Performing Resistance: Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck in Postwar Cinema
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Performing Resistance: Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck in Postwar Cinema Asher Benjamin Guthertz Film and Digital Media March 23, 2018 Thesis Advisor: Dr. Shelley Stamp This thesis has been completed according to the Film and Digital Media department's standards for undergraduate theses. It is submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Film and Digital Media. Introduction: Performing Resistance In the sunny California town of Santa Lisa, amidst a round of applause, veteran Frank Enley (Van Heflin) hands his toddler to his wife and struts onto a makeshift stage. In front of a crowd gathered to celebrate the opening of a new housing complex, he declares: “It was you fellas, you and your families, that really put this thing over. You stuck together and you fought for what you wanted, and if I gave you any help at all, well believe me, I am very happy.” His wife, holding their young son, beams. Frank musters all the spirit of war time camaraderie, and expresses that American belief that with hard work and a communal effort, anything is possible. But as Act of Violence (1949) unfolds, Frank’s opening speech becomes sickeningly hypocritical. A former army comrade sets out to murder Frank, and halfway through the film, Frank tells his wife Edith (Janet Leigh) why. The revelation takes place on an outdoors stairway at night. The railing and fences draw deep angular shadows on the white walls, and the canted angles sharpen the lines of the stairs and floor. A sense of enclosure looms; Frank mutters that he betrayed his troop. Edith locks her big eyes onto his: “I can understand how something like that can happen in a prison camp.” She pauses before “prison camp,” a word outside of her world. Frank shakes his head, and walks down some stairs. Edith follows his descent, where he finally explains that he ruined his troop’s escape plan by informing the Nazi guards. As he speaks, he walks back up the stairs, and Edith again follows him, a wife trying to hear her husband, to stand where he stands. Frank walks back down the stairs again, and Edith starts to follow. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Do I have to draw you a picture? I was an informer!...The Nazis even paid me a price, they gave me food, and I ate it.” Edith collapses into tears. Frank descends the steps, telling Edith she can leave without saying anything. She does. Edith gets up and runs up the stairs and out of the building. Act of Violence is one of the rare postwar films to speak directly about the war, and one of even fewer films to refer to the horrifying, soul shattering conditions that a world war enables. As the film makes clear, World War II veterans carried the weight of memories that could collapse the postwar family structure. The efforts to reconstruct American family life after the war, such as the housing project Frank participates in, necessitated moral certainties about community, hardwork, and the American spirit which men like Frank knew to have been untrue. Edith tries very hard to understand her husband. As her quivering delivery of the word “prison camp” reveals, the details of Frank’s war experience are incomprehensible to her. Yet, in her pacing up and down the stairs, following her husband in his pitch black journey down memory lane, Edith tries very very hard. Ultimately, she cannot. Not through any fault of her own, Frank knows, preemptively forgiving her for leaving him. The conditions of war are at odds with the conditions of postwar. If Act of Violence is a rare film, Daisy Kenyon (1947) is wholly unique. In one of the great performances of her career, Joan Crawford plays Daisy, a commercial artist living with her female colleague in a Manhattan apartment. Her onandoff again relationship with a nauseatingly arrogant but undeniably charming married lawyer, Dan O’Mara (Dana Andrews) is put on hold when she meets, and very quickly marries, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda), a troubled veteran who sometimes screams in his sleep. Much like Act Of Violence, Daisy Kenyon explores the psychic damage done by the war, but unlike the former, the latter interrogates everyone, not only the serviceman. As interesting and unique as the film’s plot is, Crawford’s performance articulates the struggles and desires of the postwar woman with unrivaled clarity and nuance. This essay demonstrates that by closely attending to screen performance, one can find new questions, ideas, and lines of thinking in even the most discussed of films. The writing of film scholar Andrew Klevan provides a clear model of how to write about film performance with nuance and imagination. “Fresh aspects of even familiar films emerge when we attend to gestures, postures, expressions, and voice — and how they are situated. Interpretations unfold and complicate with our momentbymoment experience of viewing the performer’s activity,” Klevan notes in the forward to Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation .1 Klevan illuminates the ability of performance analysis to open up even welltrod film texts. Staying attentive not only to the specific qualities of performance (“gestures, postures, expressions, and voice”), but also to how those qualities interact with other aspects of film production like cinematography, screenwriting, and production design, generates new understandings. “Attending to the momentbymoment movement of performers...encourages us to attend to a character’s physical and aural detail and reminds us, because we are prone to forget in our literary moods, of their ontological particularity in the medium of film. A living human being embodies a film character.”2 Often, if performance is mentioned at all in film writing, it is discussed with static finality: a bad performance, a good performance, comedic acting, method acting. Klevan highlights the importance of looking at the “momentbymoment movement” of actors, rather than sweeping generalizations about acting quality. The end of this quote addresses 1 Andrew Klevan, F ilm Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London: Wallflower Press, 2005). 2 Ibid, 7. the central possibility of writing on film performance: to engage in “the ontological particularity” that in film “a living human being embodies a film character.” One of the central questions of Daisy Kenyon , and the one most pertinent to this essay is: how does one love the returned soldier? After forgetting a date with Daisy, Peter visits her at her apartment late one night. He explains that the door to the complex was open. He says he supposes he did something bad by entering unannounced. Daisy looks up at Peter, her body stiff and composed. She is covered in lowkey soft lighting that accentuates her eyes and gaze in a closeup. “Yes, I guess you did,” she utters, but her voice softens, ending on a higher pitch, and her eyes drift up towards his own. Flirtation, confusion, and fear start to spin together. As he explains that he forgot about their date, a look of amusement flashes across her face. She looks down, takes a breath, and then declares: “Look, it’s late, I’m afraid you’d better get along.” Crawford bears a smile as she delivers the line, but as soon as she stops speaking, her face loses expression, though she continues to watch him intently. This hodgepodge of curiosity, fear, anger, and attraction reaches its climax when Peter suddenly grabs Daisy and tries to kiss her. She tells him not to. He says he just wants to hold her for a moment because “the world’s dead, and everybody in it is dead but you.” Daisy looks fearful, frozen in his grasp, her quizzical lips open, her big eyes set to burst. Then, in a quiet but dynamic shift, she relaxes slightly, leans into a smile, and asks: “How did they come to die?” She locks her eyes on to him as he walks from her and the question. Daisy Kenyon (1947), Directed by Otto Preminger America’s construction of a gendered world underwent a massive shift during the 1940s. During the first half of the decade, as most able men went off to war, the country had to reckon with massive amounts of married women moving into the public spheres of factory and industrial work, as well as other forms of civic participation. After the war, popular culture as well as educational texts and government policies all urged the movement of women back into the homes. More than ever, women were told that what America needed, and in particular, what American veterans needed, were womenashealers.3 In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War, Elaine Tyler May quotes the actress Ann Sothern’s advice to the wives of returning soldiers: “When he comes back it may take a few years for him to ‘find himself’ — it’s [your] job — not his— to see that the changes in both of [you] don’t affect the fundamental bonds.”4 3 Elaine Tyler May, H omeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era ( New York: Basic Books, 2008), 5889. 4Ibid, 64. Joan Crawford performs a woman alone with a recently returned and clearly affected veteran in Daisy Kenyon . She encapsulates a myriad of complex and contradictory sentiments in shockingly small amounts of dialogue. Daisy clearly harbors fear towards this man who was, until recently, involved in, or at the very least adjacent to, acts of unspeakable violence. Yet this fear coexists with lust and amusement, and some deeper fascination which manifests as she asks him how all the people in the world came to die.