force fives: Gilda and Laura
On New Year’s Day, the Belcourt Theatre started off their Noir Fest with a double feature: Gilda (1946) and Laura (1944). For universal and personal reasons, it was a perfect pairing.
I have the tendency to get monomaniac when I talk about Hayworth and Tierney, so I tried to keep my initial dumps of thoughts on social media to a minimum. But I can’t really overstate how much I love these two actresses, in these two roles, especially together. Gilda is emphatically Hayworth’s best role, and while Tierney has more to do in Leave Her to Heaven (which I’ll get to see at IU Cinema this spring on 35mm!), Laura is her most famous role and probably the better movie.
I frequently quip as an excuse for my bad taste in movies that I don’t really like movies as much as I like gossip. This is definitely a joke at my own expense that I should probably be less quick to make in the new year/decade. But what I do like is knowing where an actress was in her life and career when she made a movie. Was she in love? How did she feel about her career at that point? Did the designer dressing her make her feel beautiful? Was she ill? I prefer old hollywood studio movies in part because of my own taste, but also because I like tracking the careers of these women. There are production units and directors that either capture their talent or squander it. We still get to witness collaborative relationships and artists and muses, but something about the system codifies everything in a way that is neater, easier, more accessible to me. I like seeing Hayworth succeed in a Columbia noir after being kind of dull in a Fox musical. I like taking what I know about where she was in life when she made the movie and watching her face as she lives the life of fictional woman for ninety minutes.
In art history classes in undergrad, we’d talk poetically about the acts of mark making, especially because my advisor and mentor was a modernist. So even when she was tasked with teaching Renaissance art, I felt the visceral tactility of something like the giornata in the Arena Chapel. (Giornata means “day’s work” in Italian and because of how fresco works, lines of demarcation can be seen between each day’s work. They are most easily seen in the fields of blue in the sky). I feel further removed from being able to talk about visual art and painting than I have in a long time nowadays. I don’t write about it in any substantive way anymore. But I still see photos online of my favorite artists and have synesthetic responses to the texture of fabric in John Singer Sargent painting or the edges of Cy Twombly’s gestures that make my mouth water, the same way Giotto’s lapis lazuli does.
For better or worse, I became a grown up while watching Alfred Hitchcock films and auteur theory sort of haunts my perception of film. I spent a lot of the last decade working on personal grand theses of taste for Big Directors. I liked these Hitchcock for these thematic and aesthetic reasons. I found these others boring or upsetting in ways that ruined my enjoyment. When I watched all the David Lean movies, I did the same exercise. But the movie that stuck with me the most was one on the edges of his identity as a director. Instead, The Passionate Friends works, with all its clunky frame narratives and gauzy timelines, because it rests on the lead Ann Todd’s face. I didn’t really have a directorial theme last year. I tried William Wyler, but every time I watched a movie, I wanted to just watch a bunch more movies starring whichever lead actress. (Wyler is maybe the best director for actresses, ever). It is fun for me to look for the cohesion between films through the bodies and faces of actors on the screen and I think, overwroughtly and poetically, that’s a type of mark making that’s more interesting to me right now.
Hayworth and Tierney exist in my mind in these forced parallels because of my affection for them and Gilda and Laura do tpo. Both actresses were connected romantically to Aly Khan (Hayworth married him; his father forbid another marriage to an actress, so Tierney couldn’t). Their legacies include helping raise awareness for debilitating mental disorders (Hayworth had Alzheimer’s and her death from complications from it led to an increase in research and awareness; Tierney spoke openly about her bipolar in her autobiography, condemned electroshock therapy, and spoke about the chronic maintenance nature of the disorder in ways that I still don’t see in bipolar writings today). They both wanted to be mothers and had complicated experiences in that area of their lives. (Hayworth’s relationships with both her daughters were defined by her alcoholism and neglect, though she frequently expressed that motherhood was her personal goal. Her relationship with motherhood seemed to be one where she could set herself up for failure in order to confirm all the worst thing she felt about herself. Tierney’s first daughter was severely mentally disabled, as a result of Tierney contracting German measles during her pregnancy. Her daughter’s birth and struggles with disability triggered one of Tierney’s first major depressive episodes of her bipolar). Both women were abused by their fathers, though in very different ways. (Hayworth was a victim of incest; Tierney’s father stole and lost her earnings from her early years in Hollywood and on Broadway).
Hayworth can be seen as this great Hollywood tragedy. She was abused by nearly every man she had a close relationship with, she resented the difference between how she was perceived as a love goddess and her own personal shyness. She had to continue working longer than she would have liked because she needed money (usually for a husband’s debts). Tierney’s life is the opposite in many ways. She remained close with her mother and had financial stability through safeguarding her earnings from her father after his financial abuse, as well as help from her brother and Howard Hughes. Both of these factors helped her get treatment for her bipolar when she needed. it. She got to leave Hollywood when it was clear that she could not remain healthy while under the demands of a studio. She ended up in a loving marriage to oilman, who by her account, tended patiently to her health.
But in the mid-1940s, they existed in the same cultural space for a moment. As the femme fatale trope turned on its eye, across from broad shouldered men in short ties, across other effeminate men with canes, in noirs with elements of women’s pictures.
So here’s five things that were swirling around in my head as I watched my two favorite ladies in two of my favorite movies.
Introductions: Both movies have two of the all time great character introductions. A man “awooga”d at the Belcourt when Hayworth flipped her hair up in Gilda. The “me?” moment is maybe Hayworth’s most famous on screen, but it is one half of a bigger moment and the bigger moment totally captures how good Hayworth is at constant negotiations of her face throughout the movie. After she flips her hair, she sees that Johnny is in the room with her husband and her voice and her face totally change. She is perpetually doing this in the movie, checking in with who is watching and matching her face and body to go with the audience.
Tierney’s introduction in Laura actually happens three times. First we see her portrait in the opening credits. Her portrait features predominantly in the main set of the film, her apartment, and is frequently over the shoulders of Dana Andrews as he interrogates the other characters about her death. Then as Waldo Lydecker, played by Clifton Webb, tells Dana Andrews’ detective about his relationship with Laura, we meet Laura as Lydecker did: as an upstart teenager at the Algonquin, asking for his endorsement of a pen he doesn’t use on an ad from her agency. But throughout all of this, Laura, as far we know, is dead. And then finally, after the detective has very unprofessionally gotten himself drunk at Laura’s apartment, he falls asleep. Preminger zooms in on his face and then immediately zooms back out, but the music cues make it clear that time as passed in the night and for a moment, you think he might be dreaming, and so does he, as we see Laura walk across her own apartment, alive, to rouse the strange man. He is sleeping in her sitting room underneath the portrait that he’s fallen in love with and is confronted with the live body of the woman whose innermost life he has been investigating.
Men with canes: In both movies, the “evil” man is given the same prop to signal some sort of compensation and to make him seem more violent. Both have walking sticks and they are given a lot of space in the script for the characters themselves to bring them up. Munson in Gilda has a stick that hides a sharp dagger and that he calls his “friend” and it ultimately leads to his demise. Lydecker’s walking stick part of his well-known accessories that his adds Laura to. Though his walking stick is not the weapon in Laura, he does chose to use a shotgun, which he has to hide in an ingenious way. A pistol would have been easier to hide, but also less symbolic in a movie full of impotent men.
Femme fatale revelations: Probably the most frustrating thing for me in reading about Gilda is that Gilda is frequently held up as a prime example of a femme fatale in noir. Laura of Laura is more likely in reviews and criticism to be seen as a play on the trope, but I think Gilda also undermines the idea. I think of a character like Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity as a clear femme fatale because the trope kind of hinges on the male lead thinking that the woman, because she is a woman, is incapable of truly evil things. But in Gilda, the opposite is happening and I think the audience has a pretty clear chance to see that Johnny sees Gilda as a femme fatale, even though throughout the movie she is pretty clearly the victim of violence as the hands of Munson and that all of fatality is an act. When Gilda says that she is willing to destroy herself to destroy Johnny, it is not an act of evil, but an sign that she is in a pretty untenable situation with very little self-worth. Laura similarly is acting the way she is acting, leading the detective to suspect her, not to bring down a man, but to protect Shelby, her erstwhile fiance because she believes he will be stuck with the murder charge and she thinks he is innocent.
Shadow knowing: This is a silly name for something I didn’t ever connect between the movies until I saw them back to back and I think it’s connected to how the women aren’t really femme fatales and the male leads aren’t really leading men (see: below). In both films, the romantic leads investigate the women, but in these ways that ignore some things that are plain to the audience viewing them. Johnny ignores how Gilda is performing for him and assumes that he can demand her loyalty to Munson from other men, when he is actually the other man she is trying to love. Detective McPherson interviews her friends, reads her letters and falls in love with her portrait and what is missing is how active Laura is in her own life. Lydecker gets at it sort of as he describes her, but we see her commanding a room full of men at her ad agency, romancing artists and throwing them away when she gets bored of them, rushing into a marriage with Shelby and rushing out of it. She’s fickle and fussy and demanding and light and charming. When she dances with Shelby, he asks for her out for lunch and he says “lunch, beautiful lunch!” and she replies “what about work? beautiful work!” What Lydecker never really gets about Laura is that she has some agency in their patron-artist relationship. He sees himself as an active benefactor and her as a passive recipient of his wisdom. But she uses him to advance her career, which is her aim. If she was actually just the portrait, she’d be resigned to be an Lydecker accessory.
The male leads who aren’t: For a long time, I thought Laura was a three star movie with a five star performance from Tierney. What I never really got was how the Detective was supposed to be a believable romantic lead. Dana Andrews is handsome, sure, but he’s not particularly commanding in this role. McPherson is always fidgeting with the little ball bearing baseball game and becomes obsessed with Laura to the point of offering to buy the portrait of her before the case is even closed. But last time I watched this, before I saw it at the Belcourt, I realized I was artificially promoting McPherson above the other men in Laura’s life in a way that she doesn’t necessarily do. When he is on the same field as Shelby and Lydecker, their flaws for Laura are matched and clear. Shelby, reckless with money, uses Laura as a cover in good society. Lydecker, queer like Clifton Webb who plays him, has Laura as a beard and object of aesthetic obsession. McPherson is impotent. They reference his silver shinbone and his leg full of lead. In the last confrontation scene, he grabs Laura and lets another detective take the final shot. McPherson is not a romantic lead that sweeps Laura away from all the messiness of Lydecker, but rather, a devoted viewer who will watch her cross rooms, while she gets to keep working.
Gilda as a movie doesn’t quite work as well for me as Laura, primarily because of the confusing use of dramatic irony that tells the audience Munson is still alive immediately after his faked suicide attempt, while keeping Gilda and Johnny in the dark. There is no surprise because the audience knows and the script and director don’t do any work to use the dramatic irony to build suspense. But Johnny Farrell does click better for me when I think about him less a romantic rival for Munson. His loyalties are so clearly to Munson (again, this is one reason why Gilda doesn’t work for me. Some critics I have read suggest that we’re supposed to feel sorry for him, but I can’t see how that’s the case because the movie comes out right after WWII and he has Nazi/German ties that are not a revelation in the movie,) that watching the movie and thinking of Gilda and Johnny as rivals for Munson’s time and attention, even after his “death.”
I’m grateful that I got to start the year with this double feature, especially considering that 2020 is Gene Tierney’s centennial. It was a perfect day and I hope it bodes well for my movie watching for the year to come.