No Man’s Land

NO MAN OF HER OWN, directed by Mitchell Leisen in 1950, is an adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (and if you’re put off by that absurd title you may struggle with certain integral aspects of Woolrich) which is probably the last really major Leisen movie. Some of his TV work is very strong, especially The 16mm Shrine, made for The Twilight Zone and starring Ida Lupino, which seems like an elegy for Old Hollywood, and there’s the fascinating footnote THE GIRL MOST LIKELY, which was both Leisen’s last film and RKO’s — as each department finished work on the movie, it would be shut down permanently. “It was eerie.”

The Woolrich movie stars Barbara Stanwyck and acts as a sort of rephrasing of her earlier Leisen vehicle, REMEMBER THE NIGHT, scripted by Preston Sturges and described by me here. In both films, la Stanwyck is a woman with a shady past, adopted into a respectable smalltown family, who don’t quite realise what they’re getting. While the thirties comedy pulls of a dizzying series of volte-faces, from screwball to pastoral to tragedy, with a side-route through film noir terrain when we meet Stanwyck’s horrific real family, NO MAN was Leisen’s first and only real noir. It should have opened doors for him and led to a whole series of thrillers. This may be the best discovery of Cornell Woolrich Week (although I’d seen the film before at the Edinburgh Film Festival’s Leisen retrospective).

One of those subjective camera hospital admissions — always welcome!

With typically Woolrichian contrivance, unmarried mother-to-be Stanwyck is injured in a train wreck (Leisen rotates the entire set 180º) with another pregnant woman, and mistaken for her by the slain woman’s grieving in-laws, who had never met their new daughter-in-law. They’ve just lost their son in the same accident, so they embrace the new family member and her child. We’re a quarter of the way into the plot and we’ve achieved the outward appearance of a happy ending, but underneath the situation is absolutely rife with anxiety. Stanwyck keeps our sympathy during this imposture since her plight is so wretched, and the misunderstanding begins as a genuine one, since she’s stunned from the wreck (not the first or the last time a bit of concussion helped a Woolrich plot along).

Just as things are settling down, although there’s plenty of suspense from Stanwyck’s errors signing her name etc, and her love for the dead son’s brother (reliable snore John Lund) creates potential crises, Stanwyck’s evil ex shows up, with a plan to leech her dry by blackmail. As in the novel, the suspense here is positively unbearable (I could only read the book in ten minute bursts, so uncomfortable did I find it), and Lyle Bettger is a superbly sleazy bad guy. Stanwyck herself is too old and theoretically too resilient for her role, which Woolrich conceived as something of a doormat, one of his perpetual victim-saps put on Earth to be trampled by Fate. But Barbara makes it all work — her toughness helps stop the character coming over as an annoying drip, which is one danger with the material, and who but Babs could have created such dread in this scene, where Bettger blackmails her into marriage ~

Regular Shadowplayer Chris Schneider, pointing out that Leisen is one of very few gay auteurs to have adapted Woolrich (Fassbinder being the other key example), suggests that this scene has a nice additional meaning, lying outside the realms of the plot — it can be seen as a vision of heterosexual marriage as a death trap. It’s hard not to agree.

The parallels between Leisen and Woolrich aren’t limited to their sexuality (although Mitch seems to have had far less trouble living with his same-sex preference, and did at least manage at least one sustained relationship with a sexual partner, the dancer/choreographer Billy Daniel, strained though it sometimes was). Weirdly, both men ended their lives minus a leg… Sickness and paralysis abound in Woolrich’s work, and Stanwyck’s faux mother-in-law in this film has a convenient heart condition which can be used to ratchet up the suspense nicely: she can’t reveal the truth, it would kill mother…

I’m not sure why this movie isn’t better known… but you could say the same of ALL Leisen’s best works. It’s tempting to blame Billy Wilder for badmouthing Leisen at almost every opportunity, but simple historical forces may be more to blame. This is a terrific film, very faithful to Woolrich’s book. The ending is more upbeat, but the solution has been carefully planted so it doesn’t feel like a cheat. Woolrich’s downbeat ending has the disadvantage of making no sense whatsoever, but then, he always did veer towards the irrational. If Leisen didn’t like the title I Married a Dead Man, he wouldn’t have liked the surreal conclusion Woolrich came up with, a locked room mystery where the two characters present suspect each other of firing the fatal bullet… of course, since they were the only ones present, suspicion would in reality harden into certainty for one, while the other wouldn’t be suspicious at all, since he’d know he did it! The ending is magnificent in its morbid fatuousness.

I always felt the heroine had suffered enough and deserved a happier fate, so I’m glad Leisen and his co-screenwriters Sally Benson (SHADOW OF A DOUBT) and Catherine Turney (MILDRED PIERCE) provided one. Actually, the eleventh hour reassignment of guilt trick was used in MILDRED PIERCE too…

Quote of the Day #2

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“The summer nights are so pleasant in Caulfield. They smell of heliotrope and jasmine, honeysuckle and clover. The stars are warm and friendly here, not cold and distant, as where I came from; they seem to hang lower over us, be closer to us. The breeze that stirs the curtains at the open windows is soft and gentle as a baby’s kiss. And on it, if you listen, you can hear the rustling sound of the leafy trees turning over and going back to sleep again. The lamplight from within the houses falls upon the lawns outside and copperplates them in long swaths. There’s the hush, the stillness of perfect peace and security. Oh, yes, the summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield.

*

But not for us.

*

The winter nights are too. The nights of fall, the nights of spring. Not for us, not for us.

*

The house we live in is so pleasant in Caulfield. The blue-green tint of its lawn, that always seems so freshly watered no matter what the time of day. The sparkling, aerated pinwheels of the sprinklers always turning, steadily turning; if you look at them closely enough they form rainbows before your eyes. The clean, sharp curve of the driveway. The dazzling whiteness of the porch-supports in the sun. Indoors, the curving white symmetry of the bannister, as gracious as the dark and glossy stair it accompanies down from above. The satin finish of the rich old floors, bearing a telltale scent of wax and of lemon-oil if you stop to sniff. The lushness of pile carpeting. In almost every room, some favorite chair waiting to greet you like an old friend when you come back to spend a little time with it. People who come and see it say, “What more can there be? This is a home, as a home should be.” Yes, the house we live in is so pleasant in Caulfield.

*

But not for us.”

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From I Married a Dead Man, by Cornell Woolrich, filmed as NO MAN OF HER OWN, directed by Mitchell Leisen. More to follow!

Portrait of an Unhappy Man

This sickly cove is none other than Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich. Image scanned by Guy Budziak (thanks!) from Francis M Nevins’ First You Dream, Then You Die, the biography of Woolrich.

In his foreword to Nightwebs, an anthology of Woolrich stories, Nevins quotes a passage from I Wake Up Screaming, Steve Fisher’s crime novel, which features a disturbed detective called Cornell ~

“He had red hair and thin white skin and red eyebrows and blue eyes. He looked sick. He looked like a corpse. His clothes didn’t fit him . . . He was frail, gray-faced and bitter. He was possessed with a macabre humor. His voice was nasal. You’d think he was crying.  He might have had T.B. He looked like he couldn’t stand up in a wind.”

Interestingly, while Laird Cregar in the movie version of IWUS cannot suggest the character’s slenderness, disbarred as he is by excess poundage, he nails the nasal voice and corpse-like demeanour, accurately suggested a floater fished from the East River.

Woolrich has been compared to Poe, which holds true in some ways and not in others. Poe’s life was disordered, financially fraught, haunted by death. Woolrich was wealthy (he was worth two million when he died), and not adventurous enough to get into real trouble, it seems. His writing suggests a man fearful of any change in routine. But his health was poor, and he seems to have suffered a terror of death since childhood, poisoning his life. One wouldn’t want to be either Poe or Woolrich, but Poe probably had more fun (was a better writer, too).

The true comparison is probably not the alcoholism or misery, but the way both writers devoted the bulk of their work to hammering on a single key, the key of terror. Woolrich can sustain a single note of suspense for an entire novel (as in I Married a Dead Man) and seems to gain power and effectiveness from the speed and even the sloppiness of his writing. Capable of brilliant poetic effects (in the shade of purple), he could blithely toss of clunking nonsense without looking back, but he drags you bodily through the story, over logical crevasses both bottomless and yawning, never relaxing the bony grip on the scruff of your neck or the icy fingers round your heart.

Woolrich wrote for the movies, it appears, around the time of the changeover to sound, and I can talk about that stuff a tiny bit, but really we’re looking at adaptations of his work. This cannot, in one week, be an exhaustive survey of the field, for although, weirdly, there hasn’t been an official Woolrich adaptation since ORIGINAL SIN flopped in 2001, there have been A LOT. I’ve been rooting around amid the more obscure productions, those I can find, but do intend to touch on some of the better-known movies too — PHANTOM LADY, THE LEOPARD MAN, but probably not REAR WINDOW, which I wrote about back in Hitchcock Year.

So don your sailor suits and prepare for the Waltz into Darkness…

UK readers: start here ~
Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories