7.6.09: GILDA

GILDA (Columbia, 1946)

dir. Charles Vidor; starring Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready

Full disclosure: Gilda is my fourth favorite movie of all time, and my favorite noir. I'm going to cop out a little here and just use something I wrote about Gilda a few years back, since after re-watching it, I think it's still true. Before I do that, however, a quick note on something I thought about a little bit on previous viewings but really hit me this time:

This movie is full of audience surrogates. You have Uncle Pio, the lower-class bathroom attendant who watches and comments on anything. He categorizes, criticizes, editorializes. He always talks about how, to him “comes all the gossip,” and frequently and vocally enjoys watching the unfolding drama. He tells us that “the worm's-eye view is so often the true one,” and we do get the sense that he sees the drama in the way that only an audience member can, privy to every scummy detail. You also have the police detective, Obregon, who appears less often than Pio, but often says similar things about watching, enjoying the drama. It struck me odd to have two surrogates in this way, to have two characters who are not only external to the noir entanglements of the narrative, but actively observe and comment on them.

Even stranger is the ending, when these audience connections are corrupted, broken, betrayed. Pio suddenly sees Johnny Farrow, the conniving and manipulating protagonist, as a gentleman and a hero, rather than as the peasant Pio has called him throughout the film. Obregon appears as a deus ex machina, tying up all troubling loose ends and actively encouraging the heroes towards a happy ending. But we cannot truly see this as representing the audience's mind, can we? There is no way the audience can actually make the switch Pio does, suddenly believing in Johnny. There is no way we can actually, truly want a happy ending for the lovers as Obregon does, not if we understand what they are really like. The movie has constantly shown that anyone who claims to be “no past, all future” is lying, and yet our audience surrogate is telling the lovers that they can escape the past and live free. What are we to make of this?

Ultimately, this further cements my reactions to the ending of this film. Either it is brilliantly ironic and subversive, painting up a happy ending when, in fact, we are meant to see all these red flags telling us that it is a lie, a lie, and there is no joy here; or it is genuinely meant to be a happy ending, and represents one of the most disingenuous, simpering concession to Hollywood unreality in the entire noir canon. I cannot tell. I hope it is the first, but I cannot tell.

In order to really unpack why the ending is so troubling, I'll segue into my old writing to explain how Gilda gets where she is at the end. Essentially, Gilda is my favorite noir woman, hands down. She talks the talk, which in noir, is literally equivalent to walking the walk. Her mastery of noir tropes and style allows her to dominate the men in this male-dominated genre, causing permanent tension and instability as long as she exists in her natural state. The only way the movie can end the way is does is by subtly, subversively, and terrifying destroying everything that gives her real power:

As Gilda opens, the dominance of males over their surroundings is impossible to deny or ignore. The opening shot pans up to Johnny, pauses, and then pans further up to reveal that he is surrounded by men. Soon after, Ballin appears and saves his life. In the alleyway conversation that follows, there is immediately an understanding between the two of them. When Johnny claims that his assailant wouldn’t have killed him if Johnny had given him the money, Ballin replies, “But you wouldn’t have given him the money” (3:20). They have just met, but their status as men allows them a certain insight into what the other is thinking, an insight that allows the two of them to converse in double entendres and unsaid implications. Their talk of illegal casinos and making one’s own luck is indicative of noir discourse, in which the information transmitted is hidden between words rather than in them. The two of them smoke Ballin’s cigarettes lit by Johnny’s match, and a partnership is formed. At the casino itself, women coexist with men, but the attitude towards women in general is made explicitly clear by Uncle Pio when he informs that a woman in the crowd is “a harpy” (5:00). The woman is walking away from Johnny and remains faceless, allowing Pio’s condemnation to become universal. However, the male-female dynamic is solidified when Johnny agrees to work for Ballin, telling Ballin that he’ll be “faithful and obedient” (12:22). In direct response to this, Ballin asks if there is any woman in his life, claiming that “gambling and women do not mix” (12:36). However, the implicit meaning of this is that women do not only compromise gambling but also the faithfulness and obedience of men towards other men.

However, despite Ballin’s insistence to Johnny that there be no women to interfere with their relationship, it is Ballin who soon afterwards brings Gilda into the picture. In Gilda’s first scene, she is undeniably a threat to Johnny, only willing to approach him with a lit cigarette in hand. As Ballin and Johnny speak to each other, the camera frames Gilda for a moment as her false smile fades and she slowly breathes smoke in Johnny’s direction. From this moment onwards, Gilda is coded as a capable player in the world of noir, both in her mastery over the noir trope of cigarettes and the ability to switch between public and private emotions in an instant. This latter ability is one of the main elements of Gilda’s personality that makes her dangerous to Johnny, as he later refers to Ballin’s sword-cane as a woman “because it looks like one thing and then right in front of your eyes it becomes another thing” (25:50). Although Ballin takes this as a sign of instability, Gilda’s ability to manipulate the way she appears to the world gives her strength. This strength is seen in her very first scene, when for nearly two straight minutes, Johnny and Gilda do not break eye contact, even when Ballin walks directly in front of them. Although Gilda is cloaked in sexuality and femininity, her strength matches that of Johnny.

She proceeds to challenge Johnny’s masculinity, telling Ballin to tell Johnny to come to dinner, which even Ballin can see is less of a request and more an order. Finally, she refers to Johnny as “the hired help” (18:45), the comment that finally forces Johnny to break away from her gaze. Later on, Gilda calls Johnny both “beautiful” (24:56) and “very pretty in your nightgown” (50:50). During the casino’s carnival party, Johnny’s power over the arrangements is nothing compared to Gilda, as Pio explains that it is her party, “all the way. She has changes the decorations, she has changed the orchestra, it isn’t too much to think that she will change…” (58:09), implying that she will change Johnny, forcing the male image to be shaped by the female will rather than vice versa. Throughout the film, Gilda’s comments about his social status pains him even more than when Uncle Pio calls him a peasant, since Gilda’s comments are more than just petty insults; they threaten to overwhelm his masculinity by asserting feminine power over his world.

Over the course of the film’s first half, Gilda is a true femme fatale, displaying a number of traits that she shares with typical male noir heroes. These traits are what allow her to maintain a degree of control over her own fate, since by understanding the rules of noir, she can exploit the world of noir. Most notable is her outward disdain for love and marriage, as she dances and stays out all night with other men while telling Ballin she loves him, maintaining her ability to switch personas as it suits her. When Johnny intercepts one of her dates, he tells Gilda that she must tell Ballin that she went a picture show by herself that night. Gilda, fully immersed in noir vocabulary at this point, glibly replies, “Really? Would you like to know whether I enjoyed it?” (47:00) Far from intimidated by Johnny, she makes use of the same double entendres and implications as Johnny and Ballin. Her mastery over language allows her to keep her thoughts hidden, better than even Johnny can, as she replies to his comparison between her and Ballin’s laundry by telling him that his “thought associations are very revealing” (47:48). Also, before the party, she reformulates Maria’s explanation of carnival, saying “In other words, make hay while the sun shines” (61:18). Maria calls attention to her phraseology, calling it a “strange language” (61:22), but the moment also recalls an earlier scene between Johnny and Ballin, in which the two men repeat the phrase, “In other words, you’ve/I’ve changed the subject” (24:43). Gilda also knows how to change words, and like the other men in the picture, Gilda is able to pick up the meaning hiding between words.

Versed in noir language and conventions, Gilda poses a significant enough threat that the other men all recognize the danger she poses. Even the police officer, who theoretically qualifies as the main antagonist in the conspiracy/anti-trust plot, agrees that “women can be extremely annoying” (27:41). Ballin, when informing Johnny of his plot for world domination, asks Johnny, “You are on my side, Johnny?” (44:10) When Johnny confirms his loyalty, Ballin replied, “And Gilda?... Women are funny little creatures, Johnny” (44:13). Johnny keeps telling himself that his hatred for Gilda is in the defense of Ballin, and that “all his plans, all his dreams of greatness would be wrecked because of what she was doing to him… I had to get rid of her, for him” (72:27). However, Gilda’s analysis of his laundry simile reveals to the audience that his hatred is due to the way she makes him feel. His attraction to her makes him disloyal to Ballin, which makes him hate himself as well as Gilda. He hates Gilda because of the danger she poses to male unity. What allows Gilda to keep her strength despite the collective suspicion of men is her total awareness of the hate directed towards her. She even invites the hatred upon herself, toasting herself as the woman of Johnny’s past and saying “let’s hate her” (26:10) and even “disaster to the wench” (31:54). Her repeated performances of “Put the Blame on Mame” support this ironic invitation of hatred. Perhaps the reason that she is able to handle the hate directed towards her is because of the hatred she herself feels for Johnny, telling him that “I hate you so much, I would destroy myself to take you down with me” (53:10). This self-destructive impulse that Gilda displays by inviting hate while simultaneously wallowing in it only serves to make her more typical of noir protagonists.

If a large part of Gilda’s power lies in her knowledge of noir language and attitude, it is only fitting that the threat she poses to men diminishes when she indulges in romantic language and attitude. When she and Johnny dance at the carnival, she tells him “as long as I have my arms around you, I have to keep talking, or I might forget to dance, Johnny” (64:21). As the dance continues, she very clearly tries to seduce him, and Johnny begins to relent, despite his hatred for her. Her romantic language makes her more appealing to him as it maintains her femininity without reminding him of her strength. However, when she return to the language of double entendres, telling him that she “could help [Johnny] get in practice again… dancing, I mean” (65:06), Johnny pushes her away, repulsed. However, after Ballin’s departure, Gilda’s romantic side takes full control of her persona. As a result, she loses her knowledge of noir mentality, and when Johnny asks her what kind of a guy she thinks he is, she replies, “I don’t think anyone really knows that but me, Johnny. Not even you” (79:02), an assessment quickly proved to be completely wrong. Because she has abandoned her hate, she also abandons all the qualities that made her a femme fatale, including her resistance to the hatred of men and her ability to know what men are thinking. Even Johnny recognizes that “she didn’t know then what was happening to her. She didn’t know then that what she heard was the door closing on her own cage” (80:24). Johnny removes her agency by making her a literal prisoner to him and a figurative prisoner to Ballin’s memory.

In Gilda’s broken state, her domestication strips her of the power she once held. Contrary to her opening scene, when she approached Johnny with a cigarette lit by her own hand, Johnny stands still with a lighter, forcing her to come to him so he can light it. Moreover, Johnny will not even give her the dignity of being told outright that she is a prisoner, but forces her to “swallow her pride” (82:47) and come to Johnny for an explanation, a moral victory for Johnny that he calls “wonderful” (82:51). Even when she tries to escape Johnny, “Put the Blame on Mame” is replaced with another musical number about love, and she meets another man. Predictably, this romantic escape is an impotent failure, and Johnny’s lawyer tells her that “wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tied to [Johnny]” (90:27). She is shocked when the lawyer betrays her to Johnny, as her romantic persona cannot understand that men are loyal to men first, even if it means betraying a woman. In fact, it is this loyalty between men that provides Johnny with a justification for his treatment of her, as he wants Gilda to repent for hurting not just him, but Ballin and all the other anonymous men she has hurt. She is imprisoned for the crime of breaking men’s hearts, and Johnny is there to uphold justice for all his fellow wronged males.

This dismal state seems ill-suited to a happy ending, but the final scene of the film includes a number of moments that prepare the film for such an ending by erasing Gilda’s previous power, thus making her deserving of happiness. In the end, the police officer pursuing Johnny admits the irrelevance of his own plotline, telling Johnny, “you didn’t hear a word of it, did you? All you could think about what the way Gilda looked at you when you struck her” (98:17). He later assured Johnny that “Gilda didn’t do any of those things you’ve been losing sleep over… It was just an act” (100:13). This retroactively claims that Gilda’s romantic side was always her true one. Gilda herself seems to rewrite history, telling Johnny “no one has to apologize, because we were both such stinkers” (102:28), when, at least in the events of the film itself, Johnny has clearly treated her much worse she has him. The film seems to openly acknowledge these odd reversals when Uncle Pio insistently refers to Johnny as “the gentleman I always said he was” (104:53). With Johnny and Gilda’s sin seemingly erased, they walk off arm in arm, and if Pio’s claim that “all bad things end up lonely” (101:30) is true, then Gilda cannot be bad in the film’s eyes. However, the Gilda of the first half of the film could never have deserved this happiness. Despite the film’s apparent sympathy for her misery under Johnny’s subjugation, it nevertheless makes the claim that only the domesticated, romantic Gilda can be allowed happiness by the men around her.

7.1.09: STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR

STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR (1940, RKO)

dir. Boris Ingster; starring John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, Peter Lorre

Having never heard of the film before, I was surprised to read that Stranger on the Third Floor is, apparently, generally accepted as the first film noir, as it is defined in the classic sense. However, after watching this surprisingly short film, clocking in at only 64 minutes, it’s a pretty compelling argument. The film not only possessed most of the critical elements of noir, but it serves as something of a transition from mainstream American filmmaking of the period into – but, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The movie, as with most noirs, features a plot that is neither particularly interesting nor important, so we won’t spend too much time on that yet. Better to begin with, well, the beginning: the opening shot. After the RKO boilerplate, the first shot is of the entrance to an apartment building, which the camera pauses on for only a moment before swiftly racing up to a third-story window. At this window is the silhouette of a man behind the curtain, and superimposed upon it is the title of the film.

(It is here I will freely admit my sick tendency to over-analyze, to ferret out every possible metaphor and device in the hopes of finding the one legitimate one by pure process of saturation.)

This shot already serves as an in-between place, a transition. It is at once the classic Title Card, a device long since abandoned in our day but for the pastiches and homages, and our first shadow of the film. Man is represented by darkness, before there is a single word of dialogue; darkness smoking a cigarette, no less. Furthermore, in this first shot of the city apartment building, we have already exposed the urban backdrop that serves as the setting for pure noir. The rapid climb to the third floor establishes the vertical topography of the city, cramming everything so tightly together that the only place to grow is up. The vertical shape of the city not only emphasizes the claustrophobia of urban life, but it will aid noir photography as well; this film, as do countless other noirs, will feature harsh, diagonal angles up and down long stairwells. The altitudes of the city afford the noir style extremely exaggerated shots, a device that will eventually be taken to its extreme years later in Hitchcock’s psycho-noir, Vertigo (1958).

But enough about the first three seconds of film. Despite my obsessive over-analysis, the rest of this opening is actually very un-noir. Curly-cue title scripts, pleasant major-key music, and even the smoking silhouette turns to a silhouette of a man typing, and then making a phone call. Low on intrigue, to be sure. As it continues, any real scrap of noir style is all but invisible. Our main characters are sweet, and their banter is pretty weak. Jane is no femme fatale, Mike is a reporter who always has the same thing for breakfast every day at the same diner.

Our next noir element seeps in slowly. While there are many elements of noir storytelling that get used all the time as examples of the typical style (betrayal, complex twists, etc.), one that I rarely hear people talking about is the extensive, almost universal use of backstory. Often, the most important events in a noir are ones that have happened before the film begins. As this month goes on, we will see more and more that the past is viewed as oppressive, irreversible, inescapable. No matter how pure our characters may be, there is something in their past that will catch them and find them out. In Stranger, our placid diner scene already makes reference to Mike being the star witness in a murder trial, the murder of a man named Nick, a murder his fiancée Jane wishes he had never discovered. It will be a little while until we discover the details of this backstory, but there is already a sense that we have arrived in the middle of intrigue. Things are already complicated.

Later, we see the aforementioned trial, in which a young man, Joe Briggs, is being tried for the murder of Nick, who we learn was the prior owner of Mike and Jane’s usual diner. The boy is pitiful, wide open eyes, slack jawed with terror and weakness. He is no murderer, but we watch as he is strung up by Mike’s well-meaning but circumstantial witness account. It is interesting to see that we begin in a courtroom, a place generally accepted as the end of a crime. In another form, the courtroom is where all story points and characters may be gathered together to form a complete picture, to suss out who is right and who is wrong, and to end the movie justly. This, quite simply, is not that. The courtroom is our beginning, not our conclusion. The law is not a force to tie up a complicated story; the law is what complicates a simple life. It is here in the house of law that all terrors and paranoias of the film begin.

Certainly, as we watch the scene, it is clear that this is not a court we should expect to heal and cure. The judge is not paying attention. A juror falls asleep. The public defender barely tries. If there is safety and security in the world of noir, it is not to be found in the laws of man. This begins to settle on the mind of Mike Ward as he watches Briggs, sentenced to death, get dragged away as he screams out to Mike for help. As his cries fade away, Mike’s eyes (and ours) are dragged up to the shadowy figure of blind Justice that looms above, terrifying chords sounding as we zoom in on her scales.

In the scenes that follow, shadows begin to seep into the film. Mike and Jane talk on the phone about the trauma of the trial, each shrouded in darkness. As Mike leaves his courtroom news office for the night, he passes by the empty courtroom, where Justice once again towers over everything, exaggerated shadows harshly thrown, as Briggs’ screams of innocence echo once more. This shot triggers, 16 and a half minutes in, the first appearance of the inner monologue, another classic noir device. The monologue runs as Mike walks through the city streets on his way home, running over the trial in his mind. It is here we see that the noir is not the detective story. We do not care about clues and evidence and procedure. It is about the inner life, the endless doubts and cynicisms and questions that rattle inside a man’s mind. He arrives home, head full of thoughts, to find a strange, quiet man sitting on the front steps to his boarding house.

Now. Let’s talk about Peter Lorre.

He is a man that defines the unsettling, unnerving Other of the noir. The way he does not quite touch his hat when he greets Mike on the stoop. The way he does not quite smile. The way he does not quite focus his eyes on anything. He cannot be pinned down. He does not even speak. Why is he there? Who is he? There can be no answers to these questions now. He scares us and we do not know why. And, as if he is the literal signifier of noir, some insubstantial angel of the shadows, once he arrives, the movie is no longer a transitional piece. It is no longer a mainstream story with hints of cynicism. We are in noir. Mike walks up the stairs to his third-story room, commenting on “what a gloomy dump” it is, wishing they’d put in a bigger lamp. He passes by his snoring, obnoxious neighbor, Meng, about whom we are soon treated to more backstory flashbacks.

When Mike sees the stranger disappear into Meng’s apartment, he hides in the shadows to watch. Soon, the door opens, and the stranger’s hand slowly creeps out. It is so stylized, neither literal and realistic nor 40’s Hollywood approximation of literal and realistic. This is something alien. His shadow is cast on the wall. All is sharp light and engulfing darkness, a world of contrast. Mike chases him down the stairs, asking him all the questions we are. There is no response. Suddenly, the stranger whirls around and glares up at him, up at us. It is malice, untempered by motive or narrative. It is no surprise that Mike stops dead in his tracks, horrified. Once out the door, the stranger has disappeared.

Mike goes back to his room, but he is infected now. Once Peter Lorre enters your story, you cannot go back to a Hollywood romance. He presses himself against the wall in a contorted pose, the stylized expressions of noir having taken over. It is hard not to see why critics of the time derided this film as derivative of German contemporaries, but it is a beautiful synthesis of the Hollywood straightman and the alien angles of expressionism.

Paranoia takes over. Meng is not snoring. Is he dead? Mike cannot investigate, they will think he has done it. Fingerprints! Motives! More memories take over, all the times he threatened Meng, how many people knew he hated Meng. He remembers a night in the diner, Meng passing through while Mike eats a late dinner with a colleague. Mike asks his coworker, “Did you ever want to kill a man?” His friend deadpans back a line that could very well be the slogan for all noirs everywhere:

“My son, there's murder in every intelligent man's heart."

So there is.

As the camera angles twist and tilt more and more, Mike’s paranoia sends him into a dream, full of oppressive close-ups, shrieks and swirls, flames, phantom voices. He is found out, he is arrested, he is convicted! His prison bench sits in a room without ceiling or walls, just a void with shadows behind and shadows below, his terror reduced to the merest suggestions and shapes of his unjust punishment. In the dreamcourt, the statue of Justice is back, a pure shadow now, silhouetted above the court. As Mike screams to the sleeping jury and the hard-hearted judge, the same sinister stranger crawls over endless rows of chairs, creeping closer and closer. The judge sentences him to death, and as Mike watches, the judge transforms into an enormous statue of Justice, her scales unbalanced, her sword become a scythe. In noir, there is no glory in justice, nor in crime. There is no solution, no escape, no sympathy. The shadows are not something to hide in, they are something to consume a sane man’s mind. Even the sweet-hearted Briggs is back in the dream, his face twisted in rage, screaming “Ok kid, go and die!”

Mike wakes, and discovers that Meng is indeed dead. After a moment of panic, he is persuaded by Jane to go to the forces of law, to tell the pure truth and trust in the objective nature of the law. Is this a noir? Of course it is. Of course he is arrested for this offering of trust. Jane trawls the city, searching for the stranger, the man the police will not hunt down now that they have a suspect, a man who might not have committed the crime, but who may as well have. Jane, in her most noir act, immerses herself in the city, but to no avail. It is purely by accident that, while drinking coffee at the diner, the stranger appears in her life, first as only a hand and, for the first time in 55 minutes, a voice appearing from off-screen. He order two raw hamburgers, his voice as soft, unfocused, and unsettling as everything else about him.

Jane follows him out, strikes up a conversation, persuades him to “walk her home.” He displays sudden bursts of speed and anger to contrast his slow, unfocused stupor. He is not just one kind of terrifying, that would make him too easy to define, to pin down. He can be all of our nightmares. When Jane brings up the murders, he whirls on her, asking if “they” sent her to take him back to “the people who lock you up… they put you in a shirt with long sleeves and they pour ice water on you.” Nick, the dead diner owner, and Meng, he says they wanted to send him back. He had to kill him. We see here that there is no great reveal, no clues that lead to a perfect solution. There is no calculated revenge to be exacted here, and no revealing monologue of meticulous planning. The killings are the result of pure madness, simple insanity. How can we convince ourselves not to be terrified of this? What artificial constructs of law or logic can we invent to protect ourselves from this idea? We are naked and alone, no one will help Jane and answer our screams. Interestingly, even as he attacks Jane, we never see the knife the stranger uses. Noir is not occupied so much with violence, but with the ever-present threat of violence. We cannot shield ourselves from even the thought of death.

In the end, the stranger is killed by a truck, unable to stop in time as he runs out in front of it while in pursuit of Jane. His death is as meaningless and random as his crimes. We get the sense that this was our only chance of ending his terror, that no purposeful plot concocted by sane men could have stopped him. Our only chance was, well, chance. This is not justice. With his dying breath, the stranger confesses to the crimes, but with his last words, dispels any hopes of this being a pat, perfect ending. He looks up with those unfocused eyes, and says,

“I’m not going back.”

And he isn’t. His specter of fear has been let out of its cage, and there is no way to see the city as a safe place again. Sure, the movie can tack on its seventy-second ending, with the happy couple going off to get married, the free Briggs giving them a free taxi ride to City Hall. But this is a lie. Noir is here. No one is safe. Peter Lorre is not going back.

Subsequent write-ups will most likely not be anywhere near this long. But we’ll see