(This essay originally appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Noir City)
There are no lesbians in classic film noir, and the reason for this is quite simple. Lesbians didn’t exist back then.
Well, they didn’t “officially” exist. Sure, there were places in L.A. that catered to the all-girl set, upscale nightclubs like Tess’s Café Internationale and middle-class bars like the If Club and the Paradise Club. Actresses such as Margaret Lindsay (SCARLET STREET), Ona Munson (THE RED HOUSE), and Patsy Kelly (THE NAKED KISS) either lived openly with their partners or carried on affairs with other women while hidden behind “lavender marriages” to gay men. And rumors swirled about big name stars like Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lizabeth Scott. On the nation’s screens, however, lesbians didn’t even rate the kind of offensive portrayals accorded to other minorities. According to the Hays Code, absolutely no manner of “sex perversion” was permitted onscreen—a rule so ironclad that not even the implication of homosexuality was permissible. In the culture at large, moreover, homosexuality was rarely if ever spoken about in the open. It wasn’t that people were in the closet—it’s that the closet wasn’t even supposed to exist.
So there are no lesbians in noir. Implications, however, are funny things. After all, what implies homosexuality and what doesn’t—or more importantly, what implied homosexuality in 1947? Because film is primarily a visual medium, images carry information before it is transferred through dialog or stated in exposition. As Josef von Sternberg (no stranger to weaving lesbian inferences into his films) said, “Each picture transliterates a thousand words.” To put it somewhat differently, we read the pictures that flicker on the screen. Through the images and actions presented to us we read characters as good or bad, trustworthy or diabolical. And we read some images as straight and some as queer. When Bogart sniffs Peter Lorre’s perfumed business card and raises his eyebrows in THE MALTESE FALCON, we’re invited to infer a meaning about the effete little man that the censors would never have allowed to be stated outright. As it happens, though, nearly everyone who’s ever seen the film has assumed that Joel Cairo is gay. The figure of the slightly comic gay villain pops up occasionally in noir, as he did in the hardboiled fiction that preceded it in the twenties and thirties.
Lesbianism, however, comes to us through slightly different signifiers. Unlike male homosexuality in noir, which was denoted by a broad femininity in men, lesbianism was signified not just by female-masculinity but by a complex contempt for femininity itself. While implied lesbians were almost exclusively represented as villains, they were seldom objects of comic derision. Lesbians were always presented as far more threatening, their masculinity an implicit threat to the male hegemony of the social order.
THE BUTCH FATALE
Consider noir’s chief lesbian villain, Hope Emerson. At 6’2” and 230 pounds, Emerson not only dwarfed all her female costars she also loomed over most of her leading men as well. With a large forehead, thick jowls, and a long beaked nose, Emerson looked like a heavy, and Hollywood, being Hollywood, quickly cast her in a series of violent, sexually ambiguous roles.
Born in Iowa in 1897, Emerson was an unlikely candidate for the role of Hollywood bad guy. A comic by nature and training, she started out in vaudeville playing piano and swapping jokes in a comedy team with her mother, Josie. She toured stages all around the country, working with funnyman Billy House and serving for a while as the sidekick to a sham mystic, a la NIGHTMARE ALLEY. By the thirties, she’d made it to the stages and radios of New York City, stealing the show in productions like LYSISTRATA (playing an Amazon) and the hillbilly musical SWING YOUR LADY. To help pay the bills in between gigs, she worked the New York nightclub circuit, singing risqué tunes for largely gay crowds at clubs like Fifth Avenue One in Greenwich Village.
Then in the late forties, Emerson went out to Hollywood and became a villain. Her first role in a major production was as the hulking masseuse Rose Given in Siodmak’s CRY OF THE CITY. Her first appearance in the film is unforgettable: walking through a house in the middle of the night, turning on lights in each successive room, she grows ever larger as she approaches the camera. She towers over her 5’8” costar, Richard Conte. He’s Martin Rome, an escaped convict and smooth-talking ladies man who has easily manipulated every other woman in the film. He’s come to Rose Given for help retrieving some stolen jewels, and he begins flirting with her almost immediately. When she offers him a back rub, his flirtations seem to have worked.
Rose is different from the other women in the film, though. As her hands move up his back, he rolls his eyes in pleasure. Yet her banter grows odd. She talks about fat old women trying to stave off age with money and jewelry, and then she clamps down on his throat and his entire neck disappears between her huge mitts. The woman’s threat to the man here has nothing to do with sex or seduction, it’s purely violent. Like some kind of female Mike Mazurki, she looks as if she could pop off his head like a champagne cork. The scene is the rare example in film noir—indeed in all classic film—of a woman terrorizing a man with her bare hands.
It’s the blurring of lines between the traditional representations of masculinity and femininity—and their corresponding relationship to dominance and passivity—that marks the scene as a queer moment. Rose Given isn’t a femme fatale. She’s a butch fatale. In noir’s milieu of male anxiety, the butch holds a special place. Her threat to the male isn’t based on a feminine manipulation of male sexual desire but rather through the usurpation of his role as the dominant masculine presence.
In Nicholas Ray’s IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) we have the curious figure of Martha (Ruth Gillette) the husky-voiced butch masseuse who hovers over naked Laurel Gray (Gloria Graham), rubbing her too hard while poking into her private life. After Laurel fires her for badmouthing boyfriend Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart), Martha snaps, “I’ll get out, Angel, but you’ll beg me to come back when you’re in trouble. You will, Angel, because you don’t have anybody else.” These could easily be the words of a spurned lover, and Martha’s jealous assertion that Laurel will crawl back to her when things go wrong, it should be noted, turns out to be right. Once she becomes afraid of Dix, Laurel does indeed call Martha first—a strong suggestion that Martha fills the masculine void whenever Laurel is between men. Dix seems to intuit this when he jealously intercepts a phone call from Martha meant for Laurel.
The butch fatale wasn’t merely a danger to the male ego, however. Most of the time she was seen as a sexualized threat to the female. This was never more apparent than the women-in-prison film, the butch equivalent of the classic studio “woman’s picture.”
In a deftly argued essay in the last issue of the NOIR CITY SENTINEL, Alan K. Rode sought to rescue the classic 1950 women-in-prison picture, CAGED from the misapplied label of camp and restore it to its rightful place among the very best noirs of the period. One factor that necessitated Rode’s essay is the film’s lesbian overtones—and the assumption in some quarters that homosexuality automatically equals camp (which might account for why the film was released as a “camp classic” in the first place).
No, CAGED is not camp. But it is queer. Again we find the colossal figure of Hope Emerson, here starring as Evelyn Harper, a sadistic prison matron who taunts and tortures the “tramps” unlucky enough to be incarcerated under her watch. Locked into an ideological battle with the spinsterish warden played by Agnes Moorehead (herself a decidedly queer figure), Miss Harper is a sadistic monster. But her conflicts with the inmates have a kinky quality. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, Miss Harper, dressed up for an evening on the town with a man she says is waiting for her outside, preens in front of the inmates. We never see this man, nor is he ever referred to again. Did Miss Harper walk outside the prison and catch the bus home alone? Given what we know of her character, that would make more sense than the romantic scenario Harper outlines for the girls. In her book FEMALE MASCULINITY, cultural critic Judith Halberstam notes that Harper “indulges herself in ‘feminine comforts’…not, one feels, for the pleasure she gains from femininity but because femininity is what is denied to the inmates.”
Indeed, the central drama of CAGED is a prolonged attack on the femininity of the main character, Marie Allen (played by Eleanor Parker). She’s warned by Moorehead at the beginning of the film, “You’ll find all kinds of women in here.” She’s appraised by another inmate, a glamorous butch vice queen played by Lee Patrick, who looks her up and down and calls her “a cute trick.” Near the end of film, Marie finally snaps and attacks Miss Harper, a fight in which the matron’s uniform is ripped and her undergarments are exposed. Once Marie has been subdued, Harper, with her scratches and bra strap still visible, drags the inmate downstairs and shaves her head—a chilling scene that has long been read by critics as a symbolic rape.
Emerson’s butch villain in CAGED is offset, however, by the sympathetic treatment of another of the film’s butch characters, an inmate named Kitty Stark. Played with wonderful understatement by Betty Garde, Kitty first appears as a menacing force. Block-shouldered and short-haired, she arrives in the film trailed by two slightly more femme sidekicks (Jan Sterling and Joan Miller). She’s given a dead husband and snatches of dialog to provide the requisite heterosexual cover, but Kitty Stark is as butch as they come. Near the middle of the film, as she and Marie lie together on a cot—Marie on her back, Kitty propped up on an elbow gazing down at her—Kitty coos, “If you stay in here too long, you don’t think about guys at all. You just…get out of the habit.” Things will turn out hard for Kitty—after an altercation with Harper she’ll become a tragic figure. Yet in some ways she emerges as a hero at the end. In a fitting piece of irony, she’s also the one who finally takes care of the dreaded Harper, butch to butch.
The sexually repressed butch prison guard found her most psychopathic expression a few years later in 1955’s WOMEN’S PRISON. The film stars a steely Ida Lupino as warden Amelia van Zandt, an authoritarian so frigid and heartless that repressed lesbianism seems to have transmogrified completely into psychosexual-sadism. The film is overly simplistic, even by the conventions of the women in prison film, but with this performance, Lupino pretty much wrote the book on how you pull off the she’s-so-repressed-she’s-sexy pulp lesbian archetype. A coldly beautiful short-haired woman with no family who beats one of her inmates for getting pregnant…that’s a barely concealed subtext.
Within a few years, the lesbian subtext would begin forcing its way into the text of films.
(UN)BOUND…MORE OR LESS
By the late fifties, Hollywood was lagging behind the publishing world, where lesbian potboilers had become a powerful fixture of paperback imprints like Gold Medal Books. Tereska Torres sold 2 million copies of her autobiographical WOMEN’S BARRACKS in 1950, while Marijane Meaker published the first lesbian pulp novel SPRING FIRE under the name Vin Packer in 1952. When that book sold an astounding 1.5 million copies, lesbian pulp poured out by writers like Meaker’s lover Patricia Highsmith (THE PRICE OF SALT), Ann Bannon (ODD GIRL OUT) and Valerie Taylor (THE GIRLS IN 3-B). None of this success translated into representation in Hollywood films, but during the fifties and sixties, lesbian characters became more obvious, if not necessarily more sympathetic.
Orson Welles contributed a gruesome addition to the pantheon of noir lesbians with his inclusion of Mercedes McCambridge in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958). McCambridge had already issued her performance as Emma Small in Nicholas Ray’s 1954 Sapphic shoot ‘em up, JOHNNY GUITAR. As with everything else in TOUCH OF EVIL, however, Welles took the butch archetype one step further. When Janet Leigh is cornered in a seedy hotel room by a group of junkies, the threat of gang rape is made all the more real when a door opens and a short-haired, leather-wearing McCambridge creeps in. When the leader of the gang tells her to leave, McCambridge grunts, “Lemme stay. I want to watch.” This is followed by a close-up of the leader licking his lips and ordering his thugs to grab Janet Leigh and, “Hold her legs.” The presence of the butch hoodlum in a scene designed to infer a sexual assault is as explicit as Welles could be in 1958. The scene is hardly a shining moment in the history of lesbian representation in American film, but it is the most overt moment since a tuxedo-wearing Marlene Dietrich kissed a girl in MOROCCO.
Lesbianism would finally make it into the text of films in the sixties with William Wyler’s THE CHILDREN’S HOUR (1961) and Robert Aldrich’s THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE (1968). It’s purest noir incarnation, however, might well have been Edward Dmytryk’s WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (1962). Here, Barbara Stanwyck plays Jo Courtney, a New Orleans madam who is obsessed with one of her working girls, Hallie Gerard (the French actress Capucine). The movie is supposed to be the story of Hallie’s star-crossed love affair with a romantic drifter named Dove Linkhorn (played by a bored-looking Laurence Harvey), but this bland relationship is overshadowed by Jo’s fixation on Hallie.
Of course the L-word is never used, but the script gives Jo an uncommonly frank obsession with Hallie, keeping her in a room above the brothel so the younger woman can lounge and drink and make ghoulish sculptures of the madam. Hallie is unhappy living like this, but Jo won’t let her leave. When Dove tries to take Hallie away, Jo has him beaten up and framed for statutory rape. WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, while presenting Jo as the film’s antagonist, does at least humanize her to the extent that it allows her a genuine emotional stake in the drama. She’s the bad guy here, but there is no doubt that she loves Hallie. Moreover, since Harvey and Capucine lack any chemistry, Jo and Hallie become the de facto center of the film.
The script gives Jo a husband, of course, a self-hating amputee played by Karl Swenson. She treats him like a nonentity, and when he’s excited to find that Hallie might be leaving, Jo snaps, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Stanwyck gives a performance that moves between cool calculation and uncontrollable rage. It’s one of the actress’s most interesting parts, and Stanwyck plays it like she means it, as when she tells Swenson, “Don’t talk to me about love! What do you know? What does any man know?”
WALK ON THE WILD SIDE is a flawed film in many ways, but it did nudge the closet door open. In the decades that followed, neo-noir would become more comfortable with lesbian text and subtext, and films like BASIC INSTINCT, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, and THE BLACK DAHLIA dealt with lesbian or bisexual female characters with varying degrees of success and intelligence.
The main lesbian duo in neo-noir, however, are the protagonists of BOUND (1996). Here the butch-femme dynamic is allowed to occupy the center of the film, a privileged space in which the heroes, butch Corky (Gina Gershon) and femme Violet (Jennifer Tilly) attempt to steal millions of dollars from a gangster played by Joe Pantoliano. The lesbianism of the characters is in no way downplayed or obscured, but neither is it much remarked upon outside of the set-up of the film. The plot could be easily be about a man and a woman—indeed, noir is rife with variations on this very premise. Once the story starts to twist and turn, the sexuality of the characters becomes a simple fact. Since this is a crime thriller and not a drama about sexual identity, that’s as it should be. BOUND’s lasting contribution to noir is that it finally gives us a lesbian couple that is formed and tested along the conventional genre-lines usually reserved for straight couples.
Throughout much of the classic period of noir, the lesbian represented a danger to the social order, to male privilege in particular and to heterosexual stability in general. The misogyny and heterosexism implicit in these representations speak volumes about the anxieties surrounding shifting gender norms in post-war America, but they tell us little or nothing about the gay subculture that was alive and well at the time. The first lesbian rights organization, Daughters of Bilitis, was founded in 1955, and lesbians had been working in Hollywood from the beginning, from director Dorothy Arzner to legendary costume designer Edith Head, though most kept their love lives—and by extension their subculture—secret. The veil of history is simply the beginning when trying to piece together the record of gay culture. Someone like Hope Emerson, who never married and left most of her estate to the woman she lived with the last years of her life, is often claimed by authors of gay history as a lesbian, but gay history is almost by definition a mystery without a solution, the search for artifacts of a culture that wasn’t supposed to exist. While Hollywood films are inexact time capsules—history refracted by artistic interpretation and commercial imperative—they do give us some idea of how this culture began to stir in the mainstream consciousness during the middle of the twentieth century. It wasn’t always pretty, but then again history never is.
