WEIRDLAND

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Fred MacMurray: Nice Guy On & Off Screen

Fred MacMurray was born on August 30, 1908, in Kankakee, Illinois. Both of Fred's parents had ties to the small Middle Western town of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Frederick MacMurray was the son of the Rev. T.J. MacMurray, former pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Beaver Dam. Fred's mother was Maleta Martin, whose father was the president of the Beaver Dam Telephone Company. Jacob Martin was a self-made man (having received his education in the public schools). When he took on his job of manager of the local telephone company, the exchange consisted of only a single subscriber, but through his energetic efforts, within a few years it had over 1500 members. Maleta and Frederick eloped to Chicago and were married on June 20, 1904. The pressures of the road finally got to be too much for Maleta, who eventually left her husband and returned full time to Beaver Dam with little Fred. Years later Fred and his second wife, June Haver, would be sitting in their living room listening to a concert on television. At one point in the concert there is a violin solo and June looked over to Fred and noticed tears in his eyes. She realized he was thinking of the father that he barely remembered. It is perhaps ironic that Fred MacMurray, the ultimate TV dad, grew up basically with no father.

Despite George Murphy's assertion that everybody loved Fred, there is some evidence that Bob Hope felt some jealousy toward the younger and better-looking man. "Hope began stepping on toes right from the first. Jealous of Fred MacMurray's good looks, Hope patronized him as a green kid and former saxophone tootler who couldn't put over comedy," Fred kind of hesitated when asked about Hope and said: "He was a pain in the ass." -Lawrence J. Quirk in his biography of Bob Hope "The Road Well-Traveled".

The showgirls in the Broadway play 'Roberta' did find Fred attractive but only one caught his eye, a statuesque brunette who appeared during the 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' number as one of the models in the background. "I saw a girl named Lillian Lamonte," Fred later recalled, "and smoke got in my eyes." For the rest of their lives together the song 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' would be considered their song. They met when the show was in rehearsals in New York in August 1933. Fred found the courage to ask her out and she accepted. Because both were limited of funds, they had a romantic but inexpensive courtship. It was love at first sight and very soon afterwards Fred was telling Lillian (whom he called Lily) that he loved her and wanted to marry her (they got married in Las Vegas in 1936 and went to Hawaii on honeymoon).

According to magazine writer Jerry Asher "He was a romantic and idealistic when it came to women, under all that rakishly casual exterior of his. Of course he was so sexy that women conceived elaborate strategies to woo him." Fred's chaste reputation even became the butt of a private joke attributed to Jack Benny, but Laurence Quirk thinks it is more likely to have been originated by Bob Hope: "Bob made passes at every woman in the show, according to MacMurray (a man who, despite of his come-on sexiness looks-wise was actually a chivalrous Puritan with women). Reportedly, Jack Benny once made a crude crack about MacMurray that he must have masturbated a lot to relieve sexual tension. This crack sounds like something Hope, who never liked MacMurray, might have dreamed up."

"Claudette and MacMurray were a natural fit. The warmth the two of them generated as they sat on a stone bench at the New York Public Library, eating popcorn, filtered into the audience, who thought of them as the ideal couple, until Gray arrived on the scene. Milland’s Prince Charming was so at odds with MacMurray’s common man that audiences hoped Marilyn would make the right choice." -"Claudette Colbert: She Walked In Beauty" (2008) by Bernard F. Dick

Hollywood writer Ruth Waterbury wrote that Fred "was perfect in 'Alice Adams' as the aristocratic suitor of shy Katharine Hepburn's underprivileged nice girl. You felt his honest sympathy and concern for the girl. I always saw Fred as a nice boy, nicely brought up, and he saved any itches he had in his pants for marriage. Many people in Hollywood admired and looked up to him for that."

'Hands Across the Table' opened in November 1935. Variety called the film 'first rate entertainment.' The New Republic reviewed: "Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray make an all-time copybook example of how to play a movie for what it is worth -with subtlety, and the sustained kind of charm that can be projected through the shadows of a mile of celluloid."

Fred MacMurray and Joan Bennett in 'Thirteen Hours by Air' (1936) directed by Mitchell Leisen. Leisen got another excellent performance out of Fred, this time extenuating his masculinity, and he enjoyed working with Bennett, too, who Leisen called a 'doll.'

Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray in "Swing High, Swing Low" (1937) directed by Mitchell Leisen

In her autobiography, Dorothy Lamour pays tribute to Carole Lombard: "Not only a great star, Carole was a beautiful woman inside and out and a great humanitarian. From the lowest to the highest paid, everybody at Paramount loved her". During 'Swing High, Swing Low' Lombard took Lamour under her wing in much the same way she had Fred in 'Hands Across the Table." Lamour and Fred also got along well, remaining friends for the remainder of his life and making one more film together several years later: "Star Spangled Rhythm" (1942).

Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray in "True Confession" (1937) directed by Wesley Ruggles

Madeleine Carroll and Fred MacMurray in "Café Society" (1939) directed by Edward H. Griffith

Carroll was a cool English beauty who excelled at playing one of Hitchcock's blonde heroines. She made a fine counter balance to Fred's all-American diamond-in-the rough masculinity. Their first film together was 'Café Society' (1939). Fred ended the decade by appearing in three comedies opposite two leading ladies -Madeleine Carroll and Irene Dunne.

Movie still photographer John Engstead once told the story of why Fred was less than enamoured by Carroll: "I said, 'Madeleine, Fred's coming in especially,' and she said, 'That doesn't matter. I'm not going to do it (some photo stills).' And this poor guy had come in especially on his off time, while her filming had finished early."

Fred and Lily were living in a modest, by Hollywood standards, home in Brentwood, twelve miles west of Hollywood. The house was described as 'a small, early-American affair whose sole Hollywood feature is a swimming pool." The house was at one time the home of Margaret Sullavan and her then-husband, agent extraordinaire Leland Hayward. On the property was a red barn which the Haywards had built as a place to house their children, which Fred converted back to a barn also used as a workshop. Joan Crawford would recall that they "had one of the few happy and well-adjusted marriages in Hollywood." Fred and Lilly often socialized with Carole Lombard and Clark Gable. So close did Lillian and Lombard became that Carole would later refer to Lillian as "really the most decent person I've met in Hollywood." For some years the MacMurrays had wanted children, but couldn't conceive, possibly because of the fragile nature of Lily's health. In 1940 they adopted a newborn blonde and blue-eyed baby girl, Susan.

Fred MacMurray, Mitchell Leisen and Marlene Dietrich in "The Lady is Willing" (1942)

Marlene Dietrich was used to her leading men falling in love with her, so she was apparently displeased when Fred, who she did find attractive, didn't respond properly to her allure. Film publicist Sid Bloomberg said: "Marlene hit on everybody. She believed it helped a film's chemistry if she slept with her leading men. Fred was an exception and she never forgave him for it. He was too devoted to Lillian -it truly annoyed Marlene." Leisen would later say that Fred was 'embarrassed' by Marlene and her transparent attempts to get him in the sack.

Fred considered 'Double Indemnity' his best film. "I enjoy comedy more than anything, I guess, but I honestly have to come back to Double Indemnity and say, that's my best role."

Due to pregnancy, Lynn Bari's only 1945 release was the Eddie Rickenbacker biography 'Captain Eddie' starring Fred MacMurray. He had sole star billing and Lynn, as nice Mrs. Eddie, was back under the title again. When MacMurray signed with Fox to do the film, he specifically asked for Lynn as his leading lady. MacMurray was six feet three so Lynn didn’t need to “scrunch down until I look like a question mark” as she did to play scenes with shorter actors. “I can wear my highest heels and my broadest shoulders and he’ll still make me look tiny.” -"Killer Tomatoes: Fifteen Tough Film Dames" (2004) by Ray Hagen and Laura Wagner

Darryl Hickman acted in 'Captain Eddie' portraying Rickenbacker as a boy. "I remember Fred as being one of the shyest men I've ever met. He was just very quiet and laid back," Hickman recalls. "Fred would come in with his newspaper and sit down away from anybody else. I would walk by and suddenly hear 'Hello, Darryl', and it was Fred with his face hidden behind his newspaper. Everyone liked him and recognized that he was just basically a shy man." Hickman contrasted Fred's behavior with that of Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, who he recalled loving being the center of attention in the MGM commissary. Fred and Lilly added to their family a year-and-a-half-year-old blond-haired blue-eyed little boy, naming him Robert, in 1945.

Paramount asked Fred to return in 1946 to team up with Paulette Goddard in the passable Mitchell Leisen comedy 'Suddenly It´s Spring'.

In 'Singapore' Fred was cast as Matt Gordon, one of the many anti-heroes who populated the screen during the late '40s. When he returns to his favorite hotel after serving five years during World War II, he can't help but reminisce about his pre-war life and the woman he loved and was engaged to be married, Linda (Ava Gardner). The filming went relatively smoothly until the day that Fred and Gardner shot a fire sequence which got out of hand when part of the burning ceiling caved in just narrowly missing Gardner but setting Fred's tropical suit on fire.

The two stars got along fine but didn't forge any long lasting attachments (Ava referred to Fred as 'great'.) Gardner assigned coded nicknames for other stars so that she could gossip on the set with other friends. Barbara Stanwyck was called 'short lips,' Deborah Kerr was 'Miss Continuation', and Fred had the rather innocuous coded name of 'Mr. Gordon.' As for Gardner, director John Brahm would later say, "She didn't have a brain in her head." The film didn't go anywhere at the box office despite its NY opening, where the first one hundred women were given a string of pearls.

Fred read the script of 'Sunset Blvd' and despite previously saying he would do 'anything' that Wilder offered him, he turned the part down finding the Gillis character too 'morally repellent' to do. It's puzzling that Fred (after having played a murderer in 'Double Indemnity') found Gillis -a desperate man, but not really a bad guy- repulsive. William Holden, ten years younger than Fred, gleefully accepted the role and finally cemented his stardom. He even won an Academy Award nomination for his work. Like 'The Best Years of Our Lives,' it was another lost opportunity for Fred.

Fred had a reputation in the industry of being parsimonious and dozens of stories have emerged through the years, real or imagined, of his frugality. Fred de Cordova, who directed Fred on 'My Three Sons', tells in his autobiography that 'nobody in the industry was as generous to charitable causes as Fred and June MacMurray.' And despite Fred's cheap reputation he never pulled anything like Cary Grant later did -charging 25 cents for autographs. Fred's cousin Lester Martin Jr. recalled that Fred was 'always nice to the public. He never turned down anybody who asked for his autograph."

Film publicist Sid Bloomberg recalls 'Fair Wind to Java' as the only time he ever saw Fred blow up at one of his leading ladies on a film set. "I saw Fred blow up only once. The leading lady was Vera Ralston, the mistress and then wife of the studio head (Herbert Yates, president of Republic), and she was basically an ice skater, not an actress. Vera kept blowing scene after scene and Fred wasn't used to it. He was used to working with professionals like Colbert and Goddard, and Ralston was not in their league and he almost walked." Claude Jarman recalls a scene where Fred and Vera Ralston were supposed to enact a 'passionate' love scene. When the scene was completed, Fred turned to a bunch of the guys on the set and said "I have to be nuts to be in this film." Jarman added, "He pretty much summed up how most of us felt."

Unfortunately, Lily would not live long enough to see the realization of one of Fred's finest screen performances: 'The Caine Mutiny'. In early June 1953 Lily was admitted to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, following a heart seizure. Her kidney problems further complicated her recovery and according to her physician Dr. Robert J. Kositcheck, Lily was in grave condition. Fred was at her side all through the final days and was often observed holding Lily's hand. On June 20, while in the hospital, Lily and Fred celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary. She died two days later with Fred at her side. Lily was only 45. Lester Martin maintains that it was Lillian's bulimia which caused the serious side effects which affected her kidneys and heart and kept her in poor health for much of her marriage to Fred.

Fred said that his marriage was 'so perfect' and 'we had a wonderful life.' Perhaps forgetting that Fred had just lost his beloved wife of 17 years, Stanley Kramer ('The Caine Mutiny' producer) wrote: "Fred MacMurray was a spectator in the scene of life, both in his work and in personal relations. He seemed strangely to have retired within himself." The New York Times called Fred's performance in 'The Caine Mutiny' excellent. There was also some talk that Fred would be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, but Fred typically downplayed such talk. In the end, the only actors nominated were Bogart and the veteran Tom Tully.

In 'Pushover' (1954) Fred is back in 'Double Indemnity' mode once again. A pillar of the community, a career cop who goes bad over a dame. And not just any dame. Fred's a cop in his 40s and Novak, the femme fatale, more than twenty years younger. She needs a sucker, a 'pushover,' and, as always when Fred plays a heavy, he is confident on the outside but a marshmallow on the inside, easily manipulated by a woman he thinks he is one up on, but in actuality she is always one step ahead of him.

"MacMurray coldly kills the boyfriend and steals the money to provide a future for himself and Novak, but in film noir, things never work out that neatly. After mudering another cop who witnessed the earlier killing, MacMurray is gunned down tring to get away. As he lies in the street, seriously wounded as a result of turning crooked, he asks Novak the rhetorical question, "We really didn't need the money, did we?" No noir characters really need the money; they just want it, often for reasons they themselves do not understand. Even if they do understand, their choices are inexorably ruled by their own flaws and compulsions and by events in the world around them, ensuring their own destruction. "'Noir has a timeless appeal," says Eugenio Zaretti, art director for the modern film noir 'Slamdance' (1987), "because a noir hero has no exit, no options, and is constrained to do what destiny bids. People respond to noir because it is an element of daily life. We are all constrained,  because of conditioning, to do things we'd prefer not to do." -"Death On The Cheap: The Lost B Movies" (2000) by Arthur Lyons

Lauren Bacall and Fred MacMurray in "Woman's World" (1954) directed by Jean Negulesco

Arlene Dahl recalls Negulesco as 'an authetic flirtatious Hungarian' who would 'flirt with each of us [Dahl, Bacall and Allyson] and take us out to lunch, separately.' Dahl believes that June Haver helped bring Fred 'out of his shell.' She recalls the courting couple as being 'very affectionate and sweet to one another, just very loving.' Dahl also observed that Fred, basically a shy man, would blush, especially in the presence of women. After Lily's death, Fred told a reporter he wasn't sure he would ever marry again. By the holidays of 1953 the loneliness he felt over the loss of Lily was as acute as ever. John Wayne was having a 'Gay Nineties' party a few days before Christmas and invited Fred to come.

Singer and dancer June Haver was also invited to the party and was also hesitant about attending. Haver, the 'pocket Grable' at Fox, was the daughter of a strong-willed stage mother whose own hopes for a show business career never panned out. Haver was 'as sweet a human being as I met, a delightful woman,' according to Darryl Hickman. Actress Sybil Jason recalls Haver as being 'cute as a button and very warm and hospitable.' At the party June would recall being asked to dance by British film actor Laurence Harvey. June would later state that she knew right away she could fall in love with Fred. After all, this was the same man she worked with a decade earlier who impressed her as the kind of man she would want to marry. "He was kind of a challenge. I wanted to know what Fred was really like." They spent the rest of the time at the party locked in conversation together, pretty much ignoring everybody else. He took her home that night, but always a gentleman he didn't stay for the night. But the next day, Sunday, he came by June's apartment with his tools and fixed the plumbing in her bath room where the pipes had been leaking. June said, 'there he was, lying on his back on the bathroom floor, working on those pipes."

By late January 1954, while Fred was filming 'Pushover' with Kim Novak, Sheilah Graham was asking Fred in her syndicated column about rumors linking him to Ann Sothern, Eleanor Parker and June Haver. Graham ended her column by writing: "when he does decide to marry again, you can envy the girl. He has millions, he's attractive, considerate and about the best husband this town ever had." By May 1954 June felt it was time to ask Fred the big question, 'When are we going to get married?' Fred just grinned and said, 'Oh, we are? Well, I guess I'd better get you a ring.' She suggested 'something simple, a little pearl would be fine, that's my birthstone.' But Fred didn't want just a simple ring for June, he wanted her to have a diamond and even had one in mind, 'Red Skelton's good luck ring, the one he wore on his pinky.' When Red heard that Fred admired his diamond pinky ring he told Boo Roos that he would willingly let Fred have the diamond. Fred wouldn't hear of it and arranged to buy it and then have the diamond made into a ring.

Fred and June held their civil ceremony in Ojai, California, on June 28, 1954. The ceremony took place at the Ojai Valley Inn, in the room of Dr. and Mrs. Don Burger, the owners of the hotel. Fred slipped a circle of diamonds on June's finger while she gave Fred a plain gold band. Fred was 45 and June was 27. June was the perfect complement to Fred, where he was shy and withdrawn she was an extravert and outgoing. Lester Martin contrasted June with Fred's first wife: "Where Lillian was reserved and straightforward, very princess like, June was just the reverse, but they were both wonderful ladies and Fred was devoted to them both. He often commented to me on how lucky he was to be blessed with two happy marriages." Just before they got married Fred bought a new home for himself, June and the kids. He couldn't bear to live in the same house that he and Lily had shared and bought a ten-room colonial mansion in Brentwood from singer Nelson Eddy.

"June was one of the kindest women you'd ever want to meet, but the mother superior at her former convent would definitely not have approved one of her stories. 'Fred & I used to have a really big farm with a great big oakie tree on it. Do you remember that tree honey?' she asked as the color drained from Fred's face. He knew what was coming next, but by now June was unstoppable. 'Fred used to take me up there under that big oak and fuck the shit out of me, didn't you, honey? And he's hung like a horse.' She picked up the champagne bottle and, waving it around to emphasize the point, said: 'It´s as big as this, isn´t it, honey?' Then, probably to Fred's relief, she passed out." -"Moon River and Me: A Memoir" (2009) by Andy Williams

June had also determined not to return to work. Fred also didn't make any bones that he preferred to be the sole breadwinner of the family, but he wouldn't pressure June, it had to be her decision. She was tempted only once when she was offered a role in the film version of 'Guys and Dolls', but ultimately she turned it down: 'I had ten good years in the movies', she said. June found that even though she had come to love both Sue and Bobby, she had a natural desire to want children of her own. But she discovered that she could not conceive, which naturally disappointed her but rebounded quickly. June approached Fred to discuss adopting a baby. At St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, June found two red-headed baby girls who had been born prematurely. When Fred arrived, according to June, he telephoned their friends Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, who had also recently had twin girls, and asked Jimmy: 'What do we do? They're twins!" to which Stewart replied 'Buy two of everything.'

They named the girls Laurie and Katie. June said: 'you should have seen Fred. He worked like a frenzied boy putting up the bassinets, the bathinettes. He even helped with the night feedings, he was just marvelous.' His friends thought they had never seen Fred so happy. His pal Claude Binyon would later say 'Ever since those little girls arrived, Mr. Nice Guy has become even nicer.'

"Fred was always nice and very polite, but not an easy man to get to know. He towered over me like one of those monuments to big business on Wilshire Blvd. I felt inconsequential standing in his shadow. All I was looking for was a nod of acceptance, and I finally got it the day Fred took out his sax and I accompanied him on piano. I remember the twinkle in his eye and the connection I felt. Music bridged the unspoken gap between us, and a deep friendship began. Fred often spoke to me about Rob. It bothered him deeply that he couldn’t connect with his only son. Gradually I came to see Fred as a man who was longing to have the same relationship with Rob, as Steve Douglas had with his sons. Through his TV sons, Fred found the chance to express his love for his son. Through Fred, I found the chance to experience a father-son relationship, which I eventually had with my real dad. He loved me like a father, I loved him like a son… and I’ll never forget him. How much of that is miraculous? I suppose it depends on where you are in life, and how much of a miracle you need. For me, Fred MacMurray was the miracle I needed." -Don Grady's Foreword.

Two days following Fred's death, the Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin wrote an appreciation: "The movie camera, with its undeniable capacity to see past the characterization to the player's soul, saw the nice guy that MacMurray really was. The miracle of Hollywood in its early days was that it kept finding the men and women who could help to define the movies' possibilities. Fred MacMurray was one of the men." In 1986 Fred, in his own understated and humble way, summed up his career this way: "Well, I've done pretty good for a guy who plays saxophone." Two years later, on his 80th birthday, when asked how he wanted to be remembered, he replied, "Fondly." He got his wish. -"Fred MacMurray: A Biography" (2007) by Charles Tranberg

In addition, please revisit my previous post: Memories of Fred MacMurray

Thursday, August 08, 2013

Happy Anniversary, Robert Siodmak!


Film noir from 1944 directed by Robert Siodmak and starring beautiful Washingtonian actress Ella Raines, Franchot Tone, Alan Curtis and Elisha Cook Jr.

Ella Raines plays Carol Richman, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis)'s secretary, nicknamed 'Kansas'. She doggedly follows evanescent clues through shadowy nocturnal streets. Can she save Scott in time?

Binary Genre Models in "Double Indemnity"

Barbara Stanwyck, photographed by A.L. Whitey Schafer and Costume by Edith Head. Publicity photo for 'Double Indemnity' (1944) directed by Billy Wilder


DOUBLE INDEMNITY SCRIPT - NEFF: He interrupts the dictation, lays down the horn on the desk. He takes his lighted cigarette from the ash tray, puffs it two or three times, and kills it. He picks up the horn again. NEFF (His voice is now quiet and contained) It began last May. About the end of May, it was. I had to run out to Glendale to deliver a policy on some dairy trucks. On the way back I remembered this auto renewal on Los Feliz. So I decided to run over there. It was one of those Calif. Spanish houses everyone was nuts about 10 or 15 years ago. This one must have cost somebody about 30,000 bucks -- that is, if he ever finished paying for it. As he goes on speaking, SLOW DISSOLVE TO: DIETRICHSON HOME - LOS FELIZ DISTRICT -

“I Won’t Tell You What I Did Then”: The (Partial) Confession of Walter Huff: Walter Huff, made even more famous by Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff portrayal in the 1944 Billy Wilder film, is often set forth as the prime example of the fall guy seduced and betrayed by the murderous femme fatale.

Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff in 'Double Indemnity' (1944)

Walter refers to his attraction to Phyllis at one point as “some kind of unhealthy excitement that came over me just at the sight of her”. He contrasts this response with the feelings the innocent Lola inspires in him: “[A] sweet peace... came over me as soon as I was with her”. Phyllis is all agitation for Walter, while Lola is safe, heimlich, the expected family romance. Their different brands of femininity appear to be defined primarily by Walter’s bodily reaction in their presence. His body constitutes their gender; his hysterical response casts Phyllis as a lethal femme fatale.

Phyllis fails to fulfill physical/aesthetic expectations of the glamorous femme fatale. She is not “beautiful,” but merely “pretty.” She dresses simply—but also androgynously. No seamed stockings, tight dresses, or veiled hats. She wears lounging pajamas on first meeting Walter, later a sailor suit, then a sweater and slacks. She is characterized as appearing “sweet” rather than seductive. Walter first describes her as having a “washed out look” and later as having teeth that are “big and white and maybe a little buck” -the linking of Phyllis’s mouth with slang for money (“buck”) is surely telling- Hollowed out and even ironized, the femme fatale consequently is made to appear less and less an independent figure than a constitutive projection performing a crucial function for Walter.

Readers are not given salivating descriptions of Phyllis’s body or face, and consequently do not participate in Walter’s desire so directly, thereby enabling readers to see Walter’s projection more clearly. Her illness is within him — maybe it always was. Walter tells us early on: “I was peeping over the edge, and all the time I was trying to pull away from it, there was something in me that kept edging a little closer, trying to get a better look”. Instead of bowing out when Walter hears Phyllis say she regrets their kiss and loves her husband, Walter pushes forward, confiding to the reader, “the thing was in me, pushing me still closer to the edge. And then I could feel it again, that she wasn’t saying what she meant”. Again, Walter locates the drive within himself, as something he “feels.”

The reliance on intuition is tested when Walter meets Phyllis for the first time. They have only spoken for a few minutes when Walter begins to suspect that Phyllis may, in hardboiled parlance, have an angle (though he mistakes what the angle is). It is at this moment when, he confides, “all of a sudden she looked at me, and I felt a chill creep straight up my back and into the roots of my hair.” It fixes Walter, even when Phyllis changes the subject. While he refers to her look’s potency, it is actually his look that seems compulsive and insistent as he “tries to keep [his] eyes off her, and couldn’t.”

Mary Ann Doane writes that the femme fatale is an “articulation of fears surrounding the loss of stability and centrality of the self, the ‘I,’ the ego. Phyllis’s presence surely “unmans” Walter here —but the “unmanning” is multi-leveled. The two take part in a dance in which Walter attempts to control the situation, while Phyllis plots behind the scenes; just when he thinks he has the power, it is revealed to be a sham, not just because Phyllis is more clever or more malevolent, but because her very presence can literally destabilize Walter.

There is another mode of destabilization that is explicitly gendered, and it is negotiated through Phyllis’s appearance. Her pajamas cling to her body as she moves in such a way that he can suddenly discern the appealing curvy shape beneath: “... I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts”. Her sailor suit pulls over her hips, hinting at her figure. Her raincoat and swimming cap promise even more hidden pleasures—but, after Walter “[gets] her peeled off,” he finds she’s wearing “just a dumb Hollywood outfit” of slacks and a sweater, though even there “it looked different on her”.

William Luhr notes about the film version of 'Double Indemnity' (scripted by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler), “The image of the crippled man on crutches applies to three men [Huff, Sachetti, Nirdlinger]... The broken leg, the crutches... symbolically point to a phallic injury, an emasculation suffered by men who became involved with this black widow... The film links this image of debilitation, deformity, death to sexual association with Phyllis.” Walter is not merely threatened by the femme fatale, but his masculinity is configured such that he identifies with, desires, and doubles the femme fatale. This complication leads us to ask if, in fact, the femme fatale is nothing more than Walter himself.

Phyllis has shifted from being Walter’s plant to being the Company’s, as their virtual executioner. She operates unknowingly as a stand-in for the Company, which is effectively a stand-in for an all-consuming capitalist economy. Femininity so equated with death in the text, ends up forming a triangulated relationship with the stranglehold of business on Walter’s desire. Both Phyllis and General Fidelity (the Company’s name signifies its insistence on allegiance) provide Walter with opportunities to enact a family romance by betraying the patriarch, be it Mr. Nirdlinger or Company founder Norton (or Keyes).

William Marling suggests that Walter’s mistake was in failing to realize that the “emerging economy needed to limit [his brand of ] aggressive rationality rather than to have insiders use what usually did not happen against it”. But rather, it seems Walter’s error was in underestimating the extent to which he had absorbed, or “caught” the Company. Walter assumed he could beat it from the inside, not understanding that he was not inside the system; the system was inside him. Phyllis, while appearing to be Walter’s disease, is in fact his symptom of the larger Company pathology he has “caught.” The disease is the Company he cannot beat because he has become it. Keyes knows that Walter cannot truly flee, and Phyllis unwittingly functions as the Company’s hit man, the long arm of the Company reaching out to annihilate the stray. But Phyllis does not truly need to assassinate Walter; Walter recognizes what he carries within him and enters into death of his own volition.

Neither Walter nor Phyllis can exit their respective gender systems, but for Phyllis, the death pact is an ecstatic communion with the system through which her femininity is defined and, if we accept her self-identification as Death, the system through which she defines herself. Conversely, for Walter, the suicide pact is a hysterical recognition of his own utter lack of agency. The systems intermesh, interlock, and leave Walter with one position, white male cog whose body and function have been prescribed for him all along. This lack of male agency amid larger social systems will prove a recurrent pattern within hardboiled fiction. While the weakness of the tough guy–as–sap in his interactions with the femme fatale is often broached, 'Double Indemnity' demonstrates the extent to which that femme fatale is merely a symbol of larger and deeply oppressive societal structures that imprison both genders in tyrannically binary models.

-"The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir" by Megan E. Abbott (2002) / 'I Can Feel Her': The White Male as Hysteric in James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler (Chapter 2)

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Jake Gyllenhaal shopping groceries in N.Y. and Los Angeles

Jake Gyllenhaal is shopping groceries at Erewhon Natural Foods in Los Angeles, on August 4, 2013

The previous day Jake Gyllenhaal was seen shopping groceries with Alyssa in Tribeca, New York City on August 3, 2013

"Two months in, Jake Gyllenhaal and model Alyssa Miller's relationship seems to be keeping its happy glow. The beautiful couple were recently spotted on holiday in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where they spent plenty of time showing their adoration for one another.

And good news for the young beauty is that Miller's father has been public about his approval of her relationship with Gyllenhaal. 'I haven’t met him yet, but he must be a great guy,' Craig Miller, Alyssa's father, told Celebuzz. He admitted that his daughter has been 'shy' about tell him details on the new relationship, but noted that he could tell she was enjoying the romance. 'She sounded really happy and so ecstatic. I haven’t heard her this happy in a long time,' he said. Gyllenhaal will certainly have plenty of opportunities to show off with Miller in the Hollywood limelight in the near future. The hunk has two new films (Enemy and Prisoners, both directed by Denis Villeneuve) premiering in just over a month. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

The Pyschological Splitting of Film Noir

Fred MacMurray and Claire Trevor in "Borderline" (1950) directed by William A. Seiter

One of the strange things about travel South of the Border is that it can have one of two contrasting effects: either reveal the real you, stripped down in elemental conflict with destiny (no better example of this than 'The Wages of Fear', but see also 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre'); or it can be an opportunity for reinvention and masquerade. And this paradox, that Latin America is the site simultaneously of both truth and falsity, is not so dissimilar from the paradox that it instantiates both nature and culture at the same time.

In 'Borderline', which is a sort of film noir lite, Mexico is the site of duplicity and pretence.

Which is why the film rather goes against the conventions of noir, and becomes more a comedy of errors.

Claire Trevor plays Madeleine Haley, and ambitious young cop sent south to infiltrate and investigate a gang of drug-traffickers headed by one Pete Ritchie. She takes on the name "Gladys LaRue" and the character of, first, dancehall floozy and, then, gangster's moll to gain access to the formidable Ritchie, played by Raymond Burr. Yet she ends up kidnapped by another gang boss, who sends her North with a consignment of drugs in the company of hardman Johnny Macklin.

Little does she realize, however, that Macklin is, like her, a cop in disguise, tender-hearted Johnny McEvoy under his tough-guy exterior. Source: screened.blogspot.com

Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner in "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952) directed by Vincente Minnelli

Joseph Cotten as Holly Martin in "The Third Man" (1949) directed by Carol Reed, scripted by Graham Greene & Orson Welles

Borders and Borderers: The American film noir is a cinematic tradition whose representations are thoroughly liminal: the protagonists of these films characteristically find themselves straddling the border between competing forms of identity, as they often enter into perilous rites de passage through a nightmarish version of contemporary urban reality. Only seldom do these borderers emerge from that “dark city” (which is sometimes just a moral or psychological condition) to enjoy the transfiguration and triumph of a conventional happy ending.

In Billy Wilder’s 'Double Indemnity' (1944), an adulterous couple plot and then carry out a crime that is meant to be understood as an accident. To carry off the required elaborate masquerade, Walter and Phyllis become performers as soon as they begin plotting. In addition to playing at remaining “himself” even as he rejects that identity, Walter is even called upon to impersonate the dead man at one point.

After carrying out the murder, the pair must stay “in character,” which proves difficult after the accident theory is shown by the insurance company investigator to be untenable. A key effect of the narrative is that it highlights the willed, constructed nature of social roles, whose “naturalness” is thereby called into question. For once Walter and Phyllis determine to become other than what they were, they are forced by the very logic of their plan to inhabit self-consciously, and inauthentically, the roles they had previously performed unthinkingly: the pleasant housewife loyal to her husband and the successful insurance agent dedicated to his company’s financial well-being and the steady advancement of his own career.

Their situation comes to resemble closely that of those involved in what anthropologist Victor Turner terms “cultural performance,” those rituals and other modes of symbolic action that seem part and parcel of the everyday, but in which, Turner argues, “violence has to be done to commonsense ways of classifying the world and society” because performers must remain themselves even as they strive to inhabit another identity. Cultural performance, so Turner believes, therefore does not simply express or reflect “the social system or the cultural configuration,” but “offers a critique, direct or veiled, of the social life it grows out of, an evaluation (with lively possibilities of rejection) of the way society handles history”.

As Walter and Phyllis discover, the critical nature of the experience resides chiefly in the fact that, to quote Turner, “the ‘self’ is split up the middle—it is something that one both is and that one sees and, furthermore, acts upon as though it were another.” For anthropologists like Turner, the characteristic cultural performance is ritual, in which participants find themselves on the border between “secular living and sacred living,” in a “limbo that was not any place they were before and not yet any place. This doubleness, as James Naremore brilliantly demonstrates, also characterizes the viewer’s experience with the film’s foregrounding of performativity, for the “performances” of Walter and Phyllis as “themselves” are managed by MacMurray and Stanwyck as revealing the strain between the need to adopt one’s self as a mask and the powerful force of inner expression that defines the characters’ psychological states.

"Double Indemnity" evokes a secular limbo. Walter and Phyllis, to use the term popularized by Turner, find themselves in a liminal social space, defined by its bordering engagement with contradictory social spaces. Within this paradoxical space, the ordinary forms of everyday living are shown by Walter and Phyllis as what they always already are, that is, performances whose authenticity is by definition in question. Part of Wilder’s genius, in fact, is he stages the “random” encounters between the two “actors” in places where the contrast is greatest between their deadly plotting and the forms of everyday living they now act out. Unstable from the outset, these performances eventually breakdown completely, as Walter discovers within himself the capacity, and then the desire, to love a decent woman with whom he can imagine an ordinary life. It is, in fact, because he continues to inhabit his accustomed role that he has the opportunity to meet and get to know a woman who belongs solidly to ordinariness.

More spectacularly, Phyllis reveals herself less devoted to the coldly calculating accumulation of wealth and more driven by a psychopathic impulse to kill and passionately embrace her own destruction. In both cases, however, Walter and Phyllis discover the impossibility of remaining on the border between law-abiding normality and its oppositional heterocosm (the negative space in which the denial of the social contract plays out). The plot’s inexorable logic leads them to mutual murder. Realizing that she loves Walter after fatally wounding him, Phyllis gives herself over to her erstwhile lover’s embrace—and, shockingly, receives the answering shot he fires through her heart. Fleeing the scene, Walter eschews medical treatment for his wound, preferring instead to bleed to death while providing in his office a Dictaphone confession to the crime. This moment of Wilderian black humor suggests how Walter never manages to escape the all-too-solid identity of the company man devoted to closing the books on every case, even his own. Like the James M. Cain novel on which it is based, "Double Indemnity" exposes the self-defeating nature of that desire for self-fashioning whose trajectory it traces. So powerful is the demand that we be who we are and have been that the shedding of the self can only be achieved through the artfully inauthentic preservation of the self that has been shed.

Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten in "The Third Man" (1949)

The Noir Chronotope: In a groundbreaking study, Vivian Sobchack argues that film noir is most deeply marked by its unique representational response to a culture in transition between the collective, public experience of a world war that required the widest marshalling of all the nation’s resources and the desired, collective return to “the family unit and the suburban home as the domestic matrix of democracy”. This national experience of inbetweenness finds its most substantial visual reflex in what Sobchack argues are the “recurrent and determinate premises” of this Hollywood type, its obsession with the dark city. Earlier critics, most notably Paul Schrader, located noirness in a cinematographic style heavily indebted to Weimar filmmaking, but Sobchack importantly turns critical attention toward mise-en-scène, the characteristic settings of this film type such as “the cocktail lounge, the nightclub, the bar, the hotel room, the boardinghouse, the diner, the dance hall, the roadside café, the bus and train station, and the wayside motel”.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in "In A Lonely Place" (1950) directed by Nicholas Ray

These are the publicly accessible spaces of entertainment, dining, travel, and lodging, whose function is to provide for those literally, and also metaphorically, in transit. They substitute for what cannot be obtained in a world where nothing is “settled,” where the family home is unimaginable because it would depend on relationships (economic, sexual, and nurturant) that in noir narratives are not yet finalized. Such formal elements of mise-en-scène, Sobchack plausibly suggests, are the geographical reflexes of “existential, epistemological, and axiological uncertainty.”

The opening sequences of 'Act of Violence' juxtapose a gloomy urban neighborhood with the sun-drenched suburbs, a decaying East Coast with the vibrant prosperity of California, a young veteran, glorying in his beautiful wife and child who is celebrated for his charitable work with a lone cripple dressed in trench coat and fedora who shuffles painfully to his run-down apartment to remove a .45 automatic from the dresser drawer. An insert shot of Enley’s name and address provides something of a motive for the mission he embarks upon.

Robert Ryan and Janet Leigh in "Act of Violence" (1948) directed by Fred Zinnemann

Intercutting joins these two worlds until Parkson arrives in California, where he seems out of place (as upon his arrival he walks across the Memorial Day parade whose purpose in part is to celebrate the man he has come to kill). Enley hastens to a place that is transparently “other,” a paradoxical projection of Enley’s desires and his moral needs that exemplifies what Iser identifies as one of the most important characteristics of fictionality, the way in which it “becomes the epitome of inner-worldly totality, since it provides the paradoxical opportunity for human beings simultaneously to be in the midst of life and to overstep it”.

This doubleness is figured by the fact that Enley’s flight (he abandons both Parkson and Edith, thereby surrendering what anchors his self to the past and the present as well) actually moves him toward a reclamation of his true self, as he pays the price for his betrayal and simultaneously saves Parkson from having to commit murder.

From the uptown hotel, Enley hurries fearfully (and ever descending—one shot shows him stumbling down a huge flight of stairs) toward the dark side of the city, which seems a jumble of decaying factories, run-down tenements, and streets empty of passersby. As in the pastoral, the laying aside of identity (Enley here dons the mask of anonymity) leads him to what Iser calls the “counterimage . . . permitting what was excluded by reality,” as the world reshaped by the imagination allows the inner truth of the world imprisoned by mimesis to emerge.

Van Heflin as Frank R. Enley in "Act Of Violence", directed by Fred Zinnemann for MGM.

In this journey, imaged at a length far in excess of its importance to the narrative, the film engages with what Northrop Frye calls “the fabulous . . . something admitted not to be true” but which nonetheless possesses great significance. But it is also a place where “great rewards, of wisdom or wealth, may await the explorer,” even though, at its “structural core is the individual loss or confusion or break in the continuity of identity.” Even to the very end, Enley is liminal man, inhabiting the permeable border between past and present, between a self he has become and the self he would reclaim. -"The Divided Self and the Dark City: Film Noir and Liminality" (2007) by R. Barton Palmer