Sleep, My Love: race and resentment in Hollywood

Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love threatens to become a mundane gothic ‘gaslighting’ melodrama – in the mould of Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Suspicion and, indeed, George Cukor’s Gaslight – with dreary references, as was common at the time, to Freudian psychology, but is, after 30 minutes, rescued by a couple of unexpected innovations and turned into something hugely interesting and entertaining.

The first twist is Sirk’s decision to highlight the differences between the egotistical, repressed and calculating Richard Courtland – played flawlessly by Don Ameche – and Bruce Elcott, the epitome of effortless American masculine charm, common sense and determination – played with great appeal by Robert Cummings – by having Bruce, who has fallen in love with Courtland’s wife, Alison (Claudette Colbert), take the object of his forbidden desire to his ‘brother’s’ wedding, his brother turns out to be Jimmie Lin, who is not his real brother but his ’honorary’ brother since Jimmy is Chinese.

The Chinese wedding, happy, graceful, full of culture and style, is a surprising early attempt by Hollywood to deal with questions of race, racial discrimination and stereotyping – which, of course, Hollywood did so much to perpetuate – that Sirk was to return to more famously in Imitation of Life.

The Chinese couple’s wholesome and joyous relationship contrasts with the destructive and harrowing American relationships in the film – between Richard and Alison, between Bruce and Alison and, especially, between Richard and Daphne, the ravishing glamour model played by Hazel Brooks, who he is madly in love and lust with – the poor man cannot keep his hands off her – to the extent that he devises an elaborate plot to do away with his wife, colluding with a seedy photographer Charles Vernay superbly portrayed by George Colouris, which involves convincing her that she is mad and adding hallucinatory drugs to her drinks in order to make her more suggestive to his malign suggestions.

The second surprise in the film is the intensity of the hatred Richard feels for his wife. Not only does he find her physically repulsive – he recoils from her touch – but he is also bursting with resentment that she is above him in station.

If he were to simply leave Alison for Daphne, Richard would lose his right to his wife’s wealth, which, indeed, is why Daphne, one of the most cynical, acerbic, ruthless – and attractive – characters in film noir, urges her lover to get on with it and kill his unsuspecting spouse so that they can be together and enjoy the spoils of their crime.

In one of the most startling scenes in the film, Daphne explains what she wants and what she expects from her besotted lover.

‘I want what she’s got,’ Daphne says. ‘I want all of it. I want her house, her name, her man, and I want them now, tonight.’

Douglas Sirk’s Lured: between a film noir and a whodunnit

 

There is no discernible or worthwhile philosophical, psychological or emotional truth in Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947), often labelled a film noir but aside from a couple of striking expressionist shots involving suspicious characters lurking in the shadows there is nothing to suggest any of the moodiness, doom, existential crisis normally associated with the genre.

 

Indeed, if the film is characterised by anything then it’s its light-heartedness and breeziness, as if Sirk can’t quite come up with anything dark and meaningful to say in the script he’s been given to work with. Having comedienne Lucille Ball in the female lead doesn’t help with trying to give the film an air of gravitas or darkness. 

 

In fact, the best scenes are those that have some comic appeal, particularly those involving Boris Karloff, who plays a deranged ex-fashion designer who has lured Ball to his flat and dressed her up as if she’s about to appear in a fashion show, only for Karloff to pull back the stage curtain to reveal an audience consisting of a dolorous canine and a mannequin. 

 

How Ball has ended up at Karloff’s tells us something about the plot of the film. She’s got there after a friend of hers at the nightclub they both work at as dancers has gone missing – and is presumed the latest victim of a serial killer stalking London. The ‘poet-killer’, as the murderer is known, taunts police by sending them Baudelaire-inspired poems on death and beauty announcing he’s about to strike again. 

 

Inspector Harley Temple, played by Charles Coburn, enlists Ball as an undercover detective to answer lonely hearts ads in the newspapers in the hope that she will flush out the killer. The killer’s modus operandi is to use newspaper advertisements to lure potential victims. Karloff is one of several eccentrics she encounters via the ads before she gets closer to uncovering the homicidal maniac.

 

The film boasts a stellar cast – as well as Ball, Karloff and Coburn, the film features George Sanders and Cedric Hardwicke – and is set in London, though it’s a London of the Hollywood set and not the real thing, which is a shame, since we get no sense of post-war London and all the social, economic and psychological conditions of the time that would have made for a far more interesting film. Instead, we get the impression that Sirk is going through the motions, delivering less a film noir and more a far-fetched police procedural and whodunnit.

Dial 1119: film noir misanthropy

 

It’s not unusual to find in a film noir a depiction of post-war America as a place of cynicism, brutality and ruthless self-interest. 

It’s in the nature of the genre to follow our hero as he (and sometimes she) navigates such a world while trying to hold on to his sense of right over wrong, good over evil, battling against his moral, spiritual or physical death. 

What is rare is a film noir in which there exists no opportunity for redemption, where there is no chance for the protagonists to show their better side or find an escape from a corrupt society and the corruption of those who inhabit it. 

Dial 1119 is such a film. 

The plot involves a psychopathic killer, Gunther Wyckoff, who has been released early from the insane asylum and makes straight for the psychiatrist who he believes got him locked up. The madman embarks on a killing spree before holing up in a neighbourhood bar. There, he is recognised, but before the bartender has a chance to alert the police, the killer’s suspicions are aroused and he shoots his would-be betrayer in the back. 

The sounds of gunfire bring the police, too late to arrest the murderer as he barricades himself inside the bar and takes hostage an assortment of customers and staff. 

What follows is not heroic camaraderie among the hostages or crafty work by the police to end the siege without further bloodshed, but a fulsome display of misanthropy – human idiocy, hysteria and selfishness – as each character under duress unravels and shows us the ugliest versions of themselves. 

Thus we have Freddy (played by Virginia Field), the ageing lush; Helen (played by Andrea King), the jittery woman worried that her life is rushing by and her chances of romance and marriage are diminishing; Skip (played by Keefe Brasselle), the young barman, who believes the fact that his wife is in hospital about to have a baby should trump the predicament he and the others find himself in; Harrison D. Barnes (played by James Bell), the verbose newspaper man, who has quit the job he hates for the hundredth time only to find himself right in the middle of the biggest story of his career; Earl (played by Leon Ames), a sleazy, middle-aged salesman hitting on Helen; Dr John Faron (played by Sam Levene), the psychiatrist who believes he can rationalise with the insane gunman; and Captain Henry Keiver  (played by Richard Rober), the gung-ho cop who wants to storm the bar and do what should have been done to Wyckoff when he first came to the attention of the police, before do-gooding psychiatrists got involved.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish: 'a sickening exhibition of brutality and perversion'

‘The most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen.’

The Burglar

David Goodis scripted this excellent film noir from his own novel. Dan Duryea makes the perfect Goodisian protagonist. Paul Wendkos overdoes it at times with the music, camera and other Wellesian touches.

Gangs, Inc. (aka Paper Bullets)

Rita Adams witnesses her fink father being gunned down, winds up in an orphanage. As an adult, her troubled past means she's unemployable, then she foolishly takes a hit-and-run rap for her feckless boyfriend. But Rita's not into self-pity and, on being released from prison, she embarks on a campaign of revenge against society and becomes the Queen of Crime.