Zachary Scott: Hollywood's Sophisticated Cad

Introduction

Introduction 3 The film’s titles, successively washed away by an ebbing tide and backed by Max Steiner’s searing score, have no more than run on the screen when an establishing night shot of a swanky beach house appears. From inside the cottage six shots ring out. A sudden cut to the interior reveals a stylish man dressed in a tuxedo clutching his chest after receiving a blast from the revolver. His handsome face registers shock and anguish as he crumples to the floor and with a dying gasp pleads, “Mildred!” It seems to be a cry for help, yet the name is spoken almost as a prayer asking forgiveness. Or is the fatally wounded man condemning the hand that shot him? This ambivalence sets the mood for the movie—Mildred Pierce, one of the classic noir melodramas of the 1940s. The actor playing the well-groomed murder victim with such unforgettable intensity is Zachary Scott, then a recent Warner Bros. discovery from Broadway appearing in his fourth film. Scott’s character in the picture is so deceitful, yet so charmingly suave and credible that the image stuck, plaguing the actor for the rest of his Hollywood career. Scott’s features were consistent with the film noir cads of the time, and his face became familiar to audiences during the postwar obsession with darker themes in movies. Unsure about civilization’s future, Hollywood filmmakers, borrowing from German Expressionism, had begun to portray much of society as sinister during the war to halt Nazi aggression and depicted a world full of crime, corruption, and greed. The mood of cynicism and pessimism grew in the decade following the end of World War II, and in film after film ambition and avarice were seen as destructive to social order and human relationships. In Double Indemnity (1944), Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray play an adulterous twosome who plot a murder for insurance money and end up shooting each other. In Out of the Past (1947), the character portrayed by Robert Mitchum discovers that he cannot escape his former life when a gangster acquaintance and a seductress involve him in a morass of murder and double-dealings. As Hollywood’s tone turned more violent and fatalistic, women were frequently seen as conniving temptresses and agents of ruin, with men their willing victims. The noir filmmakers seemed to prefer a night world, foggy or rainy, inhabited by sordid, menacing types who prey upon the innocent and one another. Lighting in these pictures is low-key, with shadow upon shadow creating an eerie, claustrophobic mood. The sinister, brooding atmosphere became a symbol of the despair and alienation that enveloped segments of the postwar world. If characters in these films are not downright villainous, they commonly lack a firm moral base, are plagued by paranoia, are unable to control the forces around them, and are motivated by impulse, lust, and guilt. In The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), the title character’s life and adult relationships are motivated by a crime she committed as a child. Pitfall (1948) shows the American dream gone sour, as a successful insurance salesman with a perfect wife grows bored and jeopardizes everything when he engages in a brief extramarital fling with a younger woman and finds himself in a mass of intrigue, jealousy, and murder. Film noir represented a creative period in Hollywood history, a transition between the heroism demonstrated by the combatants in World War II and the nihilistic antiheroism of the torn T-shirt actors headed by Marlon Brando in the 1950s, and allowed moviemakers an opportunity to work with themes previously shunned. Many of the best noir directors—Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz—were European expatriates , although the tough, hard-boiled approach of such popular American 4 INTRODUCTION writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and John O’Hara contributed to the darker trend in Hollywood films. But the temper in America generally was more sardonic in the years after World War II, and the public temporarily accepted a bleaker, more honest view of its society. On Broadway in the late 1940s, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman depicted a middle-aged man at the end of his emotional tether, unable to comprehend why his business and family life have failed. Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire rhapsodized the plight of the sensitive beauty-haunted individual incapable of...