” Bass recalled, “so in the			
titles we broke apart, distorted			
and reconstituted	the human			

face to symbolically set the stage for what was to come.” (Bass used the face of his long-time assistant Art Goodman.)

Frankenheimer insisted that Seconds be shot in black and white, and recruited the great James Wong Howe to create the

film’s bleak chiaroscuro vision.  A stitched and startled Rock Hudson examines his surgical redo as Richard Anderson looks on with approval

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Seconds director John Frankenheimer steadies himself amid art director Ted Haworth’s dizzyingly distorted sets

mare, perfectly in keeping with noir’s dissolute and dispassionate sensibility. Leonard Maltin hailed it as “Howe’s masterpiece . . . one of the most faultlessly photographed films of all time.”

Frankenheimer originally wanted one actor to portray both Hamilton and Wilson. It was Rock Hudson who convinced the

director to hire separate players to enact the identity swap, and his advice was well-taken. Hudson’s name appears above the cred-its, but it’s John Randolph’s performance as Hamilton that sets the story in motion. Frankenheimer was the first film director to employ Randolph after the actor endured eighteen years on the Hol-lywood blacklist. With his sad, sagging face and slumped shoulders, Randolph conveys an uncomfortable meld of exhaustion, oppres-sion, and fear. His anguished byplay with Frances Reid is notable for its lack of chemistry: both Hamilton and Emily confront each other with regret and resignation, silently acknowledging that their dreams have crumbled. Hamilton is ready for rejuvenation.

Hudson honed his acting chops in several of Douglas Sirk’s lush 1950s melodramas. But by 1966 he’d been relegated to playing vapid leading men in light comedies—an image he was eager to shed. Over Frankenheimer’s objections, he lobbied hard for the role of Tony Wilson, and his persistence paid off. In Seconds, Hudson displays a gravitas and range unseen in his previous work. Wilson and Ham-ilton are two sides of the same coin, and by carefully studying Ran-dolph’s moods and manner, Hudson generated a synergy between both characters. He channels the sorrow and anxiety that plagued Hamilton, allowing just enough of Wilson’s former identity to sur-face through his newly varnished veneer. Hudson also adds a touch of uneasiness to his performance. Wilson’s predestined Malibu life-style leaves him disoriented and fearful. We see the dread in his face, his wide eyes, his blank gaze; physically and psychically, he’s on shaky ground. Hudson’s usually buoyant acting style is replaced by uncertainty, timidity, and terror. When Wilson pays a poignant visit to Emily, Hudson’s interplay with Reid is imbued with sorrow; Wil-son’s new life is yet another dashed dream. Salome Jens remembered Hudson as generous, secure, and extremely well-prepared: “I fell in love with him. I thought he was the best.” Hudson rightly cited Seconds as his proudest moment on film. His portrayal also bore

Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man: A disillusioned Rock Hudson ponders his artistic output and his soulless Malibu lifestyle during a crucial scene in Seconds

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John Frankenheimer (at extreme left) consults (consoles?) a prostrate Rock Hudson while shooting Seconds’ unnerving finale

personal resonance for him: as a closeted gay man in 1960s Hol-lywood, he was undergoing an identity crisis of his own.
Frankenheimer chose sixty-four-year-old Will Geer (another blacklist victim) to play the deceptively affable founder of the Com-pany, billed as the “Old Man” in the credits. The grandfatherly CEO is easily the film’s creepiest character, his benevolent smile barely concealing a satanic soul. He’s the harbinger of the desola-tion and loss that lie at the film’s core. Screenwriter Carlino gives Geer the movie’s most evocative lines, and the actor delivers them in a soothing drawl—both plaintive and sinister—as he coaxes a reluctant Hamilton to buy into a Company makeover. “Heck, boy, you owe yourself this,” he gently intones. “Rebirth, life again, begin again. You wanted this, you owe yourself a chance. Nobody’s gonna miss you, are they?” The Old Man dangles the bait and Hamilton makes the switch.

“My name’s Ruby. I’ve been assigned to go over the circum-stances of your death with you.” Jeff Corey, another blacklist casu-alty, delivers a chilly performance as Mr. Ruby, the Company’s sec-ond-in-command. Ruby is the polar opposite of Geer’s personable Old Man. Corey’s poker face and stony eyes become serpentine as he tells Hamilton about his upcoming faked death and radical sur-gery while casually munching on the Company’s daily lunch special: “They have a wonderful way of baking cheese on the chicken so it’s really crispy.” The chicken may be hot, but Corey’s demeanor coats the scene with a layer of ice.

Frankenheimer knew Seconds was in trouble when it was merci-lessly skewered at the Cannes Film Festival. The film fared no bet-ter during its US theatrical run. Paramount cold-shouldered it with a tepid marketing campaign. Despite a career-best performance, Hud-

son’s casting became problematic. His audience wasn’t interested in anything that didn’t pair him with Doris Day; genre fans thought he was too shallow to carry a dark film. The movie’s second act is flawed by an unnecessarily lengthy segment in which Hudson and Jens cavort in a giant wine vat during a frenzied bacchanalia. “[The film] played to an audience of six people,” Frankenheimer recalled. Jens saw patrons run for the exits after the film’s rhinoplasty scene. Seconds was simply too dark and outré for mid-1960s moviegoers; the film so terrified Beach Boys lead singer-songwriter Brian Wilson he avoided movie theaters for sixteen years after seeing it, claiming the picture was part of a plot hatched by archrival Phil Spector “in order to mess with my mind.” Attention and acclaim have finally caught up with the film. In Time Out New York, critic Andrew John-ston called Seconds “easily the most subversive film ever to come out of Hollywood.” In his essay for Criterion’s Blu-ray release, David Sterritt lauded it as “a vertiginous blend of genre elements . . . worthy of Hitchcock . . . and Kafka.” Frankenheimer candidly assessed the film’s legacy: “It’s the only movie, really, that’s ever gone from failure to classic without ever having been a success.”

Seconds’ fusion of panic and paranoia anticipated an entire sub-genre of films focused on conspiracy, deception, and stolen iden-tities: The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), The Stepford Wives (1975), The Skin I Live In (2011), Get Out (2017). Critics applaud it as a caustic critique of America’s obsession with shallow materialism and eternal youth. But the movie is more than a sociopolitical diatribe. With its cynicism, somber tone, and shock-ing finale, Seconds is prime noir, a bitter brew preferably savored on a raw and rainy night.

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BOOK vs. FILM

Ben Terrall

When he was four years old, Abra-ham Polonsky told his parents he was going to be a novelist. His prophecy came true, but he didn’t

know until quite a bit later that he was also going to be a filmmaker.
Polonsky based his directorial debut, Force of Evil (1948), on Ira Wolfert’s 1943 novel Tucker’s People, a story about working-class brothers locked into the numbers racket. The book took place in the same New York streets where Polonsky had grown up. He told an interviewer that although Wolfert was a good writer, “He couldn’t write a screenplay to save his life.”

I said to Wolfert: I want to have no mis-understanding with you. I would like you to write your own screenplay. . . . It will not be the screenplay I will shoot. I’m going to write that screenplay, but I will read yours and use what I like. . . . He trusted my ability to do a good screenplay because he too had seen Body and Soul [which Polonsky wrote] and liked it. So that was the arrangement we

made, and that made our relationship both intimate and trusting all the way.
Polonsky had long discussions with Wolfert about structure, mostly aimed at shortening the story to create a seventy-nine-minute feature from a nearly five-hundred-page book. Instead of the novel’s omniscient perspective, John Garfield’s char-acter, Joe Morse, narrates the film in a first-person voiceover. Echoing the key struggle of the book, Joe pressures his brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), to join forces with him under the thumb of racket boss Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts). Tucker’s ambition to expand his operation at the expense of many small-time operators results in a fraternal battle over ethics and integrity.

The most noticeable change in Force of Evil’s screenplay is a composite protagonist drawn from two of the book’s main charac-ters. Joe Morse is partly based on the char-acter of Joe Minch, but also has similarities to the novel’s Henry Wheelock, a lawyer for Ben Tucker. In Tucker’s People, Minch is a

hard-bitten, violent character who’s spent a year in prison for armed robbery and beaten an assault rap, while the film’s Joe Morse is a smoother, more sophisticated operator.

In Force of Evil, Tucker’s wife, Edna (Marie Windsor), and Leo’s secretary, Doris (Beatrice Pearson), are both tougher and more self-sufficient than Wolfert’s compara-tively passive creations, in stark contrast to the stereotypical female roles in crime pictures of the period. Such strong women are present in all of Polonsky’s writing, and Windsor and Pearson deliver forceful performances.

Though it is free of the degrading stereo-typing rife in mid-twentieth-century Holly-wood, Force of Evil skirts racial issues. In the book, Leo Morse runs a bookmaking operation in Harlem—a location changed for the movie. Wolfert describes Leo cir-culating throughout the predominantly Black neighborhood and having interac-tions with a West Indian numbers runner, discussing their mutual business. Joe Morse comments that his brother is “liked all over

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Harlem.” One of the novel’s subsidiary characters that didn’t make it into Force of Evil is a brutal cop who engages in racist harassment of a dignified Black woman he takes into custody. The movie has only a few Black actors with no speaking lines (a nightclub combo, a few men milling outside a courtroom).

Polonsky said Force of Evil is “ostensi-bly a melodrama but it’s really an autopsy on capitalism.” The film’s take on corpo-rate power is distilled into an exchange between Leo’s accountant, Bauer (Howland Chamberlain), and a henchman for a rival mobster moving in on Tucker.

Bauer: “I don’t want to have any-thing to do with gangsters.” Henchman: “What do you mean, gangsters? It’s business.”

These lines were filmed more than two decades before the comparison reached its cinematic apex in The Godfather (1972).

Wolfert described Tucker’s People as “the story of American business from Rockefeller to Hitler.” The novel includes digressions about historical developments of the period, especially Nazism, which Polonsky’s film doesn’t touch upon.

Wolfert was inspired to write about the “policy racket” while covering Republican District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey’s cam-paign to rid New York City of bookmak-ers. The young reporter had an instinctive dislike for Dewey, but became fascinated by the DA’s main target, Jimmy Hines, head of the city’s largest illegal betting organiza-tion. Wolfert described Hines as “a helluva guy.” Wolfert was so annoyed by Dewey’s naked ambition (the DA would twice run

for president) that he placed a bet on the daily number while in a courtroom watch-ing Dewey work, then wrote an article about it that made the front page of the New York Times. Dewey was not amused.

Wolfert, who began his journalism career as a fourteen-year-old copyboy at the Brooklyn American, won a Pulitzer for his reportage from Guadalcanal during World War II. He began writing Tucker’s People in 1938, finished it in 1940, but didn’t see it published until 1943. Veteran edi-tor Angus Cameron, who shepherded the book through multiple rejections, hailed it as “one of the best novels I had anything to do with.” The book drew accolades from the New York Times, which praised its “blowtorch intensity,” and H. G. Wells, who called it “a great book by a really tal-ented author.”

Predictably, Polonsky had trouble with Hollywood censors over the Force of Evil’s screenplay. The initial draft was rejected out-right by the Breen Office, forcing Polonsky to revise it. He later told his biographers, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, “I was break-ing every single rule that the censors had. They constantly said, ‘You can’t do that.’” Polonsky added, “The biggest problem the censors had was that the Garfield charac-ter, the syndicate lawyer, doesn’t want to improve humanity, he just wants revenge!”

Indeed, Joe Morse is far from a con-ventional hero, but one would be hard pressed to find anyone in the picture who is squeaky clean. The corruption goes beyond individual characters. As Martin Scorsese has noted, “The moral drama has almost a mythic scale. It displays a corrupted world collapsing from within. In this respect, Force of Evil is very different from other film noirs. It’s not just the individual who’s corrupted, but the entire system. It’s a polit-ical as well as an existential vision.”

Prior to Force of Evil, Polonsky had a fulfilling experience writing Body and Soul (1947) for Garfield’s company, Enter-prise Studios. He was on the set every day, observing director Robert Rossen and pick-ing up everything he could about the craft. He made friends with James Wong Howe and learned camera technique by studying the ace cinematographer at work.

John Garfield, producer as well as star of Force of Evil, selected Abraham Polonsky to write and direct the film

Being another left-wing street kid from New York, Garfield got along well with Polonsky. Thanks to the success of Body and Soul, the actor-producer gave him the chance to write and direct his next movie.

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Tucker’s People appealed to Garfield as much as it did to Polonsky.
Citing French filmmaker Jean Vigo as his principal influence, Polonsky aspired to make an avant-garde film. He felt he succeeded, summing up the experience in typically droll fashion: “I believed that they would only let me do one before they found me out, so I might as well enjoy myself. . . .

I was going to make an aesthetic experi-ment with a Marxist meaning. And I did.” Polonsky  respected  Garfield’s  talent and loved working with him. In an intro-duction to a book about Garfield, the first Method actor to become a Hollywood star, he wrote, “As an actor Garfield was total, he could play an intellectual with the same vigor and astonishing rapport as a cab driver.” Polonsky also told an interviewer that the actor-producer “was absolutely marvelous to work with—sensitive, gifted,

and prepared.”

Force of Evil’s screenplay is packed with sharp dialogue that lifts the picture into a realm beyond melodrama. Film historian

Under the bridge: Garfield’s Joe Morse hurries to meet his fate

Thom Andersen wrote that Polonsky’s styl-ized dialogue “becomes a kind of vernacu-lar blank verse, and it is spoken with an uncanny feeling for its rhythms by Garfield, Thomas Gomez, and Beatrice Pearson.” Lines like a math whiz’s explanation for his skill with numbers (“I was born that way, like a man with two heads or a dope with a million bucks. It’s my gift.”) support Andersen’s assessment.

In comparing Tucker’s People to Force of Evil, it’s hard to argue that Wolfert’s writing is on a par with Polonsky’s. Critic William Pechter wrote in Film Quarterly that Polonsky was “the richest literary tal-ent to have appeared in the American film,” while film historian Jack Shadoian called the Force of Evil’s script “among the most beautiful of the American cinema.”

Force of Evil is also a visually striking motion picture, the result of the director’s collaboration with veteran cinematogra-pher George Barnes. Polonsky gave Barnes a book of Edward Hopper’s paintings to show him what he wanted, and Barnes responded with single-source lighting set-ups that, aided by actual New York loca-tions, make the film distinctive. Polonsky also sketched out scenes to show art direc-tor Richard Day (who had worked with Erich von Stroheim) the look he envisioned.

Conflating gangsters with businessmen didn’t endear Polonsky to powerful right-

wingers who, starting in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, went after radicals in Hol-lywood and elsewhere. Polonsky was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in April 1951. Ques-tioned about the “Hollywood Ten” and his own involvement in various leftist organiza-tions, Polonsky declined to answer, leading Congressman Harold Velde to deem him “a very dangerous citizen.” Soon, Polonsky was blacklisted in the industry, unable to work under his real name.

The proto-feminist I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951) was released a month before Polonsky’s appearance as an unfriendly witness. It would be his last onscreen credit until the 1968 police drama Madigan, which he adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949). Polonsky didn’t direct again until Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (which he also wrote) in 1969. In the intervening seventeen years, Polon-sky supported himself by writing scripts with the help of fronts who took credit for his work. In 1996, Polonsky was finally credited for scripting Odds Against Tomor-row (1959). For the popular TV series You Are There (1953–57), Polonsky contrib-uted scripts about the lives of Galileo, Sig-mund Freud, Michelangelo, and the birth of jazz—an episode that featured Louis Armstrong.

Despite the obstacles, Polonsky always

remained active. He continued writing into his old age, and toward the end of his life taught aesthetics to University of Southern California film students. Looking back at his body of work he reflected, “I always write about the same thing, how people seek to fulfill them-selves and what society suppresses in them through convention and force.”

Though he was deprived of the oppor-tunity to direct films for two decades, Polonsky retained a commendable lack of self-pity. He forgave some compatriots, like Sterling Hayden, who cracked under HUAC pressure and named names. But in 1999, Polonsky was at the forefront of the opposition to Elia Kazan being given an honorary Academy Award, because Kazan had bartered his way back into Hollywood by cooperating with the HUAC committee.

Although Force of Evil was a commer-cial failure upon its release (which Polonsky blamed on poor distribution), over the years it has come to be regarded as a masterpiece. Critic Andrew Sarris wrote, “Force of Evil stands up under repeated viewings as one of the great films of the modern American cinema.” It made a strong mark on many important filmmakers and still holds its own with the best movies of any period. Novel-ist Jonathan Lethem wrote that Polonsky was “a director of unfathomable promise, perhaps our greatest filmmaking talent sac-rificed outright to the blacklist.”

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UNDER SURVEILLANCE

Paul A.J. Lewis

Delusion (1991)

A company man on the lam with a trunkful of embezzled cash encoun-ters a hitman and his moll while driv-ing through the Nevada desert. This

is the premise of Carl-Jan Colpaert’s 1991 film Delusion, a neo-noir road movie that in the thirty years since its original release has barely been available on home video formats, aside from a long out-of-print pan-and-scan VHS release and a wides-creen LaserDisc in the 1990s.

With its desert setting and road movie stylings, Delusion certainly conforms to the paradigms of the “film soleil,” a term employed in Variety’s review of James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet (1990) to describe a loose group of films made dur-ing the early 1990s that transplanted the themes of noir into sunbaked desert set-tings. Other examples include The Hot Spot (1990), One False Move (1992), and

Red Rock West (1993).

Last dance in the desert: showgirl Patti (Jennifer Rubin) crosses paths with white-collar criminal George (Jim Metzler) in the noirish road movie Delusion

Jim Metzler plays George, who steals money from his tech company on the eve of its buyout by a larger corporation that is intent on sinking the long-term project on which George and his team have been working. George decides to drive the cash to Reno, where he plans to establish a new company with some former colleagues. Along the way he is hijacked by twitchy hit-man Chevy (Kyle Secor) and his showgirl girlfriend Patti (Jennifer Rubin). Chevy has been tasked by sleazy Las Vegas-based mob boss Myron Sales (Robert Costanzo) with deep-sixing Chevy’s mentor, Larry (Jerry Orbach), who lives in isolation in a trailer by a desert water hole. But when Chevy learns about the cash George is transporting, a bat-tle of wits ensues, with a surprising victor.

Colpaert told this writer that Delusion was not explicitly crafted as a neo-noir: instead, the Belgian-born director saw the project “as a road film set in a Western landscape. A European’s fascination with the West, plus a flair of Sergio Leone.” Colpaert’s description of Delusion as an

accidental noir, the product of a cultural outsider’s fascination with American cul-ture, resonates strongly with the work of the European émigré filmmakers associated with classic noir, such as Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Edgar G. Ulmer. In particu-lar, Ulmer’s Detour (1945), with its theme of a regular Joe confronted by darkness during a road trip, seems like a spiritual predecessor to Delusion.

Made for Colpaert’s production com-pany, Cineville, Delusion was photographed on Agfa-Gevaert negative stock in Super 35, arguably the 1990s equivalent of the 2-perf Techniscope format on which Leone’s West-erns were shot. “The film looked amazing in a theater,” Colpaert says, and the use of the Super 35 format enabled the creation of a widescreen (2.35:1) presentation for cin-ema exhibition and an open matte version for home video and television. Cinematog-rapher Geza Sinkovics told this writer that though “the production didn’t have anamor-phic in the budget,” both he and the direc-tor “liked the anamorphic format, especially

because the widescreen aspect ratio fit the desert landscape.”
With a budget of $750,000, production took place over five weeks in 1989: four weeks of shooting in Death Valley, and one week in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The crew returned to Death Valley three months after production in March 1990, to shoot additional footage for the film’s final sequence.

Delusion had its origins in a short film Colpaert made while studying at the Ameri-can Film Institute, the first of many collabo-rations between the director and Sinkovics. This short was, like Ulmer’s iconic low-budget noir, entitled Detour, and according to Colpaert it had “similar ideas and char-acter dynamics” to Delusion. Working with writer Kurt Voss, Colpaert expanded this short into a feature. Voss was “instrumen-tal in developing the dialogue,” and both he and Colpaert were inspired heavily by the work of playwright Harold Pinter, whose characteristically menacing approach to language is present in Delusion, particu-

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Rubin’s Patti is “a quiet survivor who doesn't reveal her moves,” says Delusion’s director Carl Colpaert

Earlier in the film, Patti astutely warns George about entering into competition with Chevy by quoting Nietzsche: “He who fights with monsters should take care that he himself does not become a monster.” In Delusion’s final moments, Patti inter-rupts the Mexican standoff between Chevy and George, and asks which of the men is willing to sacrifice the money to flee with her. Of course, both men stand firm; Patti leaves, and over the film’s closing cred-its she is shown singing “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” on a stage. “It was Pat-ti’s theme song. She’s a quiet survivor who doesn’t reveal her moves,” Colpaert says.

Delusion draws an equivalence between the corporate world and the world of gang-sterism. Both are dominated by material-ism and one-upmanship. Patti represents

larly in the three-handed dialogue uttered by Chevy, Patti, and George in the confines of George’s car.

Roughly a third of the film takes place in this vehicle, the car representing George’s past, bedecked as it is with a photo of his ex-wife and daughter taken at the Lean-ing Tower of Pisa (or “pizza,” as Patti pronounces it) and George’s car phone (a symbol of his prosperity). Into this already-tight space, Chevy and Patti bring their own touristy tat: a lizard in a jar, a novelty hat, and a sprig from a fake Christmas tree that clashes with the sweaty desert loca-tions while also establishing the film’s set-ting during the holiday season.

The rest of the film takes place in iso-lated desert settings (Larry’s trailer by the water hole, a scuzzy motel) with a brief foray to a Vegas hotel, where Chevy meets with Sales to collect payment for the hit on Larry. Like many other neo-noir films of the era, Delusion juxtaposes the world of organized crime, orchestrated by city-based hoodlums, with barren, lonely locales. For Colpaert, “the desert as our background was conscious. We shot the film almost as a play with desert landscapes as a backdrop.” Delusion’s visual influences include Ste-phen Shore’s photobook Uncommon Places (1982) and Robby Müller’s cinematogra-phy on Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984). However, Sinkovics suggests that the biggest visual influence was Massimo Dallamano’s photography for Leone’s Westerns, some-thing that is particularly evident in the Mexi-can standoff on a dusty desert street between Chevy and George at the film’s climax.

Colpaert  always  felt  that  Delusion

should have an open denouement. Origi-nally, he explains, the film was to end with the Mexican standoff, the two men point-ing guns at one another. But that felt too ambiguous, so the crew returned to the locations three months later, filming “the last couple of minutes where George shoots Chevy” and Chevy waxes lyrical about kill-ing. (“The first one is always the hardest,” Chevy tells George. “I remember my first. The look on her face. But it gets easier.”) This enabled Delusion to culminate with a William Friedkin–esque transference of identity: through this act of violence, Col-paert says, “George became Chevy at the end of the film. They became each other.”

This moment underscores the extent to which white-collar criminal George and hitman Chevy offer mirror images of one another. “George’s plan was flawed from the beginning. The foundation of his plan was a lie,” Colpaert suggests. “The lie slowly becomes a character when he picks up Chevy and Patti. His actions were predes-tined. The white-collar criminal faces justice in the Death Valley.” That sense of fatalism is something that rides heavily through the neo-noir cycle.

It’s not a stretch to see George and Chevy as emblems of what is today called toxic masculinity. (“Why do guys scratch their balls, George?” Chevy asks. “Because it itches or because it feels good?”) Between these two materialistic men—one a dot-com yuppie, the other feeding his gambling addic-tion through acts of murder—sits Patti, the Vegas showgirl patronized by both Chevy and George. (“That’s because you don’t got a mind,” Chevy tells her cruelly.)

an alternative, and she develops agency as the narrative develops. It is for this reason that the film has sometimes been cited as a feminist neo-noir. “The two male char-acters were so obsessed with their deadly materialistic ideas that they forgot to live,” Colpaert says. “Patti is the stronger charac-ter because she lives by her emotions.”

With its minimalist Morricone-style score by Barry Adamson, which makes use of what Colpaert describes as “Hammond organ mixed with Paco de Lucía guitar riffs,” Delusion offers a memorable jam on the tropes of early 1990s neo-noir and the “film soleil” subtype. Colpaert remem-bers that during production, “the US army were setting off underground bombs in the Nevada desert not too far from where we were shooting. Lots of vibrations.” With a renewed home video presence, Delusion may very well create its own vibrations. The final words should belong to the film’s direc-tor: “The film had a great festival run and had a theatrical run in the US. We should definitely convince Sony to do a widescreen Blu-ray transfer.”

Heartfelt thanks to director Carl Col-paert, cinematographer Geza Sinkovics, and editor Mark Allan Kaplan for fielding the author’s questions about Delusion.

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NOIR at HOME

Cast a Dark Shadow / Wanted for Murder

(Cohen Film Collection)

A pair of UK noirs becomes available stateside in a double feature. Eric Portman, the suave actor so memorable in Michael Powell’s World War II dramas, leans on his knack for haughty arrogance to play a busi-nessman who kills a young woman on Hamp-stead Heath in Wanted for Murder (1946). It’s a classic tale of the madman strangler in thrall to his darkest drives. Lawrence Hun-tington, a filmmaker who worked his way up from British quota quickies, directs this blend of contemporary Gothic thriller and police procedural with efficiency and hand-some style, but little suspense or mystery. Portman is far more interesting than costar Derek Farr, who plays the cheery busman vying for Dulcie Gray’s Anne. Dirk Bogarde makes a more nuanced killer in Cast a Dark Shadow (1955) as the marvelously named “Teddy” Bare, a scheming lothario who marries wealthy older women and may even actually care for them—provided they don’t threaten his inheritance. Teddy is equally adept at playing the working-class lad and the sophisticated aristocrat, giving the char-acter added ambiguity. Margaret Lockwood (Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes [1938]) is terrific as his latest wife, a sharp widow who

married into money and isn’t remotely self-conscious about her manners or her taste. It’s adapted from Janet Green’s play Murder Mistaken (1954), and director Lewis Gilbert brings out the best in his cast in chamber scenes featuring clashes of personalities and battles of wits. There’s a touch of psycho-drama, several satisfying twists, and an edge of melancholy for those who love in spite of their better judgment. These editions aren’t restorations, but are well-mastered with strong images. EXTRAS: None.

—Sean Axmaker

The Man in Search of

His Murderer (Kino Classics)

The Man in Search of His Murderer

(1931), the third feature from future noir legend Robert Siodmak, opens with a failed suicide attempt and gets funnier with each scene. Seriously, this proto-noir is played for comedy, with our hapless hero (Heinz Rüh-mann) hiring the burglar who interrupts his effort to off himself to finish the job, complete with a union-approved contract. There’s also a jailbreak and a musical number. Even while chaos reigns, the actors continue to play it straight. This bizarre artifact goofs on Ger-man Expressionism, barreling through a mix of satire, slapstick, and absurdism at a break-neck pace, in part due to drastic editing. The

film was trimmed from 97 minutes to just under an hour after it flopped with audiences; that abbreviated version, retitled Jim, the Man with the Scar, is all that survives. Not every joke lands, but the movie is a funny, fleet, and unique combination of gallows humor and whimsy. Billy Wilder was one of the screen-writers. Kino presents the F.W. Murnau Foun-dation’s 2013 restoration, which brings out the clarity of worn and damaged elements. EXTRAS: Includes a well-researched and informative commentary track by film histo-rian Josh Nelson.

— Sean Axmaker

Pickup on South

Street (Criterion Collection)

“You wavin’ the flag at me?” Sam Fuller’s edgy 1953 tale of a pickpocket who inad-vertently lifts state secrets being delivered to Communist spies drops Cold War espionage into an urban crime thriller, set in a culture of loners and drop-outs with their own codes. Richard Widmark is out for number one as the three-time loser convinced he’s got the score of a lifetime, fending off the feds, the Reds, and a police detective with a grudge. Jean Peters brings vulnerability to the role of a not-too-bright former call girl whose loyalty and hide-hardened compassion make her a tarnished angel, and Thelma Ritter is magnificent as the

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maternal informer with a soft spot for Widmark. It’s an effective marriage of Hollywood studio filmmaking and Fuller’s maverick sensibility. Previously available on DVD from Criterion, the gor-geous new 4K digital restoration delivers a clean, sharp image with deep blacks and rich contrast. EXTRAS: NOIR CITY con-tributor Imogen Sara Smith provides an observant 35-minute video featurette. Also with a 1954 radio adaptation and archival interviews with Fuller carried over from the previous DVD.

— Sean Axmaker

Nightmare Alley (Criterion Collection)

Tyrone Power became 20th Century Fox’s biggest star playing cocky young men with more ambition than experience, as well as hardscrabble kids oozing sincerity. Stan Carlisle, the carny turned high society hustler of Nightmare Alley (1947), both plays up and plays off his strengths. Power leans into his dark side, using his earnestness as an angle to reel in the marks. Stan’s rise and precipitous fall straddles the chasm between sleaze and class, with A-list studio director Edmund Goulding delivering the energy and desperation of a disreputable carnival midway without commit-ting to the depths suggested in Jules Furthman’s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel. (Behold the geek!) Goulding does, however, batter Power’s matinee-idol looks in Stan’s spi-ral into dead-eyed derelict. Joan Blondell is all heart as the side-show mind reader who mentors Stan, and Coleen Gray embodies innocence and wisdom as Stan’s conscience. The new 4K digital master, beautifully transferred from studio vault materials, is a significant upgrade from the 2005 DVD. EXTRAS: Criterion includes the 2005 commentary by James Ursini and Alain Silver and adds featurettes by Todd Robbins and NOIR CITY’s Imogen Sara Smith, plus a video interview with Coleen Gray originally recorded for NOIR CITY 2007.

— Sean Axmaker

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BOOK REVIEWS

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense

by Edward White

W.W. Norton & Company, April 2021. 395 pages

The Unquiet Englishman:

A Life of Graham Greene

by Richard Greene

W.W. Norton & Company, January 2021. 608 pages

Is there anything more that can be said, you may well ask, about Alfred Hitch-cock? Every frame of film he directed has been scrupulously (over)analyzed, most incidents from his life documented. He has been fictionalized, lionized, and vilified. Surely, one would think, that well has at

last run dry.

Edward White would beg to differ. And all he had to do to make his case was com-pletely reinvent the biography.

White’s bold conceit owes something to the illustrations you’d find in Grey’s Anatomy or some other medical refer-ence, isolating the systems of the human body in order to foster a greater apprecia-tion for the miracle of them all functioning

in concert. He concocts a dozen different Hitchcocks—among them the Auteur, the Womanizer, the Fat Man, the Dandy, the Voyeur, and the Man of God—and in nim-ble prose explains the significance of each one, and how together they forge the indi-vidual whom White dubs “the emblematic artist of the twentieth century—not neces-sarily the most talented or the most accom-plished, but one of vast influence, whose life and genre-straddling, multimedia work vividly illuminate key themes of Western culture from the Roaring Twenties to the Swinging Sixties.”

Hitchcock relished the story of his break into motion pictures; upon learning that the London office of Famous Players-Lasky sought a designer, he rallied colleagues into helping him craft titles for their first announced production—only to be told that the project had been scrapped, at which point he immediately prepared more for the replacement movie. But this yarn also conveniently demonstrates White’s approach, as it “evinces so much of what would present itself over (Hitchcock’s) sixty-year career in motion pictures. There is his buoyant ambition, his vivid visual imagination, his interest in telling stories with as few words as possible, a reliance on source material, and the use of others to achieve a Hitchcockian end.”

White’s fractal portrait allows him to steer clear of many pitfalls of the biographi-cal form. There’s no protracted dive into Hitch’s childhood. White is free to dip into the topic as it suits him, as when he sug-gests that “The Birds also can be viewed as Hitchcock reliving the terror of the air raids” on London during World War I—an episode the director never acknowledged because it didn’t fit neatly into the legend he’d prepared—or discusses how a return to the city of his youth reinvigorated him during the making of his penultimate film Frenzy (1972). White is also not bound by chronology, able to return to films again and again to appreciate new facets deter-mined by which Hitch is under discussion. The Birds (1963) takes wing again as an example of the filmmaker forging into late-career arthouse territory. Psycho (1960) is

cited as both an instance of Hitch obliquely addressing the subject of childhood trauma and a “punk gesture,” a case of Hitchcock “trolling all those he’d spent decades con-vincing that even murder could be ‘art’— beautiful, charming, harmonious.”

Hitchcock’s treatment of women deserv-ingly comes under close scrutiny. As White observes, the filmmaker “surrounded him-self with women, sought out their friend-ship, gave them responsibilities and oppor-tunities that few men of his station did, and proudly championed their work. At the same time, it was through women that he revealed the darkest, most discomfiting parts of himself—and embodied the cul-ture in which he existed, as a filmmaker and as a man.” This complex relationship allows White to cast a sympathetic eye on Hitch’s wife and frequent collaborator, Alma Reville, comparing her with some of her husband’s female characters and won-dering whether she yearned with thwarted ambition or feared she couldn’t live up to her significant other’s fantasies. White also considers this aspect of the filmmaker’s life in terms of his nationality (“In relation to women, Hitchcock can sometimes appear like a curious brew of J. Alfred Prufrock and Benny Hill: English repression meet-ing English bawdiness, which may be two sides of the same coin.”) and his girth, noting that “among his generation he was rare—possibly unique—in being a famous, powerful man whose attempt to maintain a healthy weight and find peace with the way he looked became a topic of public dis-cussion and part of his public image, even while he lived.”

White notes that this “type of male rela-tionship with femininity” is echoed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 film Phantom Thread, enumerating the parallels between Hitch and the controlling fashion designer portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis. White con-sistently and engagingly links Hitchcock to modern artists working in a range of disci-plines. He finds a wholly plausible way of drawing a line across nearly a century, link-ing The Lodger (1927) with Joker (2019), and introduces Eminem and David Bowie into the conversation effortlessly. White’s

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funhouse mirror strategy produces intel-lectual sparks aplenty, but also continually underscores how Hitchcock’s films remain not only vibrant, but relevant.

After the pleasures of White’s inventive book, any conventional biography will seem a colossal letdown—particularly when the follow-up is about another titanic British-born artist specializing in noir-adjacent work drenched in Catholicism. But in The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene, Richard Greene (no relation) blithely wan-ders into every trap White avoids.

Richard edited a detailed volume of Gra-ham’s letters, and consequently can say with certainty where Graham was every day— and quite likely every hour—of his life. It’s a fact you’re keenly aware of on every page of this book, the level of detail swiftly becoming suffocating. (Be wary when every blurb for a title praises its research.)

Graham sniffily divided his fiction into two categories, “novels” and “entertain-ments.” He once wrote, “Brighton Rock I began in 1937 as a detective story and con-tinued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as an error in judgment.” Richard perpetuates this snobbery, giving short shrift to books like A Gun for Sale (1936), later adapted as This Gun for Hire (1942). (Fun fact: in 1936 Graham met Hitchcock with an eye toward advancing his screenwriting career and dubbed the director “a silly, harmless clown.”)

While White, eager to define his sub-ject in entirely new ways, shatters Hitch-

cock’s image into component parts that each contain some essential element of the whole, Richard Greene steadfastly sticks to Graham Greene’s best version of himself. Richard laments that too often Graham’s life is “boiled down to sex, books, and depression.” He sets out to recast his hero as a global correspondent and adventurer. While Graham did journey to the many far-flung locales where he set his fiction—West Africa, home to his masterwork The Heart of the Matter (1948), was a favored spot— these rushed sections reduce his travels to a litany of dates and locations, evincing a keen eye for Graham’s many grievances but no overarching sense of how these voyages seasoned his work. The endless cascade of detail has the opposite of its intended effect, emphasizing the very features Rich-ard Greene seeks to minimize: sex, books, and depression, all generously slathered with Catholic guilt. The biographer notes that “Graham Greene could never be described as a happy man,” and that in his fiction “he often depicted his protagonists spreading sorrow like a contagious dis-ease.” Such an individual isn’t much fun to be around, and Richard Greene’s wor-shipful prose does him no favors. Reading

The Unquiet Englishman would have been a chore under ideal conditions; in the wake of White’s imaginative treatment of similar material, it became a slog. White’s book had me aching to revisit Hitchcock films I already know well. Richard Greene’s door-stop left me fantasizing about time travel. I longed to go back and introduce Graham Greene to the right woman—or women— even at the cost of the key works of his career. Anything to put the two of us out of our misery.

—Vince Keenan

Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna

Edited by Noah Isenberg, translated by Shelley Frisch
Princeton University Press, April 2021. 224 pages

When he had entered the éminence grise stage of his life, Billy Wilder offered fellow filmmaker Cameron Crowe  ten  rules  for  screenwriting.  One

of them was “Know where you’re going.” Wilder possessed that sense of direction early; at the tender age of eighteen, he sought a job as a correspondent at a Viennese news-

paper. Initially rejected, Wilder allegedly went to the paper’s offices to press his case and caught the chief drama critic in flagrante with his secretary. Thus was a newspaper-man born, one who would soon—thanks to a story about bandleader Paul Whiteman— find himself reporting from Berlin.

Those formative years in Wilder’s life have largely been a blank slate until the arrival of this collection. Editor Noah Isenberg may be heeding Wilder’s screenwriting tip to “grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go” by opening the anthology with “Waiter, A Dancer, Please!” This deftly self-effacing bit of autobiography from 1927 has Wilder recounting his brief but memorable career as a taxi dancer at a Berlin hotel during the des-titute days when “I cut my cigarettes in half to make them last longer.” He describes his first night on the job like a screenplay: “Now the Persian lamb coat of a lady in narrow, crocodile-leather shoes brushes against my knees. . . . A thin fragrance of Coty lingers in the air, and stirs up my nerves.”

That cinematic eye is in evidence throughout; even when he was billed as Bil-lie, Wilder could spot the telling detail. The inventiveness that served his scriptwriting also surfaces early. A trip to Venice done in by frigid weather becomes a clever com-edy of errors, and when Wilder is unable to interview the Prince of Wales about men’s wear, he parks himself outside Vienna’s finest hotel, lies in wait for a suitably well-suited Englishman, and treats him to a cof-fee to pick his brain. Those two subjects—

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fashion and the Viennese institution of the coffeehouse—come up often, with Wilder holding forth on both evocatively: “Cof-feehouses have something in common with well-played violins. They resonate, rever-berate, and impart distinct timbres. . . .

Malice and venomous thoughts of a decade on the blackened walls have settled in as a sweetly radiant finish, as the finest patina.” These examples make it plain that Wilder could have been part of the noble tradition of columnists exemplified in America by the likes of Jimmy Breslin and Herb Caen, fast-working scribes who could concoct an idiosyncratic slant on the vital issues of the day by deadline. Wilder slyly proposes an argument for lying, a genuinely useful sub-ject, to be taught in schools “systematically by employing the scientific method,” and offers a series of “little economic lessons” that include a money-making scheme to

pay himself for shaving his own face.

But Wilder kept an eye firmly focused on show business and on the burgeoning film industry in particular. He penned por-traits of luminaries like Whiteman, opera star Feodor Chaliapin, and the famed high-kicking dance team the Tiller Girls. When the landmark 1930 film People on Sunday, cowritten by Wilder and Robert Siodmak, went into production, Wilder took readers behind the scenes. His lively, incisive movie reviews prove that he already had the first of his screenwriting dictums—“The audience is fickle”—in mind. He takes note of pub-lic reaction, logging applause and mocking laughter, and observes of one movie, “This rousing, fast-paced detective film provides good entertainment because it’s fun,” a common-sense standard to which contem-porary critics might want to hew. Wilder would soon be off to Paris, and then to the United States in 1934. His final screenwrit-ing guideline warned that once you’d stuck the landing, “that’s it. Don’t hang around.” This invaluable compendium shows that Wilder took his own advice. He couldn’t let the grass grow underneath him. Not when a whole world awaited.

—Vince Keenan

Competing with Idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a Dual Portrait

by Nick Davis

Knopf, September 2021. 384 pages

Lord Acton, the man who told us about the pesky nature of absolute power, said

something else not quite as well-remem-bered: “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.”

He had statesmen in mind, not play-wrights or painters. But as society’s reckon-ing with misconduct keeps reminding us, there’s often something rotten in the state of artistic genius. The people at the top, those with the power to mold our views of the world, may be more damaged—and dam-aging—than the rest of us.

This isn’t exactly the theme of a new double-barreled biography of the brothers Mankiewicz, siblings united by brilliance, bad blood, and cruelty. But it lurks beneath the surface of Competing with Idiots: Her-man and Joe Mankiewicz, a Dual Portrait. Should fans care about the casual cruelties of an artist’s personal life?

Documentary producer-director Nick Davis delves into the life stories of his grandfather Herman and great-uncle Joseph with remarkable openness. Armed with family lore and the findings of exten-sive research plus a healthy skepticism about both sources, he’s an ideal guide to the first moviemaking Mankiewiczes.

The brothers often had little use for each other, but their worse luck was to be the sons of a real-life Daddie Dearest. Franz Mankiewicz, a Jewish immigrant from Germany who became a popular New York City professor, treated his firstborn Herman with deep scorn and impossible expectations. A score of ninety-seven on a test was considered a failure. “To harangue

one’s sons and detail their faults was simply par for the Mankiewiczian course,” Davis writes, a generations-spanning trait as dis-tinctive as blue eyes or red hair.

Herman would grow up to become a gambler, a drunk, and a devotee of loathing, self- and otherwise. He was unreliable and unpredictable, bested by “a perpetual state of rage” at bosses who probably deserved it. But he also became a towering force behind the film considered by many to be the best and most influential of all time. He may have been lying down instead of towering, and his influence on the movie might be exagger-ated. Then again, fights about the making of Citizen Kane (1941) are as old as, well, the making of Citizen Kane.

Who wrote what? Davis is certain he knows the answer. His grandfather, not Welles, had mastered the art of film, and only he could have “demonstrated anew the possibilities of the form itself.”

As for Herman’s treatment of others, Davis seems conflicted. He writes that his grandfather, “a complicated system of neu-roses and complexes,” didn’t care much for “human connection, feelings and sym-pathies, and the free and easy exchange of intimacies.” But elsewhere, Davis pro-claims that Herman had a big heart and left a legacy of “values, compassion, love, family and the importance of forgiveness.”

Joe grew up in his brother’s shadow but ended up even more successful and, in his own way, the hottest of messes. A fre-quent fabricator of his own biography, he embraced fiction on-screen as a writer and gave us A Letter to Three Wives (1949), All About Eve (1950), Cleopatra (1963), and the noirs Somewhere in the Night (1946) and No Way Out (1950).

In his personal life, Davis writes, Joe feasted upon the vulnerability of actresses while engaging in the family trait of never bothering to listen to anyone else. “To Her-man, an actress was someone who had nothing to say. To Joe, this may have been the point.” Joe also gave this advice to one of his sons: “Never fuck a starlet when you can fuck a star.”

As Davis writes, Joe was capable of deep cruelty to family members too. At least he was a paragon of equal opportunity, hurt-ing both men and women. To borrow a line from his most legendary movie, a mas-terpiece of terrible people being terrible, maybe he should put his awards where his heart ought to be. Davis, who believes Joe

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loved his brother despite everything, still calls him “pedantic, irritating, holier-than-thou, preachy, a talkative goddamn know-it-all.”

Should we take another look at the brothers’ movies because of how they treated others? Or excuse them because of their genius or their genes?

As always in times of trouble, it’s a good idea to wonder what Margo Channing would do. She would not forget, and she would not forgive. But maybe sometimes we should leave bumpy nights to the movies and just watch in peace.

—Randy Dotinga

Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer

by Steven C. Smith

Oxford University Press, May 2020. 496 pages

In Key Largo (1948), a gangster prom-ises to give his fragile moll another drink, but only if she sings a torch song to a group of people he’s holding hostage. No stranger to nastiness himself, director John Huston had actress Claire Trevor perform the tune without a rehearsal in front of her famous and more experienced colleagues. Trevor’s raw performance won her a well-deserved Academy Award.

The film leaves this humiliation behind— or so we think. Later, chords from the song play when Trevor appears on screen, a sub-conscious reminder of her forced march into shame. It’s a tickle of malicious memory, an auditory touch of evil. Max Steiner has guided us from behind the curtain once again, and most viewers won’t even realize it.

This master of movie music deserves a biography that’s a match for his remark-able life and work. Music by Max Steiner, written by journalist and documentary film producer Steven C. Smith, is thorough, per-ceptive, and heart-breaking, with just the right amount of fanboy enthusiasm.

This is Steiner’s first full biography, reflecting the composer’s low profile. Never mind that he was responsible for the music for hundreds of films and TV shows, including some of the most well-known scores of all time (King Kong [1933], Gone with the Wind [1939], Casablanca [1942]) along with classic noirs like The Big Sleep

(1946), Mildred Pierce (1945), and White Heat (1949).
Steiner wasn’t only a composer, how-

ever. He was an influencer, a pioneer who helped to mold film music when no one quite knew what film music was supposed to sound like.

When the sound era debuted, music often appeared only at the beginning and end of a movie. Inspired by the power of opera and classical music, Steiner pushed filmmakers to make music more than an afterthought. He turned it into a character, a Greek chorus that guides, manipulates, and even occasionally misleads the audi-ence. “Steiner not only proved that ‘back-ground’ music was a crucial element in motion pictures,” Smith writes. “He estab-lished its basic vocabulary.”

Indeed, film music wasn’t destined to have leitmotifs, musical signposts linked to specific characters like Trevor’s sad dip-somaniac. Steiner, drawing from opera, helped make these motifs standard. Com-posers didn’t have to synchronize music with on-screen actions like a limp (a Steiner habit that still annoys some critics today) or adjust it so the pitches of voices on-screen wouldn’t drown it out. But Steiner did. And there wasn’t any guarantee that Steiner and his colleagues would master primitive audio technology so quickly and become so suc-cessful at making romances more romantic, thrillers more thrilling, moviegoing more magical.

Steiner also understood popular music. He chose the tragic song sung by Trevor in Key Largo, one that the character slowly realizes is a reflection of her own life. In

1959, he even gave us a top-selling instru-mental tune in “The Theme from A Summer Place,” the epitome of easy-listening elevator music. (Younger readers, ask your parents.)

Smith is an excellent guide for music novices who don’t know their allargando from their allegretto; he breaks down film scores and explains the workings of Steiner’s mind. In King Kong, for example, Smith explores how Steiner interlinks two themes—one for the damsel, one for the ape—and uses subliminal musical sugges-tions to invoke emotions like sympathy. “Furioso . . . ,” he writes in the score. “The orchestra should go ‘nuts’ here!”

It’s a delight to see the gleeful and often-naughty joy in Steiner’s work. “Orgasm music!” he writes on the score for a sen-sual Marlene Dietrich picture, adding “Die audience soll ‘Kommen’!” (“The audience should ‘come’!”)

Steiner’s scores may have reflected “his own innate optimism and generosity of spirit,” as Smith puts it. But those around him paid a painful price. It’s a familiar drill: bad husband, bad father. Smith doesn’t skimp on the details, which reveal his sub-ject to be yet another in a long line of Hol-lywood icons plagued by hot-and-cold-run-ning dysfunction.

Speaking of sad things, Smith notes that Steiner is hardly a household name in the twenty-first century. “To the general pub-lic, he is a forgotten figure. To cineastes, he is a historical footnote.” But there’s a happy ending: “To any viewer watching a movie he remains a living presence.” Actors and actresses, it turns out, aren’t the only immortals on the big screen.

—Randy Dotinga

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