Cast a Dark Shadow begins with a man and a woman in a car ride at an amusement park. They go through a dark interior where scary demons appear to jump up at them, the sort of ride a romantic couple might enjoy.  The woman, whose name is Moni, short for “Monica,” is played by Mona Washbourne, who was 52 years old when this movie was made.  She seems to be having a good time. The man sitting next to her, whose name is Edward, is played by Dirk Bogarde, who was 34 years old when this movie was made.  He is looking at Moni, and his face is the scariest face in the entire ride.  Not content to be subtle, however, the director had Edward’s eyes show demonic points of light when the car moves into darkness, which takes this movie into the realm of camp.

After the ride, they go to have tea at their favorite seaside resort.  While they are seated at a table, we learn that they have been married for a year now, and this is sort of their second honeymoon, which they have been spending in Moni’s bungalow, a little home away from home.  In fact, the real reason for their vacation is so that Moni could get over the flu. Here in America, when we have the flu, we just stay where we are, but this movie is set in England, and they do things differently over there.

After the waitress puts the tea on the table, indicating that they will have to pour it themselves, Edward asks Moni, “Who’s it going to be, Mother?”  Given that Moni is old enough to be his mother, I thought this implied something oedipal regarding their marriage.  However, I have since found out that the one who pours the tea in England is to be referred to as Mother.  So, for any American woman reading this, if you go on a date with a man who is from England, and he asks if you would like to be Mother, as long as tea is being served you have nothing to worry about.

Now that Moni is over the flu, she feels well enough to return to her home, which is a mansion.  When they arrive, Moni’s lawyer, Phillip, is already there, waiting to speak to her.  When Moni and Phillip are alone in the living room, we find out about the will she made right after her marriage.  As Phillip sums it up, with a severe look on his face, “Your husband gets this house, and your money goes back where it belongs, back to the family.”  We don’t entertain notions like that here in America, where we would think it only natural that a wife would leave everything to her husband and vice versa, but as noted above, they do things differently in England.

In any event, the only “family” Moni has, in the British sense of the word, which apparently excludes husbands, is her sister Dora, whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years, and who is quite wealthy.  As Moni puts it, “Her husband left her an enormous fortune.”  I guess he didn’t have his money “go back to the family where it belongs,” but maybe it’s different for husbands in England.

Anyway, after the flu she had, Moni decided that if something happened to her, Edward should get all her money, and she wants a new will to reflect that. When Edward hears about this new will, he gets the wrong impression, thinking that Moni intends to leave everything to her sister Dora while leaving nothing to him.

So, there’s only one thing for him to do:  kill her before she signs the new will. Some people think that Edward intended to murder her all along, only now he must do so immediately.  I think he was merely waiting for her to die of natural causes, and it is only now, in apprehension about this will, that his thoughts turn to murder.

If we may allow an inference from the ages of the actors to the ages of the characters they are playing, we note that Mona Washbourne lived another 33 years after she made this movie, dying at the age of 85, when Dirk Bogarde was 67.  So, let this be a word of warning to any would-be fortune hunter that might be reading this.  If you marry a rich, older woman, then unless you are planning on murder, you may be collecting Social Security before you can get your hands on her money.

Edward makes it appear that Moni passed out drunk while trying to light the gas fireplace and died from inhaling the gas.  Then he finds out about the will she would have signed, that would have left him everything, but now he is stuck with only the house, the bungalow, and Emmie, the maid. Looks like his fortune-hunting days are not over just yet. Meanwhile, Edward keeps going over to what was Moni’s favorite chair, rocking it gently, while addressing her by way of apostrophe, affectionately telling her his thoughts and feelings.

He returns to the bungalow near the seaside resort where the movie began.  It is at the resort that he meets Freda (Margaret Lockwood).  Her Cockney accent indicates that she is working class. In fact, she used to be a barmaid at the very restaurant they are in.  She married the owner and then sold it after he died, leaving her with enough money so she never has to work again. I guess his money did not “go back to the family where it belongs” either.

At one point, after Edward and Freda have been dancing a while, she asks to sit down because her feet hurt.  And just to make sure we get the point, we later see a closeup of her foot going back into her shoe before they get up from the table to dance again.  As Marilyn Monroe said in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), a lady never admits that her feet hurt, the reason being that a man likes to look at a woman and enjoy the vision of her physical beauty unsullied by any thought of pain or discomfort on her part.   So, her lack of consideration for Edward’s feelings in this regard is one more indication of the kind of woman she is.  However, it is a good thing that she is a tough broad if she is going to get involved with Edward.  She has already had trouble with fortune hunters since becoming a widow, so when Edward broaches the subject of marriage, she says it will have to be “pound for pound.”

After they arrive at what is now Edward’s house for Freda’s inspection, Emmie brings in tea.  Edward asks Freda if she would like to be Mother.  Now wait just a minute.  I was willing to overlook this the first time as some queer British expression, but the screenwriter has worked it into the script twice, so he must have done so for its oedipal connotations.  And while I’m on the subject, that nickname “Moni” sounds a lot like “Mommy.”  Margaret Lockwood was only five years older than Dirk Bogarde when she made this movie, but maybe that’s supposed to be older enough for this purpose.

Anyway, they do get married.  Freda discovers that the door to one room is locked.  She tells Emmie to open it.  Emmie is afraid to, saying that Edward “will go raving mad.”  Freda orders her to open it nevertheless, saying, “Well, anyone would think it’s Bluebeard’s chamber,” not realizing how close to the truth that is.

Edward shows up and is furious, saying, “This is Moni’s room!”  Freda regards the whole business as peculiar but not worth fighting about.  The next day Edward apologizes, but then adds that he hasn’t been sleeping well, feeling shut in, which makes him irritable.  He says he wants to sleep in Moni’s room for a while.  His desire to do so is not because he wants to have an entire bed to himself with undisturbed slumber.  Rather, it is another indication of just how much he still loves the woman he murdered.  Freda is not amused, saying, “Listen Ed.  I don’t know what your arrangement was with Moni, but I didn’t marry you for companionship.”

I once read that upper-class married couples have separate bedrooms and go on separate vacations. After all, there is such a thing as too much togetherness.  However, Freda is working class, and she naturally thinks a married couple should sleep in the same bed.  Furthermore, it struck me that she did not say, “I didn’t marry you only for companionship.”  Rather, she seems to indicate that his companionship is of no interest to her at all.  She married him for sex.  Today, any woman with that attitude would simply have sex with men and not bother to marry them.  But this movie was made before the sexual revolution, so it may be that in those days, marriage for some people was just a license to have sex.

In fact, as the movie progresses, we gather that she really doesn’t like Edward. For example, when Edward tries to get Freda to spend some of her money on one of his investment ideas, she puts him straight, saying, “What sort of fool do you take me for, Ed?”  She tells him he can spend his own money if he likes, but he is not getting any of hers.  He becomes so angry that he starts to hit her, at which point she threatens to hit him right back.  Later on, Edward rocks Moni’s chair, saying, “You wouldn’t have liked this one, Moni.  She’s crude.”

Freda eventually finds out that Edward doesn’t have any money of his own, that he married her for her money.  Nevertheless, she admits that she still loves him.  Boy, the sex must really be good!

About this time, Charlotte, another rich woman, enters the movie, and Edward figures he might do better with her.  But first he will have to murder Freda.  While he is working on that plan, however, he comes to the realization that Charlotte is really Dora, Moni’s sister, who has returned from Jamaica to find out what really happen to Moni.  Edward decides to murder her instead, thereby inheriting her money as well as that which she inherited from Moni.  Now, given the way things are done in England, according to Phillip anyway, Dora’s money should “go back to the family, where it belongs.”  But since there would be no more family, I guess Edward, as her brother-in-law, would get it by default.

But the entire scheme falls apart when Freda, Dora, and Phillip find out that Edward murdered Moni.  When Edward realizes that he will go to prison, he starts blubbering.  Freda takes him in her arms and comforts him.  Presumably, she likes him even less now that she knows the truth, but she still loves him, or whatever you want to call it.  Nevertheless, he must get away, so he runs outside and jumps in Phillip’s car and drives off.

Have you ever noticed how many times in the movies someone will get in a car that is not his and be able to drive it away because the owner apparently left the key in the ignition?

Anyway, he finds his exit from the driveway is blocked by another car.  No problem.  The owner of that car also left the key in the ignition too, so he gets in it and drives away. Unfortunately, the car belongs to Dora, the one he snipped the brake line on as part of his plan to kill her.  Unaware of this, he drives away, saying, “I’ve done it, Moni.  I’ve done it.”  And then, just as he realizes that he is in Dora’s car, the brakes give way, and he plunges off the cliff.

And now I have to wonder.  Will Freda inherit Edward’s house, or will it go to Dora, which is to say, back to the family where it belongs?

Dark Passage is a strange movie, no getting around it, and in more ways than one. The first way it is strange is in its use of subjective camera in much of the first part of the movie.  Subjective camera, which allows us to see exactly what some character in the movie sees, certainly has its place. However, it is normally used sparingly, reverting back to objective camera, the principal mode of filming, where we see what is going on from a vantage point that does not belong to anyone in the movie.

Furthermore, subjective camera is best used when the person whose point of view we share is motionless, or at least not moving in any significant way.  For example, it is appropriate when a man is lying on an operating table about to undergo surgery, or when he is watching people who are unaware that they are being observed.  In Rear Window (1954), James Stewart plays a man who is relatively immobile, owing to a broken leg, having nothing to do but watch his neighbors across the way.  As a result, subjective camera is used extensively in this movie.  At the same time, objective camera remains the primary mode of filming.

The worst possible use of subjective camera is in Lady in the Lake (1946), where the entire movie is filmed in subjective camera except for the introduction and some later commentary by Robert Montgomery in the role of Phillip Marlowe. He explains that this movie will allow people in the audience to experience it as if they were Phillip Marlowe.  It does no such thing, because when Marlowe is moving around, we in the audience know we are not moving, especially when he is interacting physically with another person, as when he punches Lloyd Nolan or kisses Audrey Totter. The screen goes dark when he kisses her, so she is made to explain it by saying, “You close your eyes too, don’t you, darling?” In addition, it wears us out having so many people look directly into the camera, and therefore at us, when talking to Marlowe. The most unfortunate part about this movie is that after it was made, no one ever wanted to produce a remake.  Maybe the novel by Raymond Chandler, on which the movie was based, is not one of his best, but filming a version in objective camera might have made for an enjoyable movie, had the prospect of such not been ruined by this one.

The motive for using subjective camera in the first part of Dark Passage is different from that of Lady in the Lake, which is to conceal the face of the protagonist, Vincent Parry.  Later in the movie, he will have plastic surgery, after which we get to see his face, that of Humphrey Bogart. The movie is filmed primarily in the objective mode from that point on.  Before the plastic surgery, we only hear the voice of Bogart. Objective camera is sometimes used even here, but only when Vincent’s face is not visible; otherwise, subjective camera is used.  At one point before the surgery, we see what is supposed to be Vincent’s face in the newspaper, and it is quite different from that of Bogart.  I don’t know to what extent a person’s face can be changed by plastic surgery, but it seems a stretch that his face could have been transformed that much.

The movie Seconds (1966) is more realistic, even if the kind of procedure used in the movie does put it in the category of science fiction.  Arthur Hamiliton is played by John Randolph.  He is bored with his life. He learns of a secret procedure that can give him a complete physical makeover, after which his death will be faked, and he can have a new identity, thereby giving him a second chance at life. He agrees to it, after which he becomes Antiochus Wilson, played by Rock Hudson. Admittedly, that is quite a change from Randolph to Hudson, but it is believable. There is a similarity in their eyes, for example.

Furthermore, by using two different actors, there was no need for the first part of Seconds to be filmed in subjective camera.  Those who made Dark Passage could have found an actor who had more of a physical resemblance to Bogart, much in the way Jerry Lacy was used to play the Humphrey Bogart of Woody Allen’s imagination in Play It Again, Sam (1972).  Such an actor could have played Vincent in the first part of the movie, with Bogart’s voice being dubbed in, and we would have accepted the change from plastic surgery more easily, as well as being spared the excessive use of subjective camera in the beginning.

When the movie begins, Vincent Parry is escaping from San Quentin. He manages to hitch a ride with a man named Baker, who becomes suspicious of Vincent. Then the radio reveals that Vincent is an escaped convict who murdered his wife three years ago.  This leads to Vincent punching Baker several times in subjective camera, which smacks of a gimmick.

After knocking Baker out, he drags the body out of the car, removes Baker’s clothes, and puts them on himself.  He grabs a rock, presumably to kill Baker, but then another car pulls up, and a woman steps out, whose name we later find out is Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall).  She calls him “Vincent,” saying she wants to help him, telling him to get in her car.

As I said, this is a strange movie.  She explains her presence by saying that she was out painting in the hills when she heard that he escaped. Then she figured this, and then she figured that, and that was how she was able to find him. Vincent doesn’t believe her explanation.  We have a hard time believing it ourselves.

Then there is her motive.  Why is she doing this for him?  When they get to her apartment, she shows him a clipping from a newspaper of a letter she wrote to the editor during his trial, how she felt he was getting a raw deal.  She reminds me of those goofy women that fall in love with men while they are on trial for murder, or later when they are in prison.  In any event, we now have to accept that not only was she conveniently painting in the hills when Vincent broke out of prison, and that she happened to be listening to the radio, and that she was able to figure out where Vincent would be before the police did, but we must also accept that she was motivated to help him escape because of her interest in his trial three years ago.  It turns out that she became interested in Vincent’s case because it reminded her of her father’s murder trial.  She says, “I know he didn’t kill my stepmother.”

Now, let’s see.  Why do you suppose the decision was made by those who wrote the script to make it be her stepmother instead of her mother who was murdered?  Most likely, we would have expected Irene to be more concerned about the murder of her mother. Stepmothers, on the other hand, are disposable.  They do not warrant the same amount of family feeling.  In fact, Irene might have resented the fact that her father married her in the first place. Children often do. It is for a similar reason that fairy tales often speak of the wicked stepmother and not the wicked mother.  So, Irene is allowed to take her father’s side when it is only her stepmother that was murdered without any misgivings on our part, whereas we would have been uncomfortable and suspicious had it been Irene’s real mother that was murdered.

Vincent asks her why she happened to be painting in the hills that morning. She answers:

When I woke up this morning, I found myself wondering how you were getting along. I don’t believe in fate or destiny, or any of those things because I know it wasn’t destined for my father to die in prison. But I guess it was something like fate to make me go out to Marin County to paint. Maybe it was simply because I was thinking of you.

Before they have this conversation, Irene gets a phone call from someone named Bob (Bruce Bennett), who is hoping for a date, but she says she is busy. Then she leaves to buy Vincent some new clothes. While she is out, a woman knocks on the door.  Because Vincent has the record player on, that woman knows someone is in there, saying, “Irene, let me in.”

Vincent says to himself, “That’s Madge’s voice.”  After she keeps insisting, he tells her through the door to go away.

This strikes us as bizarre.  Vincent knows a woman named Madge (Agnes Moorehead), who happens to be a friend of Irene, whom he met just this morning?  When Irene gets back with his new clothes, he tells her she had a caller, but he doesn’t mention that he knows it was Madge.  Later on, after the conversation about Irene’s father, Vincent doesn’t say anything about Madge, but he does ask her who Bob is.

“He was engaged to somebody else,” Irene answers. “She hates him now, but at the same time….”

“She didn’t want anybody else to have him,” Vincent says, finishing her thought.

“How did you know?”

“I’ve known people like that.”

“You know more than that,” Irene surmises. “You know she was the woman who knocked at the door. The one who worked against you at the trial.”

Filling in the blanks, we have to conclude that Irene was at the trial, falling in love with Vincent and hoping he would be acquitted, and that was where she met Madge, who testified against him and got him convicted.  On that basis, they became friends.  After the trial, Madge and Bob fell in love and became engaged, but now she hates him. Bob started dating Irene, which made Madge hate him even more.  And on that basis, Irene and Madge continue to be friends.

Vincent decides that Madge will keep coming back, so he leaves when it gets dark. He catches a taxicab. The cab driver, whose name is Sam (Tom D’Andrea), recognizes him from the newspapers. He thinks Vincent did kill his wife, but he doesn’t blame him.  “I figure you slugged her with that ashtray because she made life miserable for you. I know how it is.”

Vincent appreciates the sympathy and understanding, but he denies killing her. Sam tells him he knows a back-alley plastic surgeon that can fix him up, so people won’t recognize him.  Turns out that Irene slipped Vincent a thousand dollars without his knowing about it.  (Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $14,500 today.)  The face job will only cost a couple of hundred, so he can afford it.

In the meantime, Vincent goes to visit his friend George Fellsinger, a professional trumpet player. Through their conversation, we find out that Madge testified at the trial that Gertrude, Vincent’s wife, said, “Vincent killed me.”  That’s about as realistic as when the title character of Agamemnon announces offstage, “Ah me, I have been struck a mortal blow.”

George says that Gertrude wouldn’t have done that.  He says it was Madge who framed Vincent because she was in love with him, and when she couldn’t have him, she got revenge by telling that story on the witness stand.

Vincent leaves George’s apartment and has the plastic surgeon give him a new face.  Then, all bandaged up, he goes back to stay with George until his face has healed.  But when he enters the apartment, George is lying dead on the floor, having been killed by being struck with his own trumpet.  The police know that George was a friend of his, and when they come to ask questions, they will think Vincent killed him, especially since he left his fingerprints on the trumpet.

He has only one place to go now, and that is back to Irene’s. Unfortunately, he already dismissed Sam, the cab driver, so he has to walk all the way, or rather, climb, since this is San Francisco.  But wouldn’t you know it?  As he is about to reach Irene’s apartment, he sees Baker’s car.  You remember him, don’t you, the guy Vincent had to beat up at the beginning of this movie?  Well, here he is again.

Anyway, Vincent faints right after pushing the button to Irene’s apartment. She finds him passed out and carries him up to her apartment.  I guess Irene is stronger than she looks.

The plan now is for Vincent to stay with Irene until the bandages are ready to come off.  One night Bob calls for a date, and she accepts, saying Vincent can hide in the bedroom when Bob arrives.  But then Madge shows up before Bob gets there.

Up till now, this movie has merely been farfetched.  This section with Bob, however, is logically incoherent. Bob and Madge start arguing in front of Irene, with Bob saying that Madge is the reason Vincent murdered his wife.  “Madge pestered him,” he says, “kept after him till she had a hold on him. That’s why he killed his wife, to get her out of the way.”

And Bob thinks he knows this how?  He admits that he never met Vincent Parry.  Yet he is sure that Madge made Vicent fall in love with her, causing him to kill his wife so he could be with Madge from then on. Did Bob learn this from Irene?  No. Irene did not meet Madge until the trial, well after all this was supposed to have happened, and she didn’t even meet Vincent until after his escape from San Quentin.  As for Madge, she denies what Bob is saying.

Bob continues his accusation:

Parry didn’t have the brains to know it, but you drove him to it. He has no brains, or he wouldn’t have killed Fellsinger. Wouldn’t have come to Frisco in the first place. Now he’ll get the gas chamber.

So, according to Bob, Vincent not only killed Gertrude, his wife, but also his friend, George Fellsinger.

Madge says she’s afraid that Vincent will try to kill her next because she testified against him at his trial, and now he hates her.

Bob replies, “I never met Parry, but I know psychologically, he’s no killer.”

Huh?  Bob thinks Vincent killed Gertrude, and he thinks Vincent killed George, yet Bob is certain that Vincent is no killer, psychologically speaking, even though he never met him, so Madge has nothing to worry about.

Madge denies that Vincent ever had anything to do with her.  She says, “Somebody lied to you.”

Bob replies, “Gert wasn’t a liar. She was a lot of other things, but not a liar.”

So, Bob never met Vincent, but he knew Gertrude well enough to know she wasn’t a liar.  I guess we could assume that Bob and Gertrude were having an affair, and one night during a little pillow talk, she told Bob that Vincent and Madge were in love.  That right there could have been a lie, an attempt to justify her having an affair with Bob.  Then, after Gertrude was murdered and Vincent was convicted, Bob and Madge fell in love and decided to get married.  But they had a falling out, and Bob, having met Irene through Madge, started dating Irene.

I’m only assuming Bob and Gertrude had an affair, however, in order to make sense of how he knew her but not Vincent, her husband, but this is not confirmed through any of the dialogue.  And my assumption is doubtful, anyway, because Bob insists that Gertrude was not a liar, even though a woman has to lie to her husband when she cheats on him.

Eventually it comes out that a man was in Irene’s apartment the other day when Madge knocked on the door.  Irene tells Bob the man was her new boyfriend, breaking up with Bob and removing him from the rest of the picture. She also tells Madge she doesn’t want to see her anymore either.  So, let’s try to forget about all that nonsense Bob was talking about so we can get back to the parts of this movie that are only farfetched, like, for instance, the fact that Baker is outside, sitting in his parked convertible, looking up at Irene’s apartment.

Once the bandages come off, Vincent says goodbye to Irene, not wanting her to get mixed up in his problems.  He says he intends to find out who the real killer is so he can clear himself.  This is a common plot point in a movie, when a man wrongfully accused must evade the police long enough to find out who the real killer is and with enough evidence to exonerate himself.  I have never heard of anyone doing that in real life, but we’ll revisit this point later.

Anyway, no sooner does Vincent leave than he runs into a suspicious detective. He manages to get away from him and rent a room at a hotel, but then Baker shows up holding a .38.  He says he regained consciousness in time to see Irene’s license plate, by which he found out where she lived and that she is a rich woman.  He then followed Vincent the night he left in a taxi, so he even knows about the facelift. He wants Vincent to get Irene to give him $60,000.

Vincent agrees, and they start driving back to Irene’s.  It turns out that Baker did time in San Quentin himself, where he learned a lot of things. He tells Vincent where he can get identification papers in Benton, Arizona before he leaves the country.

Vincent gets the drop on Baker and finds out there was another car that followed him the night he took the taxi.  From the description of the car, a bright-orange convertible coupe, Vincent now knows who killed Gertrude and George.  There is another struggle, and Baker accidentally falls over a cliff.

Needless to say, the orange car belongs to Madge.  He goes over to Madge’s apartment, claiming to be a friend of Bob.  Eventually, she realizes he is actually Vincent.  Now, for the most part, this movie has been nothing like The Maltese Falcon (1941), but this scene with Vincent and Madge invites comparison to the final scene in that movie between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy.  And even though The Maltese Falcon is a much better movie than Dark Passage, and even though this latter film has been farfetched and even illogical up to this point, it is nevertheless more realistic in this scene than the movie about the black bird.

As you may remember, in the final scene of The Maltese Falcon, Sam tells Brigid that he has figured out that she killed his partner Miles Archer, and that she is going to have to “take the fall,” meaning that she will be the one who has to take the blame for that murder.  Otherwise, Sam will end up having to go to prison.  In this scene in Dark Passage, Vincent tells Madge that he has figured out that she killed Gertrude. Then he concluded that she killed George because that would further incriminate Vincent, for which he will get the gas chamber. He has it all written down on a piece of paper, which he will give to the police, saying that she will be the one who has to go to prison.

In The Maltese Falcon, Brigid admits to killing Miles, and when the police detectives show up, Sam turns her over to them.  Like a meek little lamb, she goes with them, accepting her fate without a word of protest.  In Dark Passage, however, Madge says to Vincent exactly what Brigid should have said to Sam, “That’s no evidence.  That’s just the way you figure it.”

To irritate Vincent even more, Madge defiantly admits to killing Gertrude and George.  But when Vincent asks if she will tell that to the police, she smirks and says, “No.”  In The Maltese Falcon, after Brigid admits to Sam she killed Miles, she acts as if that confession seals her fate.  In this scene in Dark Passage, Madge knows, as Brigid should have known, that she can deny ever having admitted anything to Vincent. Vincent realizes that she is right, that the police will not take his word for all this.  And so it is that Dark Passage is more believable here than was the corresponding scene in The Maltese Falcon.

His plan having been frustrated, Vincent becomes threatening, wanting to kill her. In her attempt to get away from him, she pushes up against a picture window, crashes through it, and plunges to her death from her high-rise apartment several floors up.  So, I guess you might say that she did end up taking the fall.

The reasonable thing for him to do at this point is take the elevator down to the first floor.  But he hears people talking about what happened, and he decides he must avoid them, as if they would think he pushed the woman out the window. Instead, he goes up to the roof and then climbs down what must be at least ten flights of fire escape.  But that’s all right, because nobody notices.

He makes it to the bus station and buys a ticket for Benton, Arizona, the place where Baker said he could get a passport.  He calls Irene on a payphone and tells her he is going to Paita, Peru.  While he is on the phone, a policeman comes in and starts talking to the man selling bus tickets.  We don’t get to hear what the policeman is looking for, we only hear the man selling tickets say, “I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”  Peeled for what?  Vincent Parry?  No problem.  He’s had a face lift.

Anyway, with the policeman standing right outside the phone booth, we wonder if Vincent will have any trouble getting past him and the man selling tickets.  Well, I guess we can go on right on wondering because all of a sudden, we see Vincent sitting on the bus.

Then comes the happy ending, where Irene finds Vincent in a nightclub in Paita.

I mentioned earlier that the plot of the wronged man, who must evade the police long enough to discover who the real killer is and find enough evidence to incriminate him while exonerating himself, is a common one.  And in every other movie I can think of, this wronged man does exactly that, even though nothing like that ever happens in real life.  This movie is the exception. Vincent is still wanted for murdering Gertrude and George, and we can now add Madge to this list of people he is supposed to have killed.  The police might even be able to tie him to Baker’s death.  In a strange way, the fact that he has been unable to clear himself makes this movie, as farfetched and illogical as it is, more realistic.

As suggested by the title, Out of the Past is a movie about a man who thought he had put his past behind him and could live out his days contentedly married to a nice woman in a small town.  But one day, his past catches up with him, dragging him back.  As might be expected, this precipitates a flashback.

Flashbacks are common in a film noir like this one, presumably because they help create the right mood for stories about what Foster Hirsch refers to as “doomed characters” who are “victims of fate.”  [The Dark Side of the Screen:  Film Noir, page 2.]  There is no logical reason why this should be so.  If man has free will, then he would have had it in the past just as he has it in the present. Alternatively, if events occur by chance, they could have done so in the past just as they do today. Because the past cannot be changed, however, the inalterable nature of those past events creates the feeling that those events were unavoidable when they first unfolded.

Even a movie told completely in the present tense can be experienced differently when seen a second time, for then we know the end toward which the events in the movie are headed, and we experience a sense of inevitability that was absent when we watched the movie the first time, when the future seemed open to all sorts of possibilities.  For that reason, films noirs with flashbacks age well, for the sense of inexorable fate is doubled on a subsequent viewing.

Danny Peary says, “Out of the Past repeatedly suggests that lives are determined by chance,” [Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, page 242] after which he lists several examples, which are discussed below.  But the overriding principle is fate, which guides the flow of chance events toward their ultimate destination.

Understood this way, we can accept some of the almost unbelievable coincidences that occur in this movie, for in a world governed by fate, what is unlikely may be inevitable.  For example, viewed objectively, it is a bit farfetched that Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), a private detective, could spend his afternoons sitting in a little café called La Mar Azul in Acapulco, drinking beer, in hopes of spotting Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), whom he has been hired to find on account of her having shot her lover, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), a big-time gambler, when he found out she stole $40,000 from him.

When Jeff is first hired to find Kathie, Whit says he’s not worried about the money.  He just wants her back.  Jeff talks to the woman that used to be Kathie’s maid, who says that Kathie must have gone south, Florida to be exact, given the clothes she packed.  However, the maid also refers to Kathie’s having gotten sick from being vaccinated.  Jeff notes that you don’t need to be vaccinated to go to Florida, so he takes the bus to Mexico City and then to Acapulco.  Jeff figures that Acapulco is the place because “if you want to go south, here’s where you get the boat.”  And so, against all odds, Jeff’s waiting around in that café works, for one day Kathie walks in through the door.

Another example of how fate overcomes the odds occurs after Jeff and Kathie fall in love and decide to hide out in San Francisco, where Jeff starts working as a private detective again.  He says, “There wasn’t one chance in a million we’d bump into our past.”  It is helpful that Jeff acknowledged the odds against running into anyone they once knew, and it is fitting that we see him at a racetrack as he says this.  This preemptive admission of just how much of a long shot it was makes it easier to believe it when it happens.  He is spotted by his ex-partner, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie), whom Whit hired to find Jeff and Kathie after he realized that Jeff betrayed him by running off with Kathie instead of bringing her back. But even more so, the fatalistic connotations of the flashback, in which this part of the story is told, make their being found out even more acceptable.  It was bound to happen, sooner or later, we tell ourselves.

Chance was also put in its place in a previous scene, one in Acapulco, where Kathie takes Jeff to a casino. She continually places big bets on the roulette table and loses.  He tells her that isn’t the way to win.

“Is there a way?” she replies with resignation.

“There’s a way to lose more slowly.”

Jeff adds that he especially does not like betting against a wheel.  In the movies, only women and weak men play roulette, where one must passively sit at the table while the odds slowly grind one down.  A real man likes to imagine that he has some say in the matter, which is why Jeff is happy to go to the racetrack, where a man can flatter himself that his knowledge of the horses, the jockeys, and the track enables him to beat the odds.  Of course, it is at the track where the million to one shot against him comes in.

Adding to this sense of fate is the enchanting nature of Kathie herself.  “And then I saw her coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn’t care about the forty grand,” Jeff says as we see her walking into La Mar Azul.  After their first meeting, she mentions a cantina named Pablo’s, adding, “I sometimes go there.”

Jeff continues his narration:

I went to Pablo’s that night. I knew I’d go every night until she showed up, and I knew she knew it.  I sat there and drank bourbon, and I shut my eyes….  I knew where I was and what I was doing. I just thought what a sucker I was. I even knew she wouldn’t come the first night, but I sat there, grinding it out. But the next night I knew she’d show. She waited until it was late.  And then she walked in out of the moonlight, smiling.

Kathie is sexually irresistible, and we know that Jeff is destined to make love to her.  She tells him she never stole the $40,000, asking him, “Won’t you believe me?”

“Baby, I don’t care,” he replies, kissing her and sealing his fate.

One night, they go back to her cabin just as it starts raining.  Because they got wet, they get a towel and start drying themselves off.  We are used to seeing old movies where the love scenes are indicated by metaphors:  two lit cigarettes burning in an ashtray, logs burning in the fireplace, fireworks lighting up the sky.  In this movie, Jeff flings the towel away, knocking over the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, just as the storm blows open the door, with the rain pouring down. Whew! That must have been some pretty good sex.

Nicholas Christopher says that the first time he saw Out of the Past, he had taken a few puffs on an opium pipe, so he attributed the dreamlike experience of watching the movie to the opium. Years later, however, he saw the movie cold sober:

And again, as I found myself entering that same vivid, darkly beautiful dream I remembered from Paris, I realized with astonishment that it had not been the opium which had engendered the dream, but the film.  [Somewhere in the Night:  Film Noir and the American City, page xii.]

After quoting the two entrances made by Kathie referred to above, he makes a general observation about how she appears to Jeff:

And he keeps referring to her as emerging from various sorts of light.  As a glowing, luminescent image.  Almost otherworldly.  Always striding into darkness….  “And then suddenly she appeared,” he says with a lift of anticipation, “walking through the moonlight, to me….”  “And then I saw her,” he says, “walking up the dirt road in the headlights of her car….”  [Ibid., pages 2-3.]

At this point, it worth contrasting Kathie with another woman, Ann Miller (Virginia Huston).  The movie begins in Bridgeport, a small town in California.  Jeff, having changed his last name to “Bailey,” runs a filling station, and he wants to marry Ann.  She is an attractive woman, but she is not sexually exciting the way Kathie is.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I would have counted myself lucky to have had a girlfriend as pretty as Ann back in the day.  But compared to Kathie?  Forget about it.  With her, I wouldn’t even have tried.  I knew my place in the world, and that did not include having a girlfriend like Kathie.

Actually, I think I would have been most comfortable with Marny (Mary Field), the wise-cracking hash-slinger who owns the café in Bridgeport right across the street from Jeff’s filling station, although nobody is interested her.  While she is talking to Jim, the local sheriff, we learn he used to be Ann’s boyfriend: “First she’s got you,” Marny says, “now she’s got you and Bailey. And the only thing I seem to get is older.”

After Jim leaves, she turns her attention to a stranger that just dropped in.  It is Joe (Paul Valentine), Whit’s right-hand man.  Wanting to find out about Jeff, he says to her, “Tell me something.”

“You don’t look like I could,” she replies.

He asks her if the Bailey she was talking about runs the filling station.  She indicates as much.  He says he just happened to be passing through when he saw Bailey’s name on the sign over the filling station, and wonders if he is someone he used to know.  Actually, Jeff went by the name of Markham when Joe knew him, but Joe doesn’t want Marny to know his reason for being there.  Rather, he saw Jeff himself in front of the filling station on a previous occasion.  Add this to the list of unlikely coincidences that only an inexorable fate could bring about.

The beginning of this movie has been compared to The Killers (1946), where Burt Lancaster is trying to escape his past by working in a filling station in a small town when he happens to be spotted by Albert Dekker, a gangster he double-crossed once.  This is one of many elements of previous films noirs that occur in this movie, discussed further below.

When Bailey returns to the filling station, Joe tells him Whit wants to see him.  Jeff realizes he has to square things, and putting on his trench coat and fedora, he has Ann give him a ride to Whit’s house on Lake Tahoe.  During the trip, he tells her about his past, which constitutes the flashback.

Before proceeding, there are a couple of points worth mentioning.  This movie is based on a novel written by Daniel Mainwaring, Build My Gallows High.  In “Daniel Mainwaring:  An Interview,” by Tom Flinn, Mainwaring says, “I had been to Acapulco a couple of years before I wrote the book.  It was just a little bitty town, not like it is today.  There were very few cafés, and one hotel.”  [The Big Book of Noir, page 66.] This makes it a little more reasonable that Jeff could hang around one café and hope that Kathie would show up.

In the same interview, he says, “The scenes in San Francisco, however, took place in New York in the book. We switched to San Francisco because we wanted to shoot there.”  [Ibid.]  The story starts in New York, where Whit hired Jeff to find Kathie.  That means that in the book, after leaving Acapulco, Jeff and Kathie went back to New York.  Had that been in the movie, their being seen by Fisher at the racetrack would have been a lot more believable.  As it is, we have to wonder why Fisher, after being hired by Whit to find Jeff and Kathie, would pick San Francisco as a good place to look for them.  Fate or no fate, that really strains our credulity.

Anyway, after Jeff is spotted at that racetrack, Fisher shows up at the cabin Jeff and Kathie have in the woods, wanting his cut of the $40,000 Kathie stole.  Jeff still thinks she doesn’t have it.  While he and Fisher start fighting, we see Kathie watching calmly as her right hand seems to be reaching for something.  A slight, determined smile appears on her lips.  The fight continues, and then a shot rings out.  We see Kathie standing there with a gun in her hand, probably the one she shot Whit with. Jeff says she didn’t have to do that.  She says, “You wouldn’t have killed him,” pointing out that Fisher would have told Whit about them.  Believing her present situation to be untenable, she runs out the door, jumps in a car, and drives off, leaving her purse behind, which has a checkbook in it, listing a deposit of $40,000.

The flashback is concluded just as Jeff and Ann arrive at Whit’s house.  He gets out, and Ann drives back to Bridgeport.  Whit tells Jeff he has another job for him to do, figuring Jeff owes him.  While telling him about it, Kathie comes walking into the room, having returned to Whit.  In many scenes, we see Jeff from behind as he walks away.  With Kathie, on the other hand, she makes dramatic entrances by suddenly walking into a room.

As James Harvey points out, however, there is a difference:

But in the second half of the movie—the part that’s in the present—Kathie is a different figure from the woman in Acapulco.  Even her reentrances (which go on) are different:  less grand than furtive—less like here-she-is! (“And then I saw her…”) than where-did-she come-from?  [Movie Love in the Fifties, page 19.]

Anyway, it seems that Whit had an accountant in San Francisco help him cheat on his taxes but who is now blackmailing him, and Whit wants Jeff to get those tax records back from the accountant.  This is the part of the movie that Bosley Crowther must have had in mind when writing his review for the New York Times, where he says that “the sum of deceitful complications that occur in ‘Out of the Past’ must be reckoned by logarithmic tables, so numerous and involved do they become.”

Suffice it to say that Whit’s plan is to have Kathie, accompanied by Joe, go to San Francisco, murder the accountant, and frame Jeff for it.  As part of the frame, there is an affidavit that Kathie signed saying that Jeff murdered Fisher.  However, Jeff is one step ahead of them and foils the plot.  He now has the tax records, which he will give up in exchange for the affidavit.  In the meantime, he goes back to Bridgeport to see Ann.

While all this was going on, Whit had gone to his Blue Sky Club in Reno.  Kathie fears that she and Joe might now be in trouble with Whit for having botched things.  She calls Whit and tells him to stay where he is.  Then she has Joe go to Bridgeport to kill Jeff.  That would mean that the tax records would make their way to the Treasury Department, in which case Whit would end up going to prison, but she and Joe don’t care because they would be in the clear.  However, Joe ends up falling to his death with the help of Jeff’s deaf-mute assistant at the filling station, referred to as “The Kid” (Dickie Moore), who hooks him with his fishing line.

When Jeff returns to Whit’s place, he makes a deal with Whit to give him the tax records that Jeff now has, in exchange for which Whit will give Jeff $50,000 and take the frame off him for killing the accountant, for which they can now blame Joe.  However, someone has to take the rap for killing Fisher, and that will have to be Kathie.

Now, where have we heard that before?  In another essay by Tom Flinn, “Out of the Past,” he notices a similarity between this movie and The Maltese Falcon (1941) in the need to have a fall-guy.  He also compares Sam Spade and Gutman to Jeff and Whit, while comparing Kathie and Meta to Brigid.  (Meta is another femme fatale in this movie, played by Rhonda Fleming, who is the tax accountant’s secretary and lover.  She plays a role in setting him up to be killed.)  [The Big Book of Noir, pages 69-70.]

In the commentary provided by James Ursini on the DVD, he says the tax records have a function similar to that of the Maltese Falcon.  To all that, I suppose we might add that just as Spade didn’t like his partner Archer, so Jeff didn’t like his partner Fisher, whom he referred to as stupid and oily.  And just as Brigid killed Archer, so Kathie killed Fisher.

Flinn goes on to note that both films have the protagonist express “mocking admiration” for the “performance” of the femme fatale, as when Spade says to Brigid, “You’re good, you’re very good,” while Jeff says to Kathie, “You’re wonderful, you’re magnificent.”  In a footnote, he goes on to say that such “masculine tributes to feminine duplicity” can also be found in Nightmare Alley (1947) and Dead Reckoning (1946).  [Ibid., page 70 and page 76, n. 2.]

Regarding all these elements in Out of the Past that are reminiscent of earlier films noirs, including similarities to Double Indemnity noted below, Flinn says the following:

In the development of any art movement (or film genre) there comes a point well after the initial breakthrough has been accomplished when the themes and ideas that marked the development of the style or genre reappear in countless elaborations, producing works of greater complexity if less originality than those that defined the style or initiated the genre.  Usually termed “decadent” or “baroque” by historians, these later efforts are frequently dismissed as “more of the same” at the time they are produced, though they often seem more interesting in retrospect than the classic works they followed….  It would be hard indeed to find a better example of the “baroque” phase of film noir than RKO’s Out of the Past….  [Ibid., page 69]

After Jeff leaves to go see Ann again, Whit tells Kathie that if she doesn’t admit to killing Fisher and take the fall, he will have her tormented, tortured, and ultimately killed.  Then he goes to Reno to get the money to pay off Jeff.  When Jeff returns, he walks into Whit’s living room where he sees Whit lying dead on the floor with a dumb look on his face, pretty much matching the one now on Jeff’s face.

It seems these guys just won’t learn.  The whole thing started when Kathie shot Whit.  In San Francisco, she shot and killed Fisher.  Then she helped arrange for Joe to kill the accountant, which he did.  And then she schemed with Joe for him to kill Jeff while Whit was away.  You’d think by this time Whit and Jeff might have realized that trying to make Kathie be the fall-guy is a dangerous thing to do.

At this point, we hear Kathie’s voice, “You can’t make deals with a dead man, Jeff,” as she makes another one of her dramatic entrances into a room.  And now she has the $50,000 that Whit was going to give to Jeff.

Kathie could kill Jeff too, but she doesn’t, probably because she is still in love with him.  Now that Jeff’s plan has been thwarted, Kathie says she wants the two of them to go back to Mexico and start all over again.  He reluctantly agrees to go along with her plan.  While she goes upstairs to pack, however, he calls the police to let them know where they will be heading.

When they get in the car, Jeff has trouble getting it started, but Kathie reaches down, presumably adjusting the choke, allowing the car to start.  This reminds us of a scene from Double Indemnity (1944), although in that case, it was the man that finally got the car started, whereas in this case, it is Kathie, reinforcing the idea that she is in charge now.

As they drive down the highway, Kathie sees a police blockade up ahead and realizes Jeff has betrayed her.  She says, “Dirty, double-crossing rat!” as she pulls out her revolver, jams the barrel into his genitals, and pulls the trigger.  Then the police riddle the car with machine-gun bullets, killing both of them.

In the novel, Whit’s men kill Jeff.  Danny Peary notes that for a while, James M. Cain worked on the script. He speculates that it was Cain who had Jeff and Kathie die together at the end, just as he did in his novel, Double Indemnity, where Walter and Phyllis commit suicide while on a ship at sea by jumping overboard together, thereby feeding the sharks.  [Op. cit., page 243.]

Following this, the movie takes us back to Bridgeport.  We see Jim telling Ann that he wants to be with her, but she says she can’t.  Then she walks over to the filling station and asks The Kid if Jeff was going away with Kathie.  Although The Kid knows that Jeff had planned to come back to Ann, he lies, nodding “yes,” allowing her to think Jeff never really loved her. This frees her to go back to Jim.  Lucky him.  He gets Jeff’s leftovers.

In the interview with Mainwaring, Tom Flinn says, “Even with the two people from the small town getting together and going away, it’s not much of a happy ending because all the interesting people are dead.”

Mainwaring replies that this ending was required by the “front office.”  “Nowadays they would have ended it with both of them dead.”  [Op. cit., page 67.]

Apparently, it was not enough for the bad people to die in the end.  Ordinary domestic life had to be affirmed.  Even so, this “happy ending” is subversive because it is based on a lie.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) is based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, published in 1930 after having been serialized in Black Mask magazine in 1929.  Because the movie follows it rather closely, references to the novel from time to time can give us a better understanding of the story.

The Provenance of the Maltese Falcon

A lot happens regarding the title statuette before the movie begins, bits and pieces of which are revealed at various points, all of which can be a little hard to follow.  Let us take advantage of hindsight and put it all together at once.

At the beginning of the movie, there is a prologue, telling us about the origin of the Maltese Falcon, made of gold and encrusted with jewels, sent as a tribute to Charles V in 1539 by the Knight Templars of Malta, but seized by pirates before it could arrive.  What happened to it after that, according to the prologue, is a mystery.

Later in the movie, Casper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) reveals additional history of the bird in the centuries since, until he became aware of where it was seventeen years ago.  However, it was stolen before he could get his hands on it.  Somewhat recently, he discovered that it was in the possession of a Russian general named Kemidov, living in a suburb of Istanbul.  Because the bird had been painted in black enamel to conceal its worth at some point during its history, Gutman surmised that Kemidov didn’t know its true value. However, he refused to sell it.  Gutman hired some agents to steal it, but they kept it instead of bringing it to him.

The novel makes it clear that those agents were Bridgid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), Floyd Thursby, and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre).  When Brigid and Thursby found out Cairo meant to double-cross them as well as Gutman, keeping the falcon for himself, they turned the tables on him and took off with the falcon after Thursby managed to steal it from Kemidov.

Brigid and Thursby went to Hong Kong, where Brigid hired Captain Jacobi, Master of the La Paloma, to bring the Maltese Falcon to her when his ship arrived in San Francisco.  Somehow, Gutman got wind of the fact that Brigid and Thursby had the bird and where they were headed.  He followed them there, along with his gunsel Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook Jr.).

At one point in the novel, Cairo claims not to know who Wilmer is, but that is unlikely, since he knew Gutman, and because he shows Wilmer affection later on, rubbing his hand, putting his arm around him. Brigid suggests that Cairo had sex with Wilmer, and Cairo says she tried to have sex with Wilmer too, for some nefarious purpose, no doubt, but with no success, probably because Wilmer was not interested in women.

Toward the end of the novel, Cairo becomes upset when Wilmer is beaten up. After Wilmer is knocked out, he is laid on the sofa:

Joel Cairo sat beside the boy, bending over him, rubbing his cheeks and wrists, smoothing his hair back from his forehead, whispering to him, and peering anxiously down at his white still face.

As for Gutman, he says he loves Wilmer like a son, but I think we know what that means.

Brigid suspects that Thursby will double-cross her, so she decides to do him in first.  To that end, she shows up at the office of a private detective agency called Spade and Archer, under the name of Miss Wonderly.  It is at this point that the movie begins.

Miss Wonderly

Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is in his office when Effie Perine (Lee Patrick), his secretary, steps inside from the outer office to tell him there is a Miss Wonderly to see him.  It is rather startling to see how sexualized the relationship between Sam and Effie is, even though it is otherwise merely professional. Sam addresses Effie as “sweetheart” and “darling.”  Later in the movie, he calls her “precious.”  When Sam asks her if Miss Wonderly is a customer, Effie says she thinks so, adding, “You’ll want to see her anyway. She’s a knockout.”

This “Miss Wonderly” begins telling her phony story about how her sister has run off with Floyd Thursby, and she wants help in getting her back home.  She says Thursby has agreed to meet her that night.  While she is talking, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) joins them.  He says he will be nearby when she and Thursby meet.  She puts two hundred-dollar bills on the table.

Because she knows Thursby is a violent man, her plan is that a confrontation will occur, and either Archer will kill Thursby, or Thursby will kill Archer.  If the latter, then she can tell the police about the murder, getting Thursby arrested, and then have the Maltese Falcon all to herself when Jacobi brings it to her. When she is unable to get the confrontation that she had hoped for, she takes one of Thursby’s pistols and shoots Archer herself, leaving the unusual revolver behind so that Thursby will be incriminated.

We don’t actually see who it is that shoots Archer.  All we see is a revolver pointed at Archer and fired. That Brigid shot him is not revealed until the end of the movie.  In the meantime, Brigid doesn’t have to frame Thursby for Archer’s murder as she planned because he is shot four times in the back by Wilmer. Later on, Wilmer also kills Captain Jacobi.

Wilmer

Wilmer is played by Elisha Cook Jr., who was 5 feet, 5 inches tall.  He often played the role of a small, thin-skinned man who is trying to compensate for his diminutive stature by acting tough, only to end up being humiliated.  Most memorable is when Jack Palance shoots him in Shane (1953), Cook’s body flying back into the mud.  He is usually nothing but feckless bluster, but on those rare occasions where he does manage to kill someone, he is almost always killed himself, as in The Killing (1956) or One-Eyed Jacks (1961).

In the latter movie, there was no need for him to die as far as the plot was concerned.  Rather, it was necessitated by his screen persona.  When Ben Johnson tries to rob a bank, Cook, as the bank teller, could have shot him dead with no harm coming to himself, and that would have worked just as well, logically speaking.  But to have a pipsqueak like Elisha Cook Jr. kill a big strapping man like Ben Johnson and then be triumphant, standing over Johnson’s body with a smoking gun in his hand, that would have been a grave injustice, aesthetically speaking, that is.  So, he just had to catch a bullet himself.

The Maltese Falcon is the only movie I am aware of in which Elisha Cook Jr. plays a character who kills someone, two in this movie, and yet is not killed himself.  At one point, he even kicks Spade in the face. However, Spade does humiliate him, taking his two .45s away from him on two different occasions. Wilmer is arrested at the end of the movie, but even that is diminished by the fact that we only hear about it.  I suspect that the reason he was able to kill two men in this movie without having to be killed himself was that there are no scenes depicting these murders.  Had we witnessed Wilmer gunning these men down with his two .45s, it would have been necessary to film a scene where he was shot full of bullets himself.

Spade and Archer

From the beginning, we see that Spade does not like his partner Archer. Although Spade was the one to start interviewing Miss Wonderly, when he tells her that they will have a man near the place where she is supposed to meet Thursby, Archer butts in and says, “I’ll look after it myself.” Spade gives him a look of mild annoyance.  After she leaves, Archer says, “Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.”

With barely concealed sarcasm, Spade replies, “You’ve got brains.  Yes, you have.”

Just after two in the morning, Spade gets a call from Detective Tom Polhouse (Ward Bond), telling him that Archer was found dead near the corner of Bush and Stockton.  Spade says he’ll be there in fifteen minutes.  When he gets there, he and Tom discuss what happened. Finally, Tom says, “Miles had his faults like any of us, but he must’ve had some good points too.”

Spade replies, “I guess so,” as if to say he can’t think of any at the moment. We accept his indifference to Miles’ death because we are informed that Miles had no children.  If a man in a movie has young children, we are supposed to like him.

During the opening scene in which Miss Wonderly told her story about the sister she supposedly had, we are made aware of two windows in the office, both with “Spade and Archer” written on them in big, bold letters.  One window is on the wall to Spade’s right, where Archer’s desk is.  The large window is behind Spade’s desk.  The sun is shining through it and, as a result, we see “Spade and Archer” projected onto the wall just to Sam’s left.  After Miss Wonderly leaves, we see “Spade and Archer” projected onto the floor, apparently through a third window, this one on that same wall, the one to Spade’s left, which means the sun has moved around so it can shine in through that window now.  And in what kind of building could an office of ordinary size have windows on three of its walls?

This impossible repositioning on the part of the sun so it can shine through an unlikely window was probably motivated by a desire on the part of the director, John Huston, to emphasize the way “Spade and Archer” dominates the room.  The day after Archer’s death, Spade is so glad to be rid of Archer that, unwilling to allow for a decent interval of even a few days to show some respect for his dead partner, he tells Effie to have “Spade and Archer” removed from the windows and replaced with “Samuel Spade.”

Near the end of the novel, after Spade has figured out that Brigid killed Archer, he explains why he doesn’t care about that:

“Miles,” Spade said hoarsely, “was a son of a bitch. I found that out the first week we were in business together, and I meant to kick him out as soon as the year was up. You didn’t do me a damned bit of harm by killing him.”

His saying that he “meant to kick him out” tells us that us that the year in question came and went without Spade getting rid of Archer.

Iva

Spade doesn’t say why he didn’t kick him out, but I think we can guess.  Before that year was up, he started having an affair with Archer’s wife Iva (Gladys George).  It would have been awkward for Sam to break off the partnership while he was still having sex with her.  Then, after Sam tired of Iva and wanted to break off his affair with her, he found it awkward to do so while he was still partners with her husband.  As a result, he was stuck with Miles on account of Iva, and he was stuck with Iva on account of Miles.

The night Tom calls Spade to tell him that Miles is dead, Spade says he will be there in fifteen minutes. But first things first.  He calls Effie, giving her the news, and telling her she will have to be the one to tell Iva, saying, “I’d fry first.” Although he is still having sex with Iva, he can’t stand her anymore.  He tells Effie to keep Iva away from him.  Of course, Iva thinks Sam is in love with her, and now that Miles is dead, she figures they can finally get married.  Although Sam is glad to get rid of Miles as a partner, he figured he was safe from Iva as long as she was already married, but now that protection is gone.

It’s bad enough when you’re having an affair with a married woman, thinking it’s just a little on the side, when she calls you on the phone and says, “I told Clarence all about us.  I’m leaving him.  Now we can get married.”  I suppose if you’re a tough guy like Sam Spade, you could say, “Listen sweetheart, I never said anything about marriage.”  But even he cannot bring himself to say that to a woman who has just become a widow.

The morning after Miles was killed, Iva is waiting for Sam at his office.  He is irritated that Effie didn’t keep her away from him as he told her to, but as Effie points out, he didn’t tell her how.  Once inside his office, Sam and Iva do a little kissing.  She asks if he killed Miles so they could get married, which from his point of view is preposterous.  In the novel, after denying her suggestion, they do some more kissing.  Finally, he sends her away, saying it’s not good for her to be there, promising to see her again as soon as he can.

After Iva leaves, Effie asks him if he is going to marry her.  In the novel, he says, “Don’t be silly.”

“She doesn’t think it’s silly,” Effie replies.  “Why should she, the way you’ve played around with her?” When Sam says he wishes he’d never seen her, Effie continues:  “Maybe you do now…, but there was a time.”

Effie sizes him up correctly when she tells him, “You think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good.  Someday you’re going to find it out.”  As far as his being stuck with Iva is concerned, I think he already has.

Later in the novel, Iva says something about Sam “pretending to love” her. Like a lot of people, Iva probably believes that if it’s true love, it will last forever, forgetting that she no longer loved Miles the way she did once.  So, when she begins to suspect that Sam doesn’t want her around anymore, she figures he never really loved her in the first place and that he was only pretending.  The reality is that people can fall in love genuinely and sincerely, only to have it die with the passage of time.  Sam probably did love Iva in the beginning, and he wasn’t pretending at all.

Effie

Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a femme fatale.  As such, we expect her to be somewhat successful in deceiving men.  What is unusual, however, is the way Brigid is able to deceive Effie.  Unlike Spade, who is skeptical of Brigid and is only partly deceived by her, Effie is completely sold.

When Brigid confesses that she lied about having a sister, Spade replies, “We didn’t exactly believe your story.  We believed your $200.”  The conversation proceeds from there with Spade seeing right through her new story and her performance.  That is consistent with what we normally expect of a private eye in a movie.  But when he asks her if she had anything to do with the death of Archer, she denies it, and he believes her, saying sincerely, “That’s good.”

In the novel, Brigid spends the night with Sam at his place.  He wakes up before she does, takes her key, goes to her apartment, and searches it thoroughly.  Then he makes it appear as though someone broke into her apartment.  When she discovers that her apartment had supposedly been broken into, Sam says she needs a new place to stay.  You would think that since Sam and Brigid spent the night together at his place, he would have the decency to let her continue sleeping with him over there, but he doesn’t.  In the movie, there is only the suggestion that they had sex, when there is a fadeout while they are kissing in his apartment, and there is no indication that Sam was the one who searched her place.

In either case, Sam turns to Effie to see if she is agreeable to letting Brigid stay with her, asking her, “What’s your woman’s intuition say about her?”

“She’s all right,” Effie replies.  “Maybe it’s her own fault for the trouble, but she’s all right.”  As a result, Effie agrees to let Brigid stay with her.

In the novel, Effie is even more emphatic in the faith she has in Brigid:

“She’s got too many names,” Spade mused, “Wonderly, Leblanc, and she says the right one’s O’Shaughnessy.”

“I don’t care if she’s got all the names in the phonebook. That girl is all right, and you know it.”

“I wonder.” Spade blinked sleepily at Effie Perine. He chuckled. “Anyway, she’s given up seven hundred smacks in two days, and that’s all right.”

Effie Perine sat up straight and said: “Sam, if that girl’s in trouble and you let her down, or take advantage of it to bleed her, I’ll never forgive you, never have any respect for you, as long as I live.”

Spade asks her on another occasion about her woman’s intuition.

“Does your woman’s intuition still tell you that she’s a Madonna or something?”

She looked sharply up at him. “I still believe that no matter what kind of trouble she’s gotten into, she’s all right, if that’s what you mean.”

With all this emphasis on a woman’s intuition, especially that of a woman like Effie, who seems to be a nice person herself, we are supposed to accept her judgment of Brigid.  Maybe that is the reason Hammett put this in the novel, as a way of letting us be seduced into trusting Brigid too.  That is why it comes as a shock at the end of the movie when we find out that Brigid killed Miles Archer in an act of coldblooded, premeditated murder.

The movie ends with the police arresting Brigid and taking her away.  But the novel continues long enough to rub Effie’s nose in it.  The next morning, Spade goes to his office, where Effie is reading all about it in the newspaper.  She asks if the story in the paper is correct.  Spade assures her that it is.

The girl’s brown eyes were peculiarly enlarged and there was a queer twist to her mouth. She stood beside him, staring down at him. He raised his head, grinned, and said mockingly: “So much for your woman’s intuition.”

Her voice was queer as the expression on her face. “You did that, Sam, to her?”

He nodded. “Your Sam’s a detective.” He looked sharply at her. He put his arm around her waist, his hand on her hip. “She did kill Miles, angel,” he said gently, “offhand, like that.” He snapped the fingers of his other hand.

She escaped from his arm as if it had hurt her. “Don’t, please, don’t touch me,” she said brokenly. “I know—I know you’re right. You’re right. But don’t touch me now—not now.”

Boy, Effie’s got it bad!  Could it be that she fell in love with Brigid?  Maybe that would explain how her woman’s intuition could be so wrong.  She was as susceptible to the lure of a femme fatale just as any man would be.

The Fall-Guy

Before Captain Jacobi died from the bullet wounds inflicted on him by Wilmer, he showed up at Spade’s office with the Maltese Falcon, since that was the address Brigid had given him.  Spade arranges to have the falcon delivered to his apartment the next morning.  And so it is that near the end of the movie, Sam Spade, Casper Gutman, Wilmer Cook, Joel Cairo, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy are all in Spade’s apartment waiting for the arrival of the black bird.

Spade says they can share the loot the Maltese Falcon will provide, but he needs a fall-guy, and he suggests Wilmer.  Wilmer doesn’t like it, so Spade humiliates him again by taking his two .45s away from him.  Gutman points out that if they turn Wilmer over to the police, he will incriminate the lot of them. Spade says that he knows District Attorney Bryan (John Hamilton), saying that he’ll be satisfied to have one man to convict.  He won’t want to confuse the case by trying to convict several.  So, Wilmer can talk all he wants, and it won’t make any difference.  Even if he talks about the Maltese Falcon, Spade says, Bryan won’t care as long as he has Wilmer to prosecute.  Gutman eventually agrees, but Wilmer manages to slip away later on.

When the black bird arrives, Gutman decides to scrape some of the black enamel off it.  It is then he discovers that it is fake, made of lead, presumably by General Kemidov, to mislead anyone who might try to steal the real one. Gutman and Cairo decide to go to Istanbul and see if they can get the real Maltese Falcon from Kemidov.  After they leave, Spade calls Tom and tells him about these characters so they can be arrested, which they are.

Spade had thought for a long time that Thursby killed Archer, but by this point in the story, he has figured out that Brigid killed him.  He tells her that he now knows the truth, and he’s going to have her arrested for it.

However, Sam has no evidence that Brigid killed Miles.  In fact, the reason he was so worried about finding a fall-guy was that the police think he killed Miles so he could marry Iva.  As he says to Brigid in the novel, “You’re taking the fall. One of us has got to take it, after the talking those birds will do [referring to Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer]. They’d hang me sure. You’re likely to get a better break.”

Later in their conversation in the novel, when she asks him to let her go, he refuses, saying, “I’m sunk if I haven’t got you to hand over to the police when they come.  That’s the only thing that can keep me from going down with the others.”

Apparently, Sam thinks all he has to do is say, “She did it,” and that will be all the evidence needed for a conviction.  While we are on the subject of evidence, I’m not sure what the police would have to arrest Gutman and Cairo on.  Wilmer can be arrested for murder, sure enough, given that Spade has the two .45s Wilmer killed Thursby and Jacobi with, but what evidence is there that Gutman and Cairo are guilty of anything?

In any event, all this contradicts what Spade said earlier.  When trying to get Gutman agree to let Wilmer be the fall-guy, he said that as long as District Attorney Bryan has one man to convict, he will be satisfied with that.  After Gutman and Cairo leave, Spade called Tom so they could all be arrested. But that means that Bryan will have Wilmer to put on trial and not bother with the rest.  Wilmer will end up being the fall-guy, just as Spade wanted originally. And that means that Bryan won’t bother with anyone else, including Spade and Brigid.

In the novel, Wilmer also kills Gutman.  So, as far as Bryan will be concerned, Floyd Thursby killed Miles Archer, and then Wilmer killed Thursby, Captain Jacobi, and Casper Gutman.

In short, Spade does not need Brigid to take the fall, since Wilmer will be serving that function.

True Love

Now, it is easy enough to overlook the inconsistency regarding the need for Brigid to be a superfluous fall-guy when District Attorney Bryan will already have Wilmer, but when it comes to the idea that Sam and Brigid truly love each other, that is another thing altogether.  The first several times I saw this movie, I did not give that serious countenance.  I heard Sam saying something about love, but I figured it was all just so much hardboiled patter. Upon subsequent viewing, however, I have been forced to reach the conclusion that Sam and Brigid are sincere when they proclaim their love for each other.  Only by examining the matter in some detail was I able to convince myself that it is supposed to be true love.

First of all, let’s ask what would have happened if Brigid did not love Sam. After Gutman and Cairo head back to the Alexandria hotel, something like the following dialogue might have taken place:

Brigid:  Well, I think I just might book passage to Istanbul myself.

Sam:  Hold on, sweetheart.  I just realized that you killed Miles.

Brigid:  That’s an interesting theory you have there.  We’ll have to talk about it some time.

And with that, she walks out the door and closes it behind her.

But that is not what happens.  Instead, Brigid confesses that she murdered Miles.  Why would she do that?  The only thing that would make sense is that she is in love with Sam and is hoping for his forgiveness.

She tells Sam that it was love at first sight:  “From the very first instant I saw you, I knew.”  When I heard her say that the first few times I watched this movie, I asked myself, how can she possibly expect Sam to believe that?  But now I see that it makes sense.  People who believe in true love, the kind that will last forever, often believe that marriages are made in Heaven, that there is just one person you were made for, and when you meet that person, you know it right away.

Sam replies, “Well, if you get a good break, you’ll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years, and you can come back to me then.”

Sounds as though he’s just being a smart-ass, right?  By itself, we could believe it was a wisecrack. But when he repeats it, we have to believe he is serious.  “If you’re a good girl,” he says a few minutes later, “you’ll be out in twenty years. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Then Sam goes into this lengthy explanation as to why he’s turning her in to the police.  Essentially, it comes down to three reasons.  The first is a point of professional duty.  In the private-detective business, when your partner is killed, even if you didn’t like him, you’re supposed to do something about it.

The second is a matter of self-respect.  Twice in the movie he says he won’t “play the sap” for her.  In the novel, he makes seven references to playing the sap for her.  He has to turn her in to preserve his manhood.

The third is that he wouldn’t be able to trust her.  “Since I’ve got something on you,” he says to her, referring to the fact that he knows she murdered Miles, “I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t put a hole in me someday.”

The thing is, if Sam didn’t love her, he wouldn’t bother giving her all these reasons why he’s turning her in.  He’d simply say, “You killed Miles in cold blood, and you’re not going to get away with it.”

Then Sam and Brigid get to the subject of love itself.  “All we got is that maybe you love me, and maybe I love you,” Sam tells her.

“You know whether you love me or not,” Brigid replies.

“Maybe I do,” he replies.  “I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over, but that’ll pass.”

As noted above, I was never able to take any of this seriously at first.  But now, for the reasons just given, I am convinced that Sam and Brigid truly loved each other, and that he really meant it when he said (twice!) that he would be waiting for her when she gets out in twenty years.

You see, if he has her sent to prison, he will be fulfilling his obligation to do something about the murder of his partner.  Second, he will still have his dignity, knowing that he never played the sap for her.  And finally, after she gets out of prison, he won’t have anything on her anymore, since she has already done her time, so there will be no danger of her shooting him. That means when she gets out in twenty years, they can get married and live happily ever after.

Yeah, right.

As mentioned previously, the novel ends back in Spade’s office.  After Effie lets Sam know how hurt she is that he had Brigid arrested, she hears the corridor doorknob rattle.  She goes into the outer office.  When she returns, she says, “Iva is here.”

These are the last lines of the novel:  “Spade, looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘Yes,’ he said, and shivered. ‘Well, send her in.’”

Since he doesn’t know how to break it off with Iva, at least he can have sex with her while waiting for Brigid to get out of prison.

In 1984, I bought a videocassette recorder.  No longer was my desire to watch a movie limited to (a) new releases at a movie theater, (b) movies that showed up later at the drive-in, and (c) movies that were broadcast on television.  Now I could walk into a video store where I could rent a movie when I wanted to see it, and not when fate should let it cross my path.

As a result, I began to take an interest in film theory, for now I could read about movies in books and then rent the movies the authors discussed.  One book I came across, published in 1981, was Film Noir:  The Dark Side of the Screen, by Foster Hirsch.  I had seen many films noirs prior to buying this book but did not realize I was doing so.  But then, according to Hirsch, the directors of those movies did not know they were making films noirs either, until the French critics came up with the term.

Right off the bat, Hirsch presented two movies that he regarded as the most famous of this genre, Double Indemnity (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). From my limited perspective, I had my doubts about that.  I had seen Double Indemnity a couple of times on television, but I had never even heard of Scarlet Street.  And whereas the former was available for rent at the video store, the latter was not.  As a result, it was a few years before I was finally able to see it.

In any event, Hirsch gives his reason for picking these two movies as paradigmatic of film noir:

In theme, characterization, world view, settings, direction, performance, and writing, the two dramas are focal points for noir style, as representative of the genre as Stagecoach is of westerns or Singing in the Rain of musicals.

In particular, he says these two movies are about “doomed characters who become obsessed with bewitching women.”  However, there is one theme they do not share, and that is masochism, which is present only in Scarlet Street.  In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) comes across as a smooth talker who is used to having a fair amount of success with women.  As for Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), no man would even think about trying to push her around.

But in Scarlet Street, Christopher “Chris” Cross (Edward G. Robinson) is easily manipulated by Katherine “Kitty” March (Joan Bennett), who enjoys humiliating him.  Chris is literally a Sunday painter, though Kitty thinks he is a professional artist who gets a lot of money for his paintings.  At one point, when Chris says he wants to paint her, she hands him some nail polish and then presents him with her bare foot, wiggling her toes, saying, “Paint me, Chris.”  As he kneels down to paint her toenails, she says, “They’ll be masterpieces.”

Kitty allows Chris to hold her foot, for which he is grateful.  This is to be contrasted with the foot of her roommate Millie, which has a different significance.  Millie has been modeling girdles, and when she comes home, she rubs her back and says she aches.  Then she sits down, removes her shoe, and rubs her foot. When two attractive women in a movie are friends, the one that indicates that her feet hurt thereby has her sex appeal diminished.  In Red-Headed Woman (1932), Jean Harlow and Una Merkel are friends. Although Merkel is an attractive woman in her own right, when she sits down, removes her shoe, and starts rubbing her foot, we know, as if we didn’t already know, that Harlow is the sexier of the two. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), when Jane Russell says to the manager of a hotel, “Show me a place to take my shoes off,” Marilyn Monroe reprimands her, saying, “A lady never admits her feet hurt.”  This reinforces the fact that, though Russell is a beautiful woman, yet Monroe is the sexier of the two. Therefore, when Millie lets us know about her aches and pains, her sore foot in particular, we know that Kitty is the sexy one.

The reason is clear.  When a man looks at a woman, he likes to imagine that it is as pleasurable for her to be beautiful for him as it is pleasurable for him to appreciate her beauty. But the minute she indicates that she is uncomfortable in any way, the effect is spoiled, ruining the man’s pleasure.  And this is especially true if she says her feet hurt.

Returning to the subject of Chris’s humiliation, we find that things are not much better for him at home. His wife Adele continually compares him unfavorably to her previous husband, Detective Sergeant Homer Higgens, whose large portrait hangs on the wall.  He (supposedly) died heroically trying to save a woman from drowning.  Although Chris has to work six days a week, we see him wearing an apron, doing the dishes, while Adele plays solitaire.  He tells Kitty that he only married Adele because he was lonely, although one suspects he would love to have his solitude back, agreeing with that fellow in The Lusty Men (1952) who says to Robert Mitchum, marriage is lonely, it just isn’t private.

Adele makes Chris do his painting in the bathroom.  She despises his paintings, which she thinks are crazy, saying, “Next thing you’ll be painting women without clothes!”

“I never saw a woman without any clothes,” he replies.

“I should hope not!”

Well, we never thought they had much of a sex life, but this confirms it.  What little sex there is probably takes place with the lights off and their pajamas on.

When Chris confesses to Kitty that he is married, that gives her an excuse not to have sex with him. She says she is not the type to run around with a married man, while at the same time indicating that she is starting to fall in love with him.  So, holding her foot is all the intimacy she allows him.

But whereas Chris’s masochistic subservience to women is psychological, Kitty’s masochism is physical. She has a boyfriend, Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea). She likes the way he slaps her around.  In fact, Chris met Kitty the night he saw Johnny knock her down and start kicking her.  Chris came to her “rescue,” causing Johnny to lose his balance and hit his head on the curb.  When Chris ran to get a policeman, Johnny took off.  Kitty let Chris think he was her hero.

Unlike Johnny, Chris is nice to her, which is why she has no respect for him.  “If he were mean or vicious or bawled me out or something,” she says, “I’d like him better.”  At one point, in an argument she is having with her roommate Millie, Kitty tells her, “You wouldn’t know love if it hit you in the face.”

“If that’s where it hits you,” Millie says right back, “you ought to know!”

At another time, Johnny is telling Kitty and Millie about how it is with men like him, in the movies as well as in real life:  “Why I hear of movie actors getting 5,000, …, 10,000 a week.  For what?  Acting tough, for pushing girls in the face. What do they do I can’t do?”

Johnny is obviously referring to The Public Enemy (1931), where Tom Powers (James Cagney) pushes a grapefruit in the face of another Kitty (Mae Clarke). But it is actually the movies Duryea himself played in that really exemplify Johnny’s point.  In Dark City:  The Lost World of Film Noir, Eddie Muller says that Duryea “developed an odd, almost fetishistic on-screen forte—beating women.”  It started with Woman in the Window (1944), where he slapped Joan Bennett there too.  Muller goes on to describe how Duryea slapped women in Too Late for Tears, Manhandled, Criss Cross, and Johnny Stool Pigeon, all made in 1949. Muller says that as a result, Duryea started getting lots of fan mail from “infatuated females.”

Why does a woman stay with a man that beats her?  Because Nature wants babies, and Nature doesn’t give a damn about her happiness. If a woman stays with a man that abuses her, she can still have his babies.  She may be miserable, but Nature doesn’t care.  Likewise, if a man allows a woman to belittle him and humiliate him, there is always the chance that by allowing himself to be treated that way, she will end up having his baby.  The pain, be it physical or psychological, is at first something to be endured for the sake of sex.  But eventually, the pain itself becomes erotic, imbued with the promise of sex, thus further cementing the sexual bond so that Nature can get the babies she requires.

We cannot imagine Walter Neff in Double Indemnity allowing a woman to humiliate him because Fred MacMurray is handsome.  But Chris, on the other hand, being played by Edward G. Robinson, is supposed to be ugly.  Toward the end of the movie, when Chris tries to forgive Kitty after having seen her kissing Johnny, she puts her face in her pillow, making muffled sounds that Chris interprets as crying.  “I’m not crying, you fool,” she says to him, rising up in the bed.  “I’m laughing!  Oh, you idiot!  How can a man be so dumb?  I’ve wanted to laugh in your face ever since I first met you. You’re old and ugly, and I’m sick of you.”  Those hateful words prove too much for Chris, and, happening by chance to be holding an icepick in his hand, he stabs her repeatedly.

But that happens near the end of the movie.  When the movie begins, a banquet is being held in honor of Chris’s twenty-five years of faithful service as a cashier in a company owned by J.J. Hogarth. He is played by Russell Hicks, an actor with a distinguished appearance, who was fifty years old at the time. When his chauffeur arrives and informs him that the beautiful woman with whom he is to have a night on the town has arrived in his limousine, he apologizes to his employees for having to leave the party, saying, “You can’t keep a woman waiting, can you?”  But before he leaves, he presents Chris with a 14-karat, 17-jewel pocket watch, with an inscription that not only mentions the years of service, but also refers to Chris as a friend.  And again, in shaking hands with Chris before he departs, Hogarth refers to him as an “old friend.”

This makes it all the more painful later in the movie when Hogarth discovers that Chris has been stealing money from him.  Chris has been using the money to pay for Kitty’s studio apartment and to supply her with luxuries, trying to keep her from finding out he is just a cashier instead of a famous painter.  Hogarth tells the police that he cannot bring himself to press charges and dismisses them. After they leave, he turns to Chris and asks, “Chris, it was a woman, wasn’t it?”  Chris, unable even to look at Hogarth, nods his head.  In a way, Hogarth is being kind and understanding.  But in another sense, unintended by Hogarth, it is a cruel form of pity.  The wealthy, handsome, and distinguished J.J. Hogarth, who is able to have beautiful women on his own terms, feels sorry for Chris, as he realizes what it must be like for an unattractive man to fall under the spell of the first pretty girl that has ever paid any attention to him.

The beautiful woman that is waiting in the limousine for Hogarth at the beginning of the movie gives a coin to an organ grinder’s monkey, prefiguring the relation Chris will have with Kitty.  Chris says to a fellow employee after they leave the banquet, referring to that woman, “I wonder what it’s like to be loved by a young girl like that.  You know, nobody ever looked at me like that, not even when I was young.”

Although Robinson is not handsome, of course, I would never on my own have said he was ugly. However, Scarlet Street is a remake of a French film by Jean Renoir, La Chienne (1931).  And in that movie, the character that corresponds to Chris is played by Michel Simon, who is even more unattractive, to put it mildly, than Robinson.  We don’t need the woman that corresponds to Kitty to tell us that she thinks he is ugly.  We know she does.

But maybe I think that way because before I saw La Chienne, I saw another film by Renoir, Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), also starring Michel Simon.  I suppose you could call that movie a comedy, provided your idea of what is funny is someone behaving in an atrocious manner, while those around him keep letting him get away with it. The title character, played by Simon, is saved from drowning (attempted suicide), and he is taken into the home of the bookseller who saved him. Boudo then proceeds to deliberately wreck everything he comes into contact with, while exhibiting revolting mannerisms. Thirty minutes into the film, you’ll wish the bookseller had let him drown. Forty minutes in, and you’ll be ready to hold his head under the water until he quits struggling.  The bookseller’s wife is a sourpuss, so Boudu rapes her and puts a smile on her face. I felt like a sourpuss watching that movie, and I felt violated by it. But unlike the wife, I did not smile.  Boudu’s ugliness is as much a matter of his disgusting personality as it is the physical appearance of Michel Simon who plays that character.

In La Chienne, it is explicitly stated that the woman that corresponds to Kitty is a prostitute, and that the man that corresponds to Johnny is a procurer.  That must have been too much to get past the Production Code in the making of Scarlet Street because Kitty is merely portrayed as a woman not averse to using sex to get money from men, with Johnny encouraging her to do so.

Speaking of the Production Code, Muller points out that the movie was controversial when it was released, even though it managed to be approved.  He says that some markets for this movie reduced the number of times Chris stabbed Kitty with the icepick from seven times to four times or even only one.  The only versions I’ve seen show him stabbing her four times.

Furthermore, Johnny is accused of being the one who killed Kitty.  After he found her dead body, he grabbed her jewelry and took off.  When captured and confronted by the police with the fact that he had stolen her jewelry, he replied, “But why wouldn’t I?  She didn’t have any more use for it, did she?” As a result, he is convicted and executed in the electric chair.  But while, strictly speaking, an innocent man is executed for a crime he didn’t commit, Johnny’s character is so despicable that he seems to be getting what he deserves anyway.

As for Chris, the real killer, while not being officially punished, is punished nevertheless.  After Chris set Kitty up in her own studio apartment, he brought his paintings over there to keep Adele from throwing them out, as she threatened to do.  Johnny tries to sell them himself, still believing as does Kitty that Chris is a famous artist who is paid a lot of money for his paintings.  When a famous art critic, Damon Janeway, sees the paintings for sale on a street in Greenwich Village, he thinks they are great and wants to meet the artist. Johnny tells him that the artist is Kitty.  Soon her work is displayed in an art store owned by a Mr. Dellarowe, and Kitty is celebrated and admired for her work.

When Chris finds out that she has sold his paintings and has become famous as a result, he is not angry. As he explains to her, “If I’d brought those pictures to a man like Dellarowe, he wouldn’t have taken them. I’m a failure, Kitty.”  I guess the idea is that if being a failure is part of a man’s essence, then he cannot succeed no matter how talented he is.  Or maybe the difference is that Chris is an ugly man, whereas Kitty is a beautiful woman, with whom Janeway seems to be falling in love.  Chris says he and Kitty will go on letting others think she is the artist.  Now she lets him paint her for real, her portrait this time, and not her toenails.  He says they will call the painting “Self Portrait.”

After Chris is caught embezzling, he loses his job.  In his imagination, he can hear Kitty telling Johnny she loves him, and Johnny affectionately calling her “Lazy Legs.”  He tries to commit suicide but is prevented from doing so, and soon ends up living on the street.  He tries to confess to his crime, but no one believes him since he is now just a bum.  The police find him sleeping on a bench and tell him to go to the Bowery where he belongs.  He walks down the street.  It is Christmas Eve, and we hear “O Come, All Ye Faithful” being played in the background.  Surely this portends some kind of redemption for poor Chris.

But then the music goes sour as he sees the Kitty’s “Self Portrait” being removed from Dellarowe’s, having been purchased by a woman for $10,000.  It is the masterpiece he can never claim as his own, the portrait of the woman he still loves but can never have.

The Postman Always Rings Twice was written by James M. Cain in 1934.  There are a lot of movie versions of this novel, many of them foreign films, none of which I have managed to see except Ossessione (1943), and that was a long time ago.  By default, then, I must confine myself to the two versions made in America.

When I read James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity having already seen the movie several times, which is one of my favorites, I thought to myself that had the movie been like the book, I don’t think I would have cared for it.  I had a similar feeling with his novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, except in this case, they did make a movie in 1981 that was a lot like the book, and I can say for sure that I didn’t care for it. Sometimes you really have to hand it to those major movie studios, Paramount in 1944 for the former, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1946 for the latter.  And perhaps I should give begrudging thanks to the Hays Office as well.  Joseph I. Breen declared that none of Cain’s novels would ever be made into a movie, and thus some of the scrubbing may have been necessary to appease his wrath, which resulted in movies more to my taste.

Of course, I have no doubt that some people prefer 1981 version of The Postman Always Rings Twice to the 1946 version, and thus found it unfortunate that the 1946 version gave the story the high-class polish typical of Hollywood in those days.

Sex

If you like your sex rough, then the novel and the 1981 version are for you.  In the novel, Frank Chambers is a tramp.  He gets thrown off a hay truck, and after walking awhile, he comes across Twin Oaks Tavern.  He decides he’ll try to con a meal out of the owner, whom he is able to identify as a Greek before he even knows his name, which turns out to be Nick Papadakis.  Nick offers Frank a job, which Frank is none too sure about until he sees Nick’s wife Cora:

Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.

And that’s exactly what he does do after taking the job and getting her alone:

I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers…. “Bite me! Bite me!”I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

Now, the 1981 version does not actually have a corresponding scene where the blood spurts into Franks mouth, with it running down Cora’s neck.  But the sex is still pretty rough.  Frank (Jack Nicholson) starts by forcing himself on Cora (Jessica Lange), which would have become a rape scene, except she gets turned on by it and wants it just as bad as he does.  They do it on the table where she had the baked bread, knocking that and everything else off onto the floor—knife, dough, flour—so they can satisfy their lust right then and there, only removing just enough clothing to allow for penetration. You see, if a couple takes the time to go to the bedroom, get fully undressed, and then slide into bed to make love, that’s too civilized.  But if they can’t wait for all that, but must do it wherever they happen to be at the moment, and in too much of a hurry to remove their clothes, then that just goes to show how hot their passion really is.

So, how did the 1946 version handle their first kiss?  Frank (John Garfield) kisses Cora (Lana Turner) against her will.  She does not bother to fight him or push him off.  She merely waits until he is through, flips open her compact, and looks into its mirror. Then she pulls out a handkerchief and wipes away the smeared lipstick.  That being done, she gives Frank a look of indifference as she pulls out her lipstick, which she reapplies, after which snaps the compact back together and walks away.

Well, maybe that’s not fair.  The rough sex scenes in the novel and 1981 version occur while Nick is away getting a new sign, and Frank locks the front door to keep customers out.  The 1946 scene described above occurs before that.  Later in that movie, Frank locks the door too, but this is followed by some hardboiled dialogue between him and Cora, in which she explains why she married Nick and admits she has fallen for Frank. They look into each other’s eyes and tenderly kiss. I’ll bet they went upstairs, got completely undressed, slid into bed, and made love just the way most of us would.

Murder

Frank wants Cora to run off with him, but she doesn’t want to go back to working in a hash house with Frank holding down some menial job.  She likes owning Twin Oaks Tavern, and she doesn’t want to give that up.  One thing leads to another, and she talks Frank into killing Nick and making it look like an accident.

Actually, here too there is a difference.  In the novel, they first try to murder Nick, but when that fails, they decide to run off together, although Cora soon realizes she wasn’t meant to be a tramp like Frank.  In the movie versions, they try running off first.  Then, when that doesn’t work, they plan to kill Nick.  That would seem to be the more natural thing, to attempt to simply leave Twin Oaks before deciding on something as drastic as murder.

In the novel, Frank explains how they planned on killing Nick:

We played it just like we would tell it.  It was about ten o’clock at night, and we had closed up, and the Greek was in the bathroom, putting on his Saturday night wash.  I was to take the water up to my room, get ready to shave, and then remember I had left the car out.  I was to go outside, and stand by to give her one on the horn if somebody came.  She was to wait till she heard him in the tub, go in for a towel, and clip him from behind with a blackjack I had made for her out of a sugar bag with ball bearings wadded down in the end. At first, I was to do it, but we figured he wouldn’t pay any attention to her if she went in there….  Then she was to hold him under until he drowned. Then she was to leave the water running a little bit, and step out the window to the porch roof, and come down the stepladder I had put there, to the ground. She was to hand me the blackjack, and go back to the kitchen. I was to put the ball bearings back in the box, throw the bag away, put the car in, and go up to my room and start to shave. She would wait till the water began dripping down in the kitchen, and call me. We would break the door down, find him, and call the doctor. In the end, we figured it would look like he had slipped in the tub, knocked himself out, and then drowned.

Frank does not say so in describing his plan, but presumably Cora was to lock the bathroom door from the inside after killing Nick.  That’s why she has to leave through the window.  And that’s why they would have to break down the door to get in later.

However, things don’t go as planned.  Frank sees a cat climbing the stepladder.  He goes to shoo it away. While away from the car, a motorcycle cop pulls in to see what is going on, suspicious of a man standing near a stepladder late at night.  Being away from the car, Frank cannot honk the horn. After the cop leaves, Frank starts to honk the horn to call off the whole thing, but suddenly the lights go out and Cora starts screaming.  It seems that just as Cora hit Nick, the cat got into the fuse box. She did not have time to hold Nick under the water, nor does Frank want her to at that point, now that a cop has seen that stepladder with Frank standing nearby.  So, they call an ambulance, and Nick survives.

Their plan did not deserve to work because it was unnecessarily elaborate.  There is no need for a stepladder for Cora to exit the bathroom, and therefore no need for Frank to be outside making sure the coast is clear.  Instead, after killing Nick, Cora could call an ambulance, saying she found Nick that way when she went in to get a towel.

The part about having to break down the door to get into the bathroom makes no sense.  After all, Cora didn’t have to break down the door to get into the bathroom to kill Nick, for the simple reason that Nick didn’t lock the bathroom door.  And why should he? The point of breaking down the door was to make it look as though Nick must have been alone when he fell, but that requires the police to believe that a married man would find it necessary to lock the bathroom door when taking a bath in order to keep his wife from coming in.

But suppose, nevertheless, they decide that they must break down a locked bathroom door to make it look as though Nick was alone when he fell.  In that case, after killing Nick, Cora could simply close the bathroom door and lock it from the inside, after which Frank would break down the door. Without the stepladder being outside leaning against the house, the cat would never have gotten to the fuse box, and the lights would never have gone out.  And without Frank standing outside, the cop would not have stopped to check on things.

Sex and Murder

Sex is more than just a motive for murder.  It’s a facilitator.  For Frank and Cora, it is what makes murder possible. Assuming that the part about door to the bathroom being locked is eliminated as an unnecessary complication, and likely to arouse suspicion besides, Cora didn’t need Frank’s help to murder Nick, at least as far as the physical aspect of the crime was concerned.  After she killed Nick, she would have been perfectly capable of putting the ball bearings back in the box and disposing of the bag, after which she could call the ambulance herself.  Stories in which a woman and her lover kill her husband are as old as that in which Clytemnestra and Aegisthus conspired to kill Agamemnon.  But Clytemnestra needed a man’s strength to put the sword to her husband.  In this case, however, Cora is supposed to do all the killing by herself.

But psychologically speaking, she did need Frank.  Sexual desire has a way of suppressing any qualms one might have of doing something immoral.  Together, a man and woman in love are capable of doing things they might not even consider otherwise.  In Double Indemnity, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) says to Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), not realizing he is the one who conspired with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to murder her husband, “There’s two of them, so they think it’s twice as safe.  But it’s not. It’s ten times twice as dangerous.”  Indeed, after seeing the movie, a friend of mine said, “If you’re going to commit a murder, do it alone.”  But while it may be safer to do it alone, it may not be possible without the needed element of love to neutralize one’s conscience.

Of course, in Double Indemnity Phyllis needed Walter’s knowledge of the insurance business to pull it off without getting caught. But in The Postman Always Rings Twice, all Cora needs is Frank’s love to enable her to get past her moral inhibitions.  One of the ways that love does this is by making the person you are cheating on become nothing in your eyes.  We are all familiar with the cliché, “I love my wife, but…,” as a man’s way of excusing his philandering.  And, indeed, if it were just a matter of getting a little on the side, it might not be so bad.  But while a man is carrying on with another woman, his wife means nothing to him. She’s just this thing that lives in his house. And that is the ugliest part about adultery.

The novel reveals how Cora turns Nick into a despicable thing, as preparatory to cheating on him. First of all, she takes pride in being white.  When Frank says to Cora, “you people” really know how to make enchiladas, she suspects he thinks she is a Mexican (in the novel, she has black hair).  She takes umbrage at that, saying, “I’m just as white as you are.”  But she does not regard Nick as white, as narrated by Frank:

It was being married to that Greek that made her feel she wasn’t white, and she was even afraid I would begin calling her Mrs. Papadakis.

My guess is that back when this novel was written, America had so many citizens that were of northern European descent that anyone whose ancestors were from southern Europe was not thought of as white.

“He’s greasy and he stinks,” Cora says of Nick.  And later she says he makes her sick when he touches her. Her contempt for Nick makes it possible for her to have an affair with Frank, which in turn makes her despise Nick even more.

Murder Again

After their first attempt at murder fails, they give up on the idea.  But in the novel as well as in the 1981 remake, after his close brush with death, Nick decides he wants Cora to have a baby with him. She says the idea disgusts her, saying Frank is the only one she wants to have a baby with.  In other words, it’s bad enough, to her way of thinking, to be married to someone that isn’t white without having a baby with him as well, which she says will be greasy, just like Nick.  In order to avoid having that greasy baby, they decide once again to kill Nick.

In the 1946 version, Nick, whose last name is changed to Smith, is just as white as Cora. Miscegenation was not allowed under the Production Code.  She could have still been repelled by the idea of having his baby, however. There is nothing unusual about a woman not wanting to have a baby with a man she detests, and there is nothing unusual about a woman detesting her husband. But that is not given as the reason for murder.  Perhaps having a woman in a movie expressing disgust at the idea of having a baby would have been objectionable to Breen, as an affront to motherhood.  In this version, what precipitates a second go at murder is Nick’s decision to sell Twin Oaks Tavern and move to northern Canada.  (Not simply Canada, mind you, but northern Canada.) He and his sister own a house up there, but she has become paralyzed and will need a woman to take care of her, that woman being Cora.  And just to put a cherry on it, Nick says of his sister, “Oh, she’s going to live for a long time yet, I hope.”

Never has a movie made me so sympathetic to a murder.  Of course, if I were Cora, I would just leave and go back to slinging hash.  There are worse things in life than holding down a menial job.  But she so hates that idea that Frank finds her in the kitchen holding a knife.  He thought she was planning on killing Nick with it, but she says she was going to use it on herself.  That’s when they decide on murder once more.

I was critical of their first attempt at murder.  But I cannot find fault with their second scheme to murder Nick because I don’t understand it.  I had the same trouble trying to understand the mechanical explanation for the death of the Sternwood chauffeur when I read The Big Sleep.  Maybe it’s because my knowledge of cars is limited to being able to drive one, and maybe it’s because cars functioned differently back then. Fortunately, both movie versions simplified it.  The idea was to make it appear that the car accidentally went over a cliff, killing Nick, even though Frank had already whacked him in the head, probably in the same spot where Cora had smacked him with the bag full of ball bearings. But things don’t quite go as planned, and Frank ends up getting caught in the car when it becomes dislodged and rolls further down the cliff, getting injured in the process.

Frank and Cora are suspected of murder.  And this where I really get confused.  It all has something to do with legal proceedings and insurance companies (three in the novel; one in the 1946 version; and two in the 1981 remake).  Essentially, District Attorney Sackett scares Frank into signing a complaint against Cora, which infuriates her.  Frank is the weaker of the two.  Cora is the one who had to talk Frank into committing a murder in the first place, and we have the sense that Sackett would never have been able to break her story.

In the novel, they have a smart lawyer named Katz, who manages to get Cora off with a charge of manslaughter, suspended sentence.  There is also a plot point involving blackmail by one of Katz’s former employees, a Mr. Kennedy, who has a confession from Cora that she and Frank planned the murder, which she signed in order to get even with Frank for betraying her.  However, Frank persuades Kennedy to hand over the confession by beating his face to a pulp.

The end result is that the love Frank and Cora had for each other is now poisoned. Worse, Cora cannot be tried for the same crime twice, but Frank was never charged with anything.  Therefore, Cora could simply testify with impunity that she and Frank did murder Nick, if she felt like it, and which she suggests she might do.  This makes Frank start thinking about killing Cora.

But it turns out she is pregnant with Frank’s baby.  They reconcile and get married. However, they end up in an automobile accident in which Cora is killed. Sackett now gets another chance to convict Frank, this time for murdering Cora.  There is a trial in the novel that I don’t understand any better than when Sackett tried Cora for killing Nick.  Frank is convicted and the story ends with him in prison, awaiting execution. There is no trial in the 1946 version.  The movie jumps ahead, and we find out that Frank has been narrating this story from his prison cell.  In the 1981 version, Frank is not narrating the story.  The movie ends at the scene of the accident, leaving us with no idea what happens to him after that, unless your familiarity with the novel or 1946 version allows you fill in the blanks.

Cats

Referring back to the scene of the murder, after the car has gone partway down the cliff, and before Frank is injured when it becomes dislodged, he and Cora become so overwhelmed with lust for each other that they have to have sex right there on the ground next to the car where Nick’s body lies crumpled-up in the front seat.  That is in the 1981 version as well as in the novel. Throughout the 1946 version, we never actually see Frank and Cora do anything but kiss, the rest of their sexual activity being implied, as was typical under Breen’s oversight of the Production Code.  But they don’t even kiss here.  That strikes me as more realistic.  If I were in the middle of committing a murder, I don’t believe I would be in the mood for love either.

And this brings out another difference between the 1946 version on the one hand, and the novel and 1981 version on the other. Part of the fun of watching the 1946 version is the way you get drawn into identifying with Frank and Cora.  They seem like an ordinary man and woman that slowly drift into murder.  But in the novel and 1981 version, they come across as animals.  Frank even refers to himself in the novel as an animal when he ravishes Cora right after the murder. As a result, we don’t identify with them.  We just react with disgust.

Of course, this is exactly how things would appear to us if we were invited to identify with a cuckolded husband witnessing his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto.  So, if Nick, not quite dead, had regained consciousness and looked out the window, Frank and Cora would have looked just like the animals they were.  But neither in the novel nor in either movie version are we encouraged to identify with Nick.  Rather, he is portrayed in such a way as to preclude identification.  We don’t feel the least bit sorry for him when he is murdered.

The animals to which there are repeated references in the novel are cats.  First, Frank says Cora looks like a “hell cat.”  She says she is not really a hell cat, but she needs to be a hell cat just this one time.  That’s when Frank realizes she wants to kill Nick.

Second, there is the cat that gets into the fuse box, shorting out the lights and getting killed in the process. It may be that the unnecessary complications of their first attempt at murder were needed by Cain so that a cat could be the reason why their plan failed.

Third, when Frank kills Nick in the car by hitting him in the head, he says of Nick, “He crumpled up and curled on the seat like a cat on a sofa.”

Fourth, their attorney’s name is Katz.  And so it is in the 1981 version.  But in the 1946 movie, their attorney’s name is Keats (Hume Cronyn).  In other words, the 1946 movie eliminates all references to cats, other than the one that got into the fuse box.

Fifth, after they escape from justice for murdering Nick, Cora gets word that her mother is ill.  While she is gone, Frank has an affair with Madge, a woman that catches lions, tigers, and jaguars.  Then she sells them to zoos, works them in movies, or just keeps them on exhibit at the restaurant she owns because they attract the trade.  She distinguishes between jungle cats, which you can train, and outlaw cats, raised in captivity, which are more likely to kill you because they are “lunatic cats.”

But Frank misses Cora, so he returns to her after she gets back from her mother’s funeral.  They start to patch things up between them, but while Frank is taking care of Kennedy, the one who tried to blackmail them, it seems that Madge stopped by, not knowing about his relationship with Cora, and left a young puma with her to give to Frank to remember her by.

In his review of the 1981 version, Roger Ebert mentions this part of the story, as criticism of the movie:

Along the way, there is a brief and totally inexplicable appearance by a woman lion tamer (Anjelica Houston), who seems to be visiting from another movie.

He is right about that.  It does seem that way.  And yet, it is faithful to the novel.  Half a chapter is spent on his relationship with Madge, and much of the next chapter is about the puma she left for Frank.  In a subsequent chapter, Madge testifies at Frank’s trial for Cora’s murder.  Sackett even brings the puma into the courtroom as Exhibit A.

In the 1946 version, there is no lion tamer.  Madge (Audrey Totter) merely works in a lunchroom.  We only see her when they meet.  The rest is implied.  Cora finds out about their affair when Madge stops by Twin Oaks to return Frank’s tie, which he accidently left in her glove compartment.

And so, I suppose it’s just a matter of taste.  If you prefer a story in which a man and a woman act like animals, cats in particular, outlaw lunatic cats, to be even more specific, you will likely prefer the novel and the 1981 remake.  But if you enjoy the guilty pleasure of identifying with a man and woman who seem almost like the rest of us, but who give in to the temptation of murder while under the spell of illicit love, then the 1946 version is the movie to see.

As a bachelor, I have never had any personal experience with divorce, although it does seem like the next best thing to never having married at all.  My best friend, however, was not as lucky in love as I, so he ended up marrying his sweetheart in the year of our Lord 1967, with me as his best man.

“I don’t know how this is going to turn out,” he said to me three years later, “but it can’t go on.”  He probably would never have left her, but one weekend she decided to spend a few days with her sister and brother-in-law, and it turned out to be a permanent separation.  A few years after that, he decided to move away, and he suggested to her that she file for divorce before he left, in case she wanted to marry again. She cried, realized it was a good idea, got herself a lawyer, and filed for divorce.

After it was done, she told my friend that the judge wanted to know why she was seeking a divorce. So, she said, “I told the judge, ‘I came home from shopping one Saturday afternoon, and my husband and two of his friends [that’s me and another fellow] had made a mess of the apartment. They were sitting around, smoking cigarettes, drinking cokes, and watching a monster movie on television.’”

And that was all there was to it.  The point of all this is that I did not appreciate at the time that in years past, getting a divorce was not that easy.  Before no-fault divorce became widely accepted, a spouse would have to allege adultery, abandonment, cruelty, or some other reason sufficiently grave.  In Frenzy (1972), a man is suspected of murdering his ex-wife because the divorce petition alleged “extreme mental and physical cruelty” and “depravity” as well.  The ex-husband tries to explain:

It had to read that way, but there wasn’t a word of truth in it!  The lawyers made it all up. We didn’t want to wait three years for a divorce based on desertion, so I allowed her to divorce me on the grounds of cruelty.

As a result of my naivete, when I saw those ads in the yellow pages for private detectives, and they used the phrase “peace of mind,” I took that as a way of saying, “Don’t think of hiring us as betraying a lack of faith in your spouse.  You just need a little reassurance that he or she truly loves you.”

Perhaps I should have been suspicious.  When I used to watch old movies featuring private detectives, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Murder, My Sweet (1944), they mostly did missing-person cases. These private detectives in the movies never seemed to help anyone get that peace of mind.

Out of the Past (1947) starts out as a missing-person case, but when private detective Robert Mitchum finds himself having to hide out from gangster Kirk Douglas, he has to keep a low profile:

I opened an office in San Francisco.  A cheap little rat hole that suited the work I did. Shabby jobs for whoever hired me.  It was the bottom of the barrel, and I scraped it.

Looking back, I can see now that he was talking about divorce cases.

Had I seen Private Detective 62 (1933), that would have cleared things up for me.  In that movie, a private detective agency frames innocent wives for adultery so that their husbands can divorce them and not have to pay any alimony.  In a typical frame, a woman is given a knock-out drug, and then wakes up to find herself in a hotel room, in bed with some strange man, with photographs having been taken to document the deed.  But I would not see that movie until years later.

And so it was that Kiss Me Deadly (1955) was the first movie I had ever seen where the private detective did divorce cases.  And when I saw it, I was a little perplexed.  But let me start at the beginning.

When the movie opens, we see Cloris Leachman running down the highway at night, wearing nothing but a trench coat.  Desperate to have someone give her a ride, she stands in front of an oncoming Jaguar convertible that has to swerve off the road to avoid hitting her.  The driver is Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker). Disgusted, as he tries to get his car started again, he says, “Get in.”  Her name is Christina, and Mike figures she was out on a date with a guy who thought “No” was a three-letter word.  But when they come to a police blockade, he finds out she has escaped from an insane asylum.  Mike has such disregard for the law that he pretends Christina is his wife. “So, you’re a fugitive from the laughing house,” he says as they drive away.

Apparently, Christina has gotten herself involved in something illegal and dangerous. She becomes mysterious, saying “they” took her clothes away to make her stay.  Mike is curious as to who “they” are, but she doesn’t want to get him involved.  When he stops at a filling station, Christina goes into the ladies’ room.  When she comes out, she hands the attendant a letter and asks him to mail it for her.

As they drive down the road again, Christina begins psychoanalyzing Mike.  Only Mike has been through this sort of thing before with women who presume to tell him all about himself, and he responds with sarcasm:

Christina:  I was just thinking how much you can tell about a person from such simple things.  Your car for instance.

Mike:  What kind of message does it send you?

Christina:  You have only one real, lasting love.

Mike:  Now, who could that be?

Christina:  You’re one of those self-indulgent males, who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself.

What we are learning from all this is that, unlike the private detectives of previous movies, who always seem to be just scraping by, Mike Hammer lives well and can easily afford to drive an expensive car and wear tailored suits.

Then she asks him if reads poetry.  Mike just gives her a look that says, “Are you kidding?”  She tells him about Christina Rossetti, whom she was named after, and who wrote love sonnets.  And then she says that if they don’t make it to the bus stop, where he is to let her off, she asks him to “Remember me.”

Suddenly, a car pulls in front of them.  Next, we see Mike, only partially conscious, lying on bedsprings, while three men are torturing Christina.  We see them only from the waist down, one of whom is holding a pair of Channellock pliers, used to try to extract information from Christina before she died from the ordeal.  The men put Christina’s corpse and Mike in his sportscar and push it off a cliff.  Mike survives, but spends several weeks in a hospital.  When he gets out, he is greeted by some kind of federal agent and is brought in for questioning.  In a room with several agents, Mike tells them what he knows.  The agent in charge decides to get down to some basic questions, only before Mike can answer them, a couple of other agents snidely answer the questions for him:

Agent in charge:  Just what do you do for a living?

Second agent:  According to our information, he calls himself a private investigator. His specialty is divorce cases.

Third agent:  He’s a bedroom dick.  He gets dirt on the wife, then does a deal with the wife to get dirt on the husband.  Plays both ends against the middle.

Agent in charge:  How do you achieve all this?  You crawl under beds?

Second agent:  Nothing so primitive.

Third agent:  He has a secretary.  At least, that’s what he calls her.

Agent in charge:  What’s her name, Mr. Hammer?

Second agent:  Velda Wickman.  She’s a very attractive young woman.

Third agent:  Real woo-bait.  Lives like a princess.  He sics her onto the husbands, and in no time he’s ready for the big squeeze.

Agent in charge:  Who do you sic onto the wives, Mr. Hammer?

Second agent:  That’s his department.

Well, it doesn’t look as though Mike’s clients find much peace of mind.  Not only does he do divorce cases, but he often makes things worse than they already are, being the cause of the very infidelity he was hired to investigate.

Just as we earlier learned that Mike lives well, we find out that his “secretary” Velda is well paid herself.  But it was that last part of the “interrogation” that really made me wonder.  We can imagine Mike showing a wife pictures of her husband and Velda kissing in a parking lot or entering a hotel room. And later on in the movie, he tells Velda that the bedroom tape she made with lover-boy got lost, and that she will have to call him up, make a date, and try to get some more of that “honey talk” again.  He smirks as he says all this, saying, “That tape sure was nice.”

But when the husband is the client, and the wife is Mike’s “department,” we have to imagine the following conversation:

Mike:  I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Jackson, but your wife is having an affair.

Mr. Jackson:  Oh, my God!

Mike:  We have some photographs, if you would like to see them.

Mr. Jackson:  All right.  [He looks at the pictures.]  Wait a minute!  That’s you!

But this is confusing only if you are still laboring under the peace-of-mind motive for hiring a private detective to check on your wife, unless it is the peace of mind that comes from getting a divorce and being single once again.  Once you realize that when this movie was made, a man needed a serious reason to divorce his wife, it becomes clear that it wouldn’t have mattered to him if the private detective he hired was the one having an affair with his wife, just as long as it finally gets him out of the marriage that is making him miserable.

Anyway, after the federal agents finish interrogating Mike, he goes to his apartment. Now we really see how lucrative divorce cases must be.  His apartment is big and swanky, unlike the cramped quarters of the typical movie private eye, or that of his spare office with a secretary he can just barely afford, if he has one at all.  When I saw the answering machine he had, I had no idea such things existed.  They would not become a common item in the average person’s home for at least two decades.  At the time, I thought how wonderful it would be to find out who’s calling you before answering.  In 1955, of all the stuff in Mike’s apartment, that was not only the greatest indication of how well off he was financially, but also that he had the latest technology in the private-detective business.

When Mike begins to figure that whatever Christina was involved in might be something big, he decides to pursue it himself, to see if he can get a cut of whatever it is.  He tells Velda not to bother about trying to make another tape with lover-boy, saying he wants to forget about these “penny-ante divorce cases” for a while.

Velda is skeptical.  She refers to whatever Mike is looking for as the “Great Whatsit.”  As is well known, Alfred Hitchcock defined a MacGuffin as the thing the spies in a movie are after, but the audience doesn’t care.  However, no one in a Hitchcock movie ever used the word “MacGuffin,” as in, “I sure hope we find the MacGuffin before the bad guys do,” or thought of what they were after in that dismissive way.  In Kiss Me Deadly, however, not only is there a MacGuffin, but it is cynically regarded as such by Velda. She just has her own name for it.  “Does it exist?” she asks.  “Who cares? Everyone everywhere is so involved in a fruitless search—for what?”  We never do find out what part all the people involved played in inventing this Great Whatsit, stealing it, and hiding it, but I guess that doesn’t really matter either.

In particular, the thing the police, the federal agents, the gangsters, and Mike are all after is a small box with some kind of nuclear device in it that makes no sense technologically.  It is nice and quiet as long as the lid is closed, but when it is opened, it begins glowing and hissing.

Lieutenant Pat Murphy, a detective with the police department, revokes Mike’s detective license and gun permit to keep him off the case.  But Mike has no problem dealing out pain and death without either one, as when Mike punches some guy that was following him, bashes his head against the wall several times, and then throws him down two flights of concrete stairs.

But not all the pain he inflicts is physical.  Mike gets a lead on some unemployed opera singer that might know something.  He goes over to the man’s apartment, just as that man happens to be singing along with a recording of Martha.  When Mike starts to question him, the man says he knows nothing. There is a vast collection of records in the room that the man treasures.  Mike pulls a record out of an album, looks at it, and says, “Hey!  Caruso’s Pagliacci.  That’s a collector’s item.”  The man agrees, smiling enthusiastically. Mike snaps the record in two.

It turns out that Christina, having seen the registration certificate in Mike’s car, which had his address on it, sent the letter she gave the filling-station attendant to Mike.  In it, it has just two words enclosed in quotation marks:  “Remember Me.”  It turns out Mike is pretty good at interpreting poetry.  He found a book of sonnets by Christina Rossetti in Christina’s apartment and took it with him.  He figures out from reading the poem “Remember Me,” which speaks of “darkness and corruption,” that Christina must have swallowed something before she was killed.  Accompanied by Gabrielle, a woman Mike believes to be Lily Carver, who was Christina’s roommate, he goes to see the coroner (Percy Helton), and gives him some money as a bribe.  The coroner admits he found a key in Christina’s stomach when he performed an autopsy, but he tries to play cute by putting the key back in the drawer, indicating he wants more money. Mike rams the drawer on the coroner’s hand again and again, making him squeal with pain as Mike grins. Then he pushes him aside and takes the key.

The key is to a locker in an athletic club.  Mike gets into the locker and finds the box. When he opens it just slightly, he gets a radiation burn on his wrist.  He closes it back up.  But when he gets back to his car, Gabrielle is gone.

Meanwhile, an art dealer tricks Velda into thinking he can give her information, but is actually part of a plot to kidnap her.  He lives upstairs above his modern art gallery. When he hears Mike breaking in, he swallows a bunch of sleeping pills, trying to kill himself first, as Mike makes his way up the stairs past a bunch of ugly paintings.

Why a modern art dealer, you may be wondering.  Mike has a cavalier attitude toward the fine arts throughout this movie.  Christina loved poetry, which Mike sneered at.  When Mike was in her apartment, he turned on the radio and found that it was tuned to a classical-music station.  We see Velda doing ballet exercises, stretching one of her legs resting on her desk.  Mike rotates her leg to the back of a chair so he can get by.  After Mike snapped the Caruso record and got the information he wanted from the opera singer, he put the needle back on Martha and left, saying, “A lovely record.”  And now we have a modern-art dealer mixed up in this story.  Mike is indifferent to all this cultural refinement, except when he can use it to get what he is after.

Anyway, Mike tries to beat some information out of the art dealer, but the man passes out from the sleeping pills.  Mike turns on the man’s radio.  More classical music.  He looks around the room.  He sees the name of Dr. Soberin on the bottle of sleeping pills. Velda had mentioned that name.  He calls Soberin’s answering service and finds out that he has a beach cottage.  Mike realizes it’s probably the same place where Christina was tortured, and subsequently the place where the gangsters forcibly brought him later in order to find out what he knows, only Mike killed two of them and got away.  Mike doesn’t bother to call an ambulance for the art dealer.  He just leaves for the beach house, letting the man die of an overdose.

Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker) is, in fact, the chief villain, and Gabrielle is actually his lover. She told Soberin where the box was, and he now has it at his beach house, with Velda locked in one of the rooms.  Gabrielle wants to know what is in the box.  In the space of two minutes, Soberin alludes to Pandora’s box, Lot’s wife, and the head of Medusa.

Gabriele says she wants half of what is in the box, but Soberin says it can’t be shared. So, in that case, she says she wants it all, pulls out a revolver, and shoots him.  He still has time for one last allusion, referring to Cerberus barking with all his heads at the gates of Hell, as he warns her not to open the box.  Gabrielle doesn’t care about all those references to mythology or stories in the bible. She wants to know what’s in the box.

In any event, just after Gabrielle kills Soberin, Mike comes in through the door.  She tells Mike to kiss her, saying it would be a “liar’s kiss,” referring to the way Mike treats women as sex objects, but only when he’s in the mood to bother with them at all. Perhaps he got a little off Gabrielle when she stayed at his apartment, and she felt used.  Before he has a chance to do anything, however, she shoots him.  Then she opens the box.  It hisses and glows.  She can’t help herself.  She must keep opening the box, screaming as she becomes engulfed in flames.  Don’t ask how anyone ever got that thing in the box to begin with.

There are two endings for this movie, in both of which the final scene is that of the beach house exploding in a fireball.  In what is now called the “original ending,” the wounded Mike manages to get himself and Velda out of the house and into the surf, where they watch the house explode.  Big deal. All this for a bomb that can blow up a house?  That makes no sense.  At the very least, we have to suppose this is an atomic bomb of sorts, one that will destroy Los Angeles.  But in that case, seeing Mike and Velda escape from the house is pointless, for they will soon be incinerated.

What is sometimes called the “shortened ending” makes more sense.  Mike finds the room where Velda has been locked up, but then we see the entire house exploding, presumably killing them both.  So, now we can assume it is an atomic bomb, inasmuch as Mike and Velda will be dead anyway.

Or can we?  By 1955, nuclear weapons were a commonplace.  One more bomb would have been just one more bomb.  And it would not have even been a danger to the United States, because Soberin told Gabrielle that he was leaving, and that it was not possible for him to take her with him. Presumably, he was leaving the country.  For this reason, and perhaps because that glowing, hissing thing almost seems to be alive, some critics argue that this device is setting off a chain reaction that will continue to grow until it consumes the entire world.  Not just Mike and Velda, not just the citizens of Los Angeles, but everyone on this planet will be killed.

Mike should have stuck to divorce cases.

At the beginning of the movie Leave Her to Heaven, Richard “Dick” Harland (Cornel Wilde) has just been released from prison after serving a two-year sentence, and is returning home to his lodge in Maine, a place called Back of the Moon.  He arrives at a dock by motorboat, where he is greeted by his lawyer Glen Robie (Ray Collins), who also happens to be an old friend of his.  Glen says everything has been arranged. Richard gets in a canoe by himself and proceeds to his lodge across the lake, where Glen says “she” is waiting for him.

We learn the story behind Richard’s trial and conviction in a flashback, as Glen tells it to a man he happens to be with as they have coffee.  It seems that Richard had just finished writing his latest novel, Time without End, and needed a rest, so Glen invited him to come to his ranch in Jacinto, New Mexico for a vacation.  Richard takes a train to get to Glen’s ranch, and on the way finds himself sitting across from a woman, Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney), who is reading the very novel he just finished writing. She is also traveling to Jacinto along with her mother, Mrs. Berent, and adoptive sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain), who are in another part of the train at that moment.  As it turns out, Glen and his wife are also friends of the Berent family, who live in Beacon Hill, Boston, and who are also on their way to Glen’s ranch.

Apparently, Richard’s novel is not that interesting because Ellen puts it in her lap and falls asleep. When the book falls to the floor, Richard picks it up and hands it to her. She thanks him and then begins staring at him intently, almost as if she were in a trance.

The Father

At first, we think she recognizes Richard from his picture on the back of the book jacket.  But soon we find out that he has a remarkable resemblance to her late father, to whom she was very much attached.

Just how attached, we wonder?  Later in the movie, Ruth comments that Mrs. Berent adopted her. Richard asks her why she said only Mrs. Berent adopted her and not Mr. Berent as well.  At first Ruth says she doesn’t know why she said that, but then says perhaps it was because Mrs. Berent suggested it, because she was alone so much.  Ruth seems a little uncomfortable and changes the subject.  By that time, we have pieced together that Mrs. Berent was alone much of the time because her husband spent so much time with their daughter Ellen.  Ellen and her father used to come to the ranch every spring, but her mother never came along.  Ellen says it is because her mother doesn’t like New Mexico, but her mother denies that, so we have to suspect another reason, which is that she felt excluded, believing that her husband and daughter wanted to be alone with each other, and that she was not wanted.

Mrs. Berent is played by Mary Philips, who was forty-four years old when this movie was made, and thus Mrs. Berent may be assumed to be in her forties as well.  If we assume that Mr. Berent was about the same age, then he must have died in his forties.  It might have been of natural causes, but toward the end of the movie, Ruth says to Ellen, “With your love, you wrecked Mother’s life and pressed Father to death.” Because she speaks with an authoritative voice, we know that must be true.  But delving more deeply, what does she mean by “pressed Father to death”?  There are three possibilities.

One is that Ellen demanded that her father spend so much time with her that she wore him out.  But that just doesn’t seem to be sufficient to bring about an early death:  first, because he could easily have put limits on her demands; second, because her demands would not have been a problem if he had enjoyed his time with her.

A second possibility is that she was sexually aggressive, always tempting her father, cuddling with him, kissing him.  He resisted the temptation, but he wanted her, and it stressed him out so much that it killed him.

The third possibility is that he gave in to temptation and had a sexual relationship with her, causing him so much guilt that he died from that.

Given the powers of censorship on the part of the Production Code, the second and third possibilities could not have been made explicit in 1945.  However, the novel on which this movie is based is just as indefinite as to their relationship.

The purpose of the visit to the ranch has to do with the father’s death.  It seems he died back East some time ago, in Beacon Hill, and was cremated.  The reason for the visit is so that Ellen can scatter the ashes of her father in the mountains where she used to spend a lot of her time with him.  She and her father had made a pact:  when they died, their ashes would be brought out there and mixed together, and that whoever died first would see to it.

Because Richard reminds her so much of her father, Ellen falls in love with him and breaks off her engagement with her fiancé Russell Quinton (Vincent Price).  When Russell gets her telegram, he is so angry that he flies up to Jacinto, saying he wanted to congratulate her on her forthcoming marriage; but this is bitter sarcasm, since he refuses to shake hands with Richard, who is only then learning about Ellen’s plans to marry him, but is too polite to say anything. Russell is perplexed, saying, “I always knew you’d never marry me while your father was alive.  But after he died, I thought….  Well, I thought there might be a chance.”

Just as a side observation:  Russell is a politician running for district attorney.  He is afraid that having Ellen break off their engagement will hurt his chances in the upcoming election, and so he asks her if she would postpone the wedding until after the election is over in the fall.  I guess it didn’t take much to make for a political sex scandal when this movie was made in 1945.

Anyway, she refuses to postpone the wedding, saying she and Richard will get married immediately. Before he leaves, Russell tells Ellen that he loves her and always will.  “Remember that,” he says with seething anger in his voice.  “Russ,” Ellen replies calmly, “is that a threat?”  Ominous words, as it turns out.

When Richard tries to confront her after Russell leaves, she subdues him, asking, “Darling, will you marry me?”  Unable to resist, he kisses her.  She says, “And I’ll never let you go.  Never. Never. Never.”  And these too are ominous words.

The Brother-in-Law

As noted above, even though Ellen is only in her twenties, her father is already dead. Ruth is also in her twenties, and both her parents died when she was a child, which is why she was adopted.  And even though Richard is only thirty years old, both of his parents have been dead for some time.  I guess people didn’t live long back then.

Anyway, Richard takes care of a younger brother Danny, played by Darryl Hickman, who is about fourteen years old.  When we see him at the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, an institution that provides rehabilitation therapy for people with polio, he is in a wheel chair.

Ellen knew about Danny before she married Richard, but she didn’t think he would be living with them. She believed that he would continue staying at the Foundation, and when he got better, he would go back to boarding school, which means living away from home.  She even spends a lot of time with Danny, helping him learn to walk with crutches toward that end.

She tells Richard, in a house they have rented near the Foundation, that she doesn’t want them to have a maid or a cook, that she will do everything for them, because she doesn’t want anyone else living with them.  Richard brings up the possibility of their having a child, and she says, “That’s different.”  When he asks about Danny, she says, “That’s different too.”  As it turns out, however, they are not different at all.

Let’s step back just a minute, forget about the details of this movie, and think about the situation with marriage in general.  I knew a guy once who said that when he got married, he thought he and his wife would live together in their own little love nest, just the two of them.  Six months later, he said, she started talking about having her mother move in with them:  not out of any economic necessity, but for emotional reasons only, because she just liked the idea of having her mother around.

In To Catch a Thief (1955), Cary Grant has a beautiful house on the French Riviera.  At the end of the movie, Grace Kelly follows him to his house.  They start kissing, and it is clear they are going to get married, at which point she says, “Mother will love it up here.”  Cary Grant gets a look of horror on his face.

As for children, another guy I knew said that when he and his wife got married, they had an understanding that they would not have any children.  When she got pregnant, he thought that, per their agreement, she would have an abortion, but she decided she wanted the baby.  “That’s when I found out I couldn’t trust my wife,” he told me.  Nine months later, she had the baby, and he had a vasectomy.

In other words, there are two kinds of people:  there are the love-nest types, whose idea of marriage is a man and a woman living together, just the two of them; and then there are the inclusive-family types, who want others, be they children, relatives, or friends, to be a part of the household too.  It’s not that these two types are completely unaware of each other’s preferences when they marry each other, as so often they do.  It’s that they fail to comprehend just how strong those preferences are, never imagining how much stress this will put on their marriage.

Ellen is definitely the love-nest type.  She is the last person in the world who should marry into a package deal.  As noted above, she figured she could navigate the situation, but things don’t work out the way Ellen planned.  When Richard first sees Danny walking on crutches, he is thrilled.  Then Danny says, “Now we can, all three of us, go to Back of the Moon.  Can’t we, Dick?  Can’t we?”  Richard says, “You bet we can.” Ellen, who had been smiling, pleased with Danny’s progress, narrows her eyebrows and frowns, and then sadness covers her face as she looks down.

In the next scene, Ellen tries to get Dr. Mason (Reed Hadley) to advise Richard that it would be better for Danny to stay at the Foundation for more therapy, or to go to a boarding school, but Mason thwarts her every argument.  She says there is no telephone out in Richard’s lodge in case of a medical emergency; Dr. Mason is sure there won’t be a such an emergency.  She says there won’t be a school for Danny to go to; Dr. Mason says school can wait.  Finally, she even admits that it is partly for selfish reasons that she doesn’t want Danny to live with them.  She says she gave up her honeymoon so that Richard could be with his brother, but Richard has been working, and the burden has fallen completely on her, to the point that she is worn out taking care of Danny.  She insists she loves Danny just as much as Richard does, “But after all,” she says, “he’s a cripple.”

Ellen realizes her mistake and apologizes, saying, “I’m afraid I haven’t been too well myself lately.”  And yet, most people would know not to say something like that, even if they were thinking it, and even if they weren’t feeling well.  That she said that anyway is an indication of just how intense is her desire to be alone with Richard, making her oblivious to all other considerations.  Having recovered herself, she continues to plead with Dr. Mason to help her make her case to Richard, with Dr. Mason refusing to do so.  When Richard shows up, Ellen says, “Oh, Richard, I’ve got such wonderful news.  Dr. Mason just consented to let Danny come with us to Back of the Moon.”

So, it’s off they go to Back of the Moon.  The walls are paper thin in that lodge, so there isn’t much privacy, certainly not enough for Ellen, especially since there is also Richard’s friend, Leick Thorne (Chill Wills), a handyman who lives in the house too.  In other words, Richard is an inclusive-family type.  And just when Ellen thinks it cannot get any more crowded than it already is, it turns out that Richard has invited Mrs. Berent and Ruth up there under the misguided notion that Ellen would be pleased.  She is not pleased.  His excuse for not discussing it with her first is that “We wanted to surprise you, honey.”

You see, Richard lacks empathy.  It sounds strange to say that of someone who otherwise seems to be a nice guy.  We tend to associate a lack of empathy with people that are selfish and mean.  But that is not always the case in real life, and it is not true in Richard’s case either.  Richard is so convinced he knows what will make Ellen happy that, notwithstanding what she earlier said about wanting to live alone with him, he never considers that he might be wrong in this matter.  Being the inclusive-family type, Richard likes having lots of people living with him, and lacking empathy, he projects that same attitude onto to others, Ellen in particular.

Mrs. Berent and Ruth invite Danny to stay with them at their summer home in Bar Harbor, Maine, mentioning that there is a school he could attend there.  When Ellen suggests it to Danny, however, he says he is not interested in going there unless all three of them can go together.  In other words, Danny is as attached to Richard as Ellen is, and she realizes there is no way to get rid of him.

Well, there is one way.  Ellen mentioned to Leick that she had a strange dream in which Richard was drowning and she was unable to save him, saying she had no voice to call for help, that her arms were paralyzed, and she couldn’t row to him because the lake was like glue.  Freud was a dominant intellectual force in those days, and with that in mind, we can see that this dream is the fulfillment of a wish, the wish that Danny would drown.  But her conscience would not let her dream that about Danny, so she substituted Richard. Since there was no way she wanted Richard to drown, the dream caused no feelings of guilt.

But there may be more to this dream than that.  As noted above, when Ellen first saw Richard, she went into a dream-like trance staring at him.  There are times in Ellen’s life when, though awake, it is as if she is in a dream, under a compulsion, and unable to do anything about it.

In any event, the dream turns out to be prophetic.  She encourages Danny to try swimming across the lake, as therapy, while following him in a rowboat.  As he eases into the water, she puts on a pair of sunglasses.  Ostensibly, this is to protect her eyes from the glare of the sun.  But when someone conceals his eyes, it makes it difficult for others to engage him emotionally.  Sunglasses confer on the wearer a degree of moral detachment.  That the sunglasses are heart-shaped, suggesting a warmth that isn’t there, is all the more disturbing.  When Danny starts cramping and going under, she seems to be in that dream she had, paralyzed, even though we know she is an excellent swimmer and could easily have saved him.  It is only when she hears Richard whistling as he walks along the lake that she is roused from her dream, screaming, “Danny!” and then jumping in the water, as if she is trying to save him.

Another side observation:  During her stay at the lodge, Ruth is suddenly frightened by the sound of a loon across the lake, and it is shortly afterwards that Ellen lets Danny drown.  In A Place in the Sun (1951), a man plans to drown his pregnant girlfriend in Loon Lake, and after she does drown, he is bothered when he hears a loon, reminding him of what he did.  I guess this association between loons and someone drowning in a lake is just a coincidence, but I can’t help thinking it has a significance that escapes me.  Otherwise, why have a scene where Ruth is bothered by the sound of a loon?

The Baby

After Danny’s death, Richard can’t stand living at Back of the Moon, so he and Ellen go to Bar Harbor to stay with Mrs. Berent and Ruth.  Ellen is getting nowhere in her hopes of living alone with Richard. Now she has to live with her mother and sister as well. This would be bad enough if things were pleasant, but Mrs. Berent shuns her, leaving the room when walks in.  Presumably, she suspects something.

Ruth suggests that Richard might better be able to deal with his loss if he had a child of his own. Normally, Ellen would be averse to the idea, as any love-nest person would be.  But she is desperate and appears to be considering it.  She does get pregnant, and as she get further along in her pregnancy, the doctor tells her not to walk up the stairs.  One day she does just that, only to discover that Richard is changing her father’s laboratory into a playroom.  For Ellen, the room was a shrine, and she did not want it changed.  She asks Richard why he didn’t consult her first.  Once again, given his lack of empathy, he was so convinced that he knew exactly what would make her happy, which just happened to be what would make him happy, that he saw no need to talk to her about it first.  And when Ellen appears to be upset, he once again falls back on the old excuse:  “We wanted to surprise you,” which is supposed to make everything all right.  He even admits he knows she doesn’t like being surprised, but he won’t be denied, saying, “but we were trying to please you.”  And that is supposed to put her in the wrong, making her appear ungrateful.  Of course, Mrs. Berent and Ruth are not much better, for they knew more than anyone how Ellen felt about her father, and yet they said nothing to Richard, but merely helped him with his plan.

As time goes by, Ellen finds herself even more limited in what she can do, the doctor telling her she needs lots of rest.  Meanwhile, Richard has been spending time with Ruth, of whom Ellen has long been suspiciously jealous, especially now that she does not like the way she looks in the late stages of her pregnancy.

Her pregnancy is obvious only to her and the people in the movie, however, not to us in the audience.  We are supposed to imagine that the robe she is wearing signifies a distended belly. Apparently, Joseph Breen, head of the Hays Office, was afraid that if a woman in a movie looked pregnant, that might cause us to think about the sex that was involved in getting her pregnant, thereby precipitating the collapse of Western civilization.

Anyway, thinking she is losing out to Ruth, with her nice trim figure, and realizing that having a baby would just be like having Danny around again, she says to Ruth, “I hate the little beast.  I wish it would die.”  After Ruth leaves, Ellen decides to induce an abortion by flinging herself down the stairs, making it look as though she tripped.  I’d be afraid that if I tried that, I would break my back and be paralyzed for the rest of my life.  But I guess she figured that the doctor would be able to tell if she used a coat hanger.  In any event, she loses (kills) the baby.  The suspicious Mrs. Berent says, referring to Richard, “First his brother, and now his son.”

The doctor says of Ellen, “When she came to, she remembered nothing about leaving her room.  She thought she must have been walking in her sleep.”  Ruth says she couldn’t have been asleep, since she was with her just twenty minutes before it happened.  But that is because Ruth is thinking of sleeping and dreaming in the ordinary sense, and not in the sense that is sometimes true of Ellen.

The Sister

Free of that baby, Ellen is happy again.  But that is short lived.  Mrs. Berent warned Richard that he should dedicate all his future books to his wife, but like an idiot, he dedicates his next book to Ruth, using his nickname for her, “To the Gal with the Hoe,” because she likes planting things.  Being the inclusive-family type, Richard thinks members of a family are all full of love for one another.  He has a blind spot when it comes to understanding just how jealous a love-nest person can be.

The dedication precipitates an argument between Ellen and Ruth, in which Ruth tells Ellen how much she despises her, a lot of which Richard overhears.  Then Ellen and Richard start arguing, and he finally coerces a confession out of her that she let Danny drown.  In one sense, this is a movie confession, one that meets the needs of melodrama; for we might legitimately imagine that a real-life Ellen would continue to deny all, saying she loved Danny, and that it broke her heart when he drowned.  But in another sense, this recalls her attempt to elicit sympathy from Dr. Mason by saying that Danny was a cripple.  She becomes so single-minded in her desire to be alone with Richard that she finds it difficult to lie, which does take more effort and deliberation than simply blurting out the truth.

Richard tells her he is going to leave her.  Figuring he is going to run off with Ruth, Ellen decides to fake evidence, making it look as though Ruth poisoned her.  On her death bed, she tells Richard she wants to be cremated, with her ashes scattered where her father’s ashes were.  He does as she asks, little knowing that she changed her will to say she wanted to be buried in a cemetery, making it look as though an attempt was made to prevent an autopsy.  And then we learn the significance of Russell’s vehement assertion that he will always love Ellen, which she referred to as a threat.  She writes Russell a letter, telling him that Richard and Ruth are in love, and that Richard wants a divorce.  She says she tried to get Ruth to give him up, but Ruth threatened to kill her.  Ellen undoubtedly realized that with Russell as the district attorney, he will be relentless in trying to convict Ruth of murder.

It almost works, but Richard finally tells all on the witness stand about what a monster Ellen was, killing his brother and then their baby, making it plausible that she wanted to make her suicide appear to be murder. Ruth is acquitted, but since Richard withheld evidence of Ellen’s crimes, he is charged as an accomplice, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison.

And so, it is Ruth who is waiting for Richard at Back of the Moon.  Jeanne Crain is pretty in much the same way that Gene Tierney is, but with less character in her face.  We can easily believe that she will make for an innocent version of Ellen.  The irony is that Ruth will have Richard all to herself.

The Title

I suppose a word must be said about the title.  It comes from Hamlet, where the ghost of Hamlet’s father tells of how he was murdered by his brother, demanding that he be avenged.  But then he says, “Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge / To prick and sting her.”  This is quoted just below the title of the book.  But to whom is that admonition addressed, and does it make any sense?

It sounds as though the ghost is saying that Hamlet’s mother will suffer enough just knowing what she has done.  Well, I don’t see how that applies to Ellen.  First of all, Hamlet’s mother is not guilty of murder, only incest, if you can call it that, by marrying her brother-in-law, whereas Ellen is guilty of murder and other wickedness.  Second, whereas Hamlet’s mother is still alive when the ghost tells Hamlet not seek vengeance against her, it’s too late for anyone to get revenge against Ellen, because she’s dead.  We can’t say she has already suffered from remorse, because when she told Richard that she did let Danny drown, she said she had no regrets and would do it all over again.  Finally, Ellen’s death is not punishment.  It’s a weapon.  Her final act on this Earth was to use her own death to destroy Ruth.  That hardly sounds like someone who had been bothered by thorns in her bosom.

Perhaps the author of the novel figured people might not like the fact that Ellen goes unpunished, and he is trying to justify his letting her get away with it, as if an allusion is a substitute for logic.