Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir

6. The Big Number (Side B): Killing Them Softly

192 6 The Big Number (Side B) KILLING THEM SOFTLY It’s safe to say that the musical numbers one remembers most from classic —in this case, forties—noir are those in which a woman sings while backed by a combo or orchestra. Although there’s something to be said for female performers who accompany themselves, whether on guitar (as Rita Hayworth does in Gilda) or piano (as Ida Lupino does in Road House), there’s also something about a woman who’s free to move while she sings, unencumbered by an instrument, One way to frame this sort of performance would be to argue, as Laura Mulvey does in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that, freed of instrumentation , female performers can be better shown as spectacular objects of desire. Men look, so the argument goes, and women in all their corporeality are “to-be-looked at.” In other words, male spectators, not unlike their ideal masculine counterparts within the diegesis, derive fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure from contemplating the female form, even and especially its parts—say, a leg. (Consider, for example, the striking shot of Gilda’s leg, stuck up into the air like a baton, as she dresses for the Carnival in Vidor’s film.) While there’s clearly more than a grain of truth to the critique of the spectacular, stereotypical construction of women in forties noir, what does it mean if a woman is singing or dancing? Even if a woman is “only” singing , what does this act of performance say about her? Is it possible that Miklitsch_pp192-254.indd 192 Miklitsch_pp192-254.indd 192 12/8/10 4:25:12 PM 12/8/10 4:25:12 PM The Big Number (Side B) 193 the musical number is a dramatic site in film noir, a place where women “speak,” as it were, with a certain discursive authority?¹ The Crooner and the Black Blueswoman Before I turn to two features that, like the Hayworth vehicle Gilda, constitute significant exceptions to the standard white female figuration of the “big number” in forties noir, I want to open with a film, Bewitched (1945), that provides another, audiovisual frame of sorts. Written and directed by Arch Oboler who began in radio like Orson Welles and helmed the first 3-d picture, Bwana Devil (1952), Bewitched features neither a siren nor big number, but it does invoke what Eric Lott calls “whiteface dream work.”² Joan Ellis—“young, pretty, alert”—has fled her parents’ home after hearing voices and fainting at her engagement party to hometown boyfriend Bob. When she hears voices again at the zoo while visiting the tiger cage, she wanders the city alone at night pursued by her “evil” alter ago Karen, who keeps jabbering in her head, “Crazy crazy crazy.” (The eerie sound effects were dubbed by M-G-M maestro Douglas Shearer, and Karen was voiced by noir staple Audrey Totter who appears in such forties noirs as The Set-Up, High Wall, The Unsuspected, and Lady in the Lake.) Seeking sanctuary in a concert hall, Joan sits on the stairs leading up to the loggia where she listens to a white female vocalist, accompanied by a pianist, performing a faux-operatic version of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” a spiritual covered in 1938 by Louis Armstrong with the Decca Mixed Choir: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen / Nobody knows but Jesus / Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen / Glory hallelujah.” Although the high-angle shot of the singer standing in a circle of light on the darkened stage below is not from Joan’s POV, the lyrics clearly reference her troubled existence. The implicit connection between Joan’s personal hell and the travails of African Americans is made even more explicit in the second number, “My Old Kentucky Home,”³ the Stephen Foster standard performed here in its original, unexpurgated version: “The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home / ’Tis summer, the darkies are gay.” According to Krin Gabbard, black magic refers to the “enchanting effect that black music . . . [has] on movie characters more often than not when the characters onscreen are white.”⁴ But if it’s true that “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” offers Joan a Miklitsch_pp192-254.indd 193 Miklitsch_pp192-254.indd 193 12/8/10 4:25:12 PM 12/8/10 4:25:12 PM Chapter 6 194 momentary stay against madness, “My...