This weekend Noir City Chicago kicks off at the Music Box Theater with two of my favorite films: TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949) starring Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea, and ROADBLOCK (1950) starring Joan Dixon and Charles McGraw.
I've written about both of these films on this blog (here and here), and I'd like to reprint an essay I posted here a few years ago that celebrates Lizabeth Scott and Joan Dixon.
Here's "The Altars of Forgotten Women":
One of the ironies of
film noir is that many of its lasting icons were never stars in their lifetime.
More than any other genre, stardom in noir is retroactive. Someone like Ann
Savage had only the most fleeting taste of fame in her youth before Hollywood
showed her the door. Yet, Savage was one the lucky people who lived to see her
fame catch up to her. A cheap little sixty-five minute crime picture called
DETOUR—a picture Savage appears in for all of thirty minutes—somehow endured
and prospered over the years. Savage was in her sixties and working as a
secretary when she discovered that she was at the center of a cult.
Savage’s cult is just
a faction of something larger called film noir, which is, among other things,
largely a cult of forgotten women. Savage was not alone in finding herself as
an object of worship. Within this convocation there are many different sects,
sects with passionately devoted followers. Actors like Audrey Totter, Marie
Windsor, Evelyn Keyes, and Janis Carter all have legions of admirers. None of
them were really stars in their day, but their movies have a life all their
own. Long after their careers fizzled out, sometimes after their own deaths,
some actors finally became stars. That just about defines the word bittersweet.
Of course, major stars
like Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland experience a similar life after death
effect, and a select few even seem to reach beyond mere stardom and become a
part of the larger shared consciousness of society. You could argue, at this
point in Western culture, that Marilyn Monroe is nearly as iconic as the Virgin
Mary.
Yet film noir is a
genre born out of B-movie obscurity. Lizabeth Scott will never be as
famous as Marilyn Monroe, but she is the ruler of her own dark little corner of
Dreamtown because is the woman who most deserves the title of Queen of Noir.
She starred in more film noirs than nearly anyone else, and she was also unique
in that her filmography consists mostly of noirs. She only made a handful of
movies that didn’t involve people betraying each other and ending up gutshot at
the end. She played the entire range of characters available to women in the
genre, from doe-eyed innocents (THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS, THE COMPANY
SHE KEEPS) to world-weary lounge singers (DARK CITY, I WALK ALONE) to
cold-blooded femme fatales (STOLEN FACE). She starred in one of the genre’s
real lowlights, the misogynistic DEAD RECKONING. She starred in what maybe the
campiest noir ever made, the hilarious DESERT FURY. Most importantly, she
starred in two of the finest noirs we have, Andre De Toth’s 1948 PITFALL and
Byron Haskin’s 1949 TOO LATE FOR TEARS.
To understand the
appeal of Liz Scott, one only need to look at those last two films. In the
first, she plays a woman named Mona Stevens who falls into an affair with a
married man played by Dick Powell. Their affair is discovered by a psychotic
private detective (played by Raymond Burr) who is obsessed with Mona and
proceeds to make life hell for everyone involved. The cast here is superb, and
at the center , in a performance of great sympathy, is Queen Liz. She makes
Mona a sexy woman (which must have been fairly easy since Scott herself was
gorgeous, blonde, and had a voice that was equal parts cigarettes and silk),
but she also makes Mona a sad woman. Loneliness is the undercurrent of Scott's
voice, the thing that pulls you further down into her trap. Even when she’s
happy, you can tell that Scott is afraid of the worst. In PITFALL, she
pretty much gets the worst at the hands of thoughtless men.
In TOO LATE FOR
TEARS, she gets her revenge. As housewife turned criminal Jane Palmer, Scott
creates a portrait of coolheaded evil. Jane and her husband Alan (Arthur
Kennedy) are driving home one night when someone tosses a briefcase full of
money into their car. Is the money a payment for a ransom? Perhaps a blackmail
payoff? Alan doesn’t care, he just wants to turn the money over to the cops.
His wife, ah, disagrees. She’s willing to do anything to keep the cash, even
after slimy crook Dan Duryea shows up looking for it and slaps her around.
Neither the crook nor the husband have any idea who they’re dealing with in
Jane Palmer. These guys are toast. With her performance, Scott makes a pretty
good grab for the most evil femme fatale on record, yet she also makes Jane
Palmer curiously relatable. Again, there’s that sadness, that aching,
unfulfilled need at the center of Lizabeth Scott that comes through in her
performance. Jane Palmer is evil, yes, but she’s also smart, dogged, and
utterly human.
It is, after all,
humanity that is the great appeal of the forgotten women of film noir, our
sense that we’re seeing a human being alive onscreen. Movies of the forties and
fifties were made to be dreamlike, and all these years later they still seem
like dreams. The dreams hook us; the humanity makes us obsessives, worshipers
at the altar. “Who was this woman?” we ask. Not just Queen Liz (who, happily,
is still alive as I write this), but so many others. We watch them laugh and
cry and scheme and die and then we watch them do it all over again. It doesn’t
take much to hook us.
Take Joan Dixon. In
1951 she starred in a vastly underrated film noir called ROADBLOCK alongside
Charles McGraw. She plays Diane, a sexy conwoman who marries a straight-laced
insurance investigator name Joe Peters, a marriage that will have disastrous
results. Joan Dixon strolls through this movie as if she’s one of the great
femme fatales. It’s not just that she’s beautiful, it’s that she projects that
essential combination of intoxicating sexual allure and an untouchable, unknowable
center. Is Diane bad? It’s tough to say. Dixon might be criticized for giving a
performance that's too laid back, but I would argue that very ambiguity is her
greatest attribute. She doesn’t set out to ruin Joe Peters, but once she meets
him, he’s a goner. It’s an interesting take on the femme fatale. Many femmes
are man-eating monsters. Diane is different. She’s a catalyst who opens up all
the insecurity and greed buried beneath honest Joe Peters’ upright façade. It
takes quite a gal to destroy Charles McGraw. Joan Dixon does it without really
trying.
One thing’s for sure:
she never had much of a career in Hollywood. She started out at RKO under
contract to Howard Hughes (which was not somewhere a fresh-faced twenty-year
old from Norfolk, Virginia wanted to find herself). Hughes promised to build
her career, but he was too busy running RKO into the ground. Dixon spent most
of her time in low budget westerns and ended her acting career in the late
fifties doing bit parts on television. By then, she’d become a lounge singer
and was mostly notable in the newspapers for a string of quick marriages
and messy divorces. She died in Los Angles in 1992.
She was no one’s idea
of the queen of anything, yet she lives on in this little-seen masterpiece. Her
fame hasn’t happened yet, unlike Ann Savage or Lizabeth Scott. Even in the
insular world of film noir, Joan Dixon isn’t an icon—yet. I have faith,
however, that her cult is coming. If there’s one thing that you can learn from
the history of noir, it’s that there’s always time.
