Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir

3. Audio Technologies: Intercoms and Dictaphones, Telephones and Radios, Phonographs and Jukeboxes

84 3 Audio Technologies INTERCOMS AND DICTAPHONES, TELEPHONES AND RADIOS, PHONOGRAPHS AND JUKEBOXES As Nicholas Christopher observes in Somewhere in the Night (1997), there is an “ongoing fascination in film noir with electrical devices,” a “galaxy of new machines and luxury” accoutrements such as the radio and hi-fi phonograph that rapidly became essential to the lives of Americans in the postwar period and that, in the “hands of both criminals and the police, altered the urban landscape in a way that could be heard.”¹ Of Intercoms and Dictaphones In John Farrow’s The Big Clock (1948), the “noir universe is the office building.”² The Janoth Building becomes the labyrinthine space or maze in which George Stroud (Ray Milland), the managing editor of Crimeways, a magazine that’s the publishing equivalent of a tabloid detective agency, finds himself in a paradoxical but paradigmatic noir predicament: the object of his crack team’s investigative powers is none other than Stroud himself. Telephones are omnipresent in The Big Clock. For example, the flashback narrative begins with George’s secretary informing him, even as he’s striding past her toward his office, that he has two calls, one from his wife and one Miklitsch_pp053-127.indd 84 Miklitsch_pp053-127.indd 84 12/8/10 4:23:02 PM 12/8/10 4:23:02 PM Audio Technologies 85 from a source in Salt Lake City about an ongoing case. The most distinctive sound technology in the film, however, is the intercom. It makes its first, unremarkable appearance in a scene where Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), having made his grand entrance from a private elevator at 11:00 a.m. on the dot, is presiding over a business conference and, right in the middle of one of his underling’s reports, informs his secretary, “Hold the call from Boston.” The intercom’s status as a mode of domination as well as surveillance is reinforced in the following scene when Janoth, who has just been surprised by a visit from his mistress, Pauline York (Rita Johnson), listens in on a private conversation between Stroud and Janoth’s right-hand man, Steve Hagen (George Macready). Stroud has been deferring his honeymoon for five years and his marriage is now on the rocks: “I’ve been working twentysix hours a day, Christmases, Fourth of Julys, Mother’s Days. What does Janoth think I am, a clock with springs and gears instead of flesh and blood?” After Hagen tells Stroud that their employer expects loyalty from everyone —“from the top right down to the bottom”—Janoth tells Pauline, “Shut that thing off.” Later, Janoth, informing Hagen via intercom that he’s decided to talk to Stroud himself about his decision to quit (“When does he think he’s leaving ?”), displays his micro-managerial mania: “Steve, on the fourth floor in the broom closet, a bulb has been burning for several days. Find the man responsible. Dock his pay.” Janoth is a white-collar monster, but his dominion over Stroud takes an unexpected twist when George shares a drink with Pauline after work. A quartet is playing “I’m in the Mood for Love,” and Pauline, describing herself as a “woman of mystery,” reads his palm, correctly guessing that he has recently quarreled with a “very unpleasant man” about working “twenty-six hours a day.” No femme fatale, Pauline admits she was listening in on Stroud’s conversation with Hagen in Janoth’s office, at which point the couple realize that they’re both under the big man’s thumb. However, when Janoth sees a man leaving his mistress’s apartment that night (he doesn’t recognize Stroud), he murders her with a sun-dial (a sign, given his obsession with time, of a primitive regression) and then has Hagen clean up the mess. Now partners in crime, Janoth and Hagen decide to pin the murder on the unidentified person leaving Pauline’s apartment. The noose begins to tighten for Stroud when Hagen buzzes him on the intercom to stand by for a call from the “communications czar”: “George, I want this man smoked out. Use the guard. Mobilize everyone. Floor-by-floor search. Miklitsch_pp053-127.indd 85 Miklitsch_pp053-127.indd 85 12/8/10 4:23:02 PM 12/8/10 4:23:02 PM Chapter 3 86 Follow through in person, understand me?”³ Stroud, Janoth’s best, most aggressive editor, is now...