censorship, (20)

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Blackout

critic Bosley Crowther noted the films pronounced style rather than nar-rative in a lukewarm February 18,1944, review:

We wish we could recommend [Phantom Lady] as a perfect combina-tion of the styles of the eminent Mr. Hitchcock and the old German psychological films, for that is plainly and precisely what it tries very bard to be. It is fuli of the play of light and shadow, of macabre atmos-phere, of sharply realistic faces and dramatic injections of sound. Peo-ple sit around in gloomy places looking blankly and silently into śpace, musie blares forth from empty darkness, and odd characters tum up and disappear. It is all very studiously constructed for weird and disturbing effeets. But, unfortunately, Miss Harrison and Mr. Siodmak forgot one basie thing—they forgot to provide their picture with a plausible, reasonable plot.²⁸

Phantom Lady was a sleeper, and although it was released in January-February J944, a few months before Double Indemnity, it was the Paramount A film, rather than the morę modest Universal production, that received all the critical and industry attention and initiated Hollywood’s crime cycle. Such reception may also have been aided by the fact that Phantom Lady was disqualified from Academy Award consideration because of its January-February 1944 release datę. (Double Indemnity received numerous Oscar nominations later in 1944 for the following year’s Academy Awards.)²⁹ While Harrison was promoted as Hitchcock’s protćge in producing Phantom Lady in wartime, not long after her celebrated status as the female “master of suspensę,” men were increasingly emphasized after the war. By February 1946 the New York Times noted that Siodmak—who went on to direct noir films Christmas Holiday (1944), The Suspect (1945), The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Killers (1946), The Dark Mirror (1946), Cry ofthe City (1948), and Criss Cross (1949)—“rebelled” against directorial typecasting in making exclu-sively psychological mystery and suspensę films. Soon it was małe director Siodmak, not female producer Harrison, who was “disturbed” to be repeat-edly called “a second Alfred Hitchcock.”³⁰ As a hyphenate producer, Joan Harrison had the power to realize her vision in Phantom Lady as a dark, psychological female detective film. Harrison would go on to write the gothic Dark Waters (1944) and then produced the films noir Uncle Harry (1945, directed by Siodmak), Nocturne (1946), They Won't Believe Me (1947), and Ride the Pink Horse (1947). Not all women writers were as fortunate as Harrison, however. Without hyphenate producer status, writer Catherine

Rosie the Riveter Goes to Hollywood

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Turney’s role in scripting Mildred Pierce shows how the Hollywood film-making proccss was morę typically dominated by men.

Catherine Turney, Jerry Wald, and Mildred Pierce Mildred Pierce—like Laura and Gilda—revolves around a female protago-nist whose presence is so intrinsic to the film that she not only structures the story but also becomes the namesake of the entire picture. The classic noir picturć employs gothic roman noir conventions in its central working-redeemer character. Mildred Pierce combines female melodrama with a hard-boiled detective narrative to create a heroine that, like Kansas, Laura, and Gilda, defies conventional notions of a gothic ingenue or femme fatale. Mildred is presented as an amalgam of noir redeemer, working woman, and mysterious, possibly guilty, femme fatale who is a humane, compassionate character. Warner Bros. adapted James M. Cains Mildred Pierce in 1944-45, shifting a women’s sex melodrama novel to a crime film using a flashback to frame the story, not unlike Double Indemnity. Warners’ version begins with a murder and a police interrogation, changing the weepie to a murder mystery—where the darkest points in the crime investigation set up the framing narrative.³¹ The film opens with gunfire. The camera, skewed in an extremely Iow Dutch angle, shows a man, shot several times, in a dark beach house. He calls out, “Mildred,” before he crumbles and dies. Like Laura, the picture becomes a whodunit, implicating the heroine. Seemingly admitting her guilt, Mildred (Joan Crawford) contemplates suicide shortly after the murder. Police detectives suspect she committed the crime and interrogate her to discover her story and reveal her past. The film flashes back to her life as an unhappy housewife and mother of two daughters who becomes a Rosie the Riveter-style career woman after her husband, Bert (Bruce Ben-nett), leaves. Mildred builds her own business as a restaurant entrepreneur to support her family. She spoils her irresponsible eldest daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth), who becomes a monster, and neglects the other, who dies. Mildred carries on with other (shady) men and has affairs. Although her op-portunistic suitors (Jack Carson, Zachary Scott) are the sexual aggressors, she is reluctant and far morę interested in materiał status to impress and indulge Veda. Mildred marries a broke eon artist with a wealthy name, Monte (Scott), rises in her career, then loses almost everything. She is ulti-mately victimized not only by the dubious men who betray her for money and destroy her business once she achieves success but also by ruthless, greedy Veda. After she and Monte leach all Mildred’s cash, Veda runs off to pursue a cabaret career, steals her mother’s disreputable husband, and turns