Movie Review: Nobody Lives Forever

Nobody Lives Forever (1946)
directed by Jean Negulesco, starring John Garfield

(Note: This is my entry in the John Garfield Blogathon, hosted by Patti at They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To, in honor of the actor's 100th birthday.)
 
Like so many other returning soldiers, Nick Blake (John Garfield) just wants to come home to his girl. Unfortunately for Nick, his girl Toni (Faye Emerson) isn't the kind of woman that waits at home for her man. She's more the kind of woman that runs around with other guys and loses all of her boyfriend's money. But Nick isn't your normal ex-G.I. either. He's a conman, able to twist people around his finger with just a few words. Wanting to get away from Toni and the New York confidence racket, Nick heads to L.A. with his loyal friend Al (George Tobias). Maybe a rest in the California sunshine will clear his head.

However, Nick won't be able to resist the allure of the con game for long. He's soon roped into another scheme, masterminded by his rival Doc Ganson (George Coulouris). There's a rich, young widow in town (Geraldine Fitzgerald) and a ladies' man like Nick could easily talk her into sinking money in a phony business. In order to get Nick on his side, Doc teams up with an old friend of Nick's, Pop Gruber (Walter Brennan), an old hand at the con game who's since fallen on hard times. By playing on Nick's vanity and restlessness, the con artists rope the young man into their scheme.

To his own amazement, Nick slowly finds himself falling for the beautiful, yearning woman he's supposed to swindle. But what hope could he have for a life with her now, when all of his allies and enemies are circling round them? Like sharks scenting blood in the water, they won't leave until they get their take. No matter who gets hurt along the way... 

A troubled hero, a pile of cash, scheming side characters, and the faintest possibility for redemption. Nobody Lives Forever has everything it takes to make a great film noir except the killer instinct. Despite the cold futility of its title, it's an oddly gentle film. It focuses on the clash of two very different ways of living. On the one hand we have New York, personified by the restless, cynical con artist Nick Blake and his cohorts. On the other hand we have Los Angeles, portrayed as a land of dreamy sunshine and relaxation, ripe with suckers like the lonely widow Gladys Halvovsen. The surprise is that the film doesn't automatically assume that this will all end in disaster. Instead, it's more a story of romance, as the troubled Nick begins to realize that he belongs more with Gladys than he does with his old crowd. Nobody Lives Forever is more of a meander through darkness than a blind alley. The fact that it works as well as it does rests largely on the strength of its performances.

John Garfield is given one of the oldest plots in the book, the criminal that falls in love with his prey. Somehow, he makes it not only believable but utterly moving and real. Nick begins the film as a supposedly great con man, a plot contrivance that's hard to buy when your main character entrusts 50,000 dollars to the vampish arms of Faye Emerson. But Garfield sells it, conveying Nick's intelligence through his constant movement and searching gaze. His response to Emerson's betrayal is only a quick slap, but it makes you wonder how Garfield would have handled the grapefruit scene in The Public Enemy. Later, as he slowly  opens up to Geraldine Fitzgerald, Garfield's eyes light up with boyish wonder, marveling at the sensation of being sincere for the first time.

John Garfield was one of those actors that could simultaneously convince you of his toughness and his deep emotional need. The part of Nick Blake was originally meant for Humphrey Bogart but watching the film, it's hard to want anyone but Garfield in the role. Bogart is a little too smart for all this, a little too closed-off. He had the dark, calculating intelligence of the true noir hero but Garfield had the battered, bruised heart. His characters might fall to the dark side but they always yearn to go back, to return to innocence and comfort.

Aside from Garfield, we have a wealth of entertaining side characters. George Coulouris isn't the most menacing of film hoodlums but what can you expect from the actor most famous for getting beaten up by a kid with a sled? However, his brand of reserved, pop-eyed resentment is exactly right for the character of Doc, a semi-comic thug fighting to conceal how much he hates relying on the younger, more attractive Nick. Coulouris' best moment is undoubtedly the scene where Doc tries to protest to his gang that he could just as easily seduce the mark as Nick could. For a man that never once looks comfortable anywhere, you have to admire his faith in his own sexiness. 

Walter Brennan gives a fine, subtle performance here as the old timer Pop, now reduced to selling looks through a telescope and picking his customers' pockets. I've never cared much for Brennan and I never could understand why Ford and Hawks loved his overdone comic relief so much. But I've decided the man was much better when he could play it simple and straight. Pop knows his time as a big shot will never come back; when he calls to people to "see the moon and stars all for a dime," it feels like a sadly poetic way to sum up the con artist's existence. 

Like so many other Warners films,  Nobody Lives Forever always has one eye on the side characters, giving little curlicues of personality to even the most throw-away parts. So we have a business manager that can't talk about anything but golf, a cafe owner that gets agitated by the word "java," and a wisecracking bellhop that used to be a jockey. The only character that falls flat is Toni, Nick's ex-girlfriend.

Normally in film noir, you'd expect the bad girl to steal the show. But Nick's treacherous old flame Toni is nothing more than a grade-A, lemon-sucking pill, the kind of woman that double-crosses a man and gets mad when he returns the favor. Faye Emerson, with her sunken cheeks and big dark eyes, looks the part well enough. But when John Garfield follows up a tender kiss with a contemptuous slap, Emerson just looks annoyed. A true femme fatale would look back at him with pure, lustful vengeance. The script uses Toni mainly as a plot device, plunking her down in the story only long enough to scatter the chess pieces.

This leaves the stage wide open for Geraldine Fitzgerald to capture attention as the elegant but naive prey, Gladys Halvorsen. Fitzgerald was a stunning Irish redhead, best known for the role of Isabella in Wuthering Heights. Onscreen she had an air of respectability masking inner smolder. The character of Gladys is maybe a little too innocent to be believed, but Fitzgerald adds a lot of dignity to the role, making Garfield's attraction to her wholly believable. The chemistry between them is all the stronger for their differences; it's the street kid wooing the princess. Fitzgerald has one of the more unusual Irish accents I've heard. Not a lilt or a brogue but a few exotic intonations here and there that make her sound positively Hedy Lamarr-ish at times. 

Director Jean Negulesco has perhaps a little too light of a touch for the material here and the film doesn't have the rat-a-tat energy of the typical Warners crime film. On the other hand, the leisurely pace does give time for little vignettes. Negulesco perfectly illustrates the culture gap between his romantic leads by showing a scene of Gladys flinching at a prizefight, followed by Nick at the symphony, folding his concert program into a paper airplane. It's hard not to like these people. 

As a true noir aficionado, I can't recommend Nobody Lives Forever as a pure example of the genre but on its own merits, it's a fine film to spend a few hours on. It has enjoyable characters, a straightforward plot, and a strong lead performance by John Garfield. Nobody lives forever but good films live long in the memory. And this one does.

Favorite Quote: 

"Now look here, fellas, I hate the word 'java' and I hate to be called 'buddy' and 'pal,' I just can't stand it."

Favorite Scene:

There's a kind of poignancy and nervous ardor to the relationship between Nick and Gladys. Like all characters in film noir, they know how fragile happiness can be (he's a soldier, she's a widow) and it gives their scenes together an extra jolt of romance that offsets the movie's cynical humor. For the moment where they confess their love, Negulesco pulls out all the stops. The lovers take a side trip to the Mission Church of San Juan Capistrano, wandering around crumbling pillars and waving trees. As Gladys walks down the path, a flock of white birds fly in front of her, their bodies blending into the pattern of her beautiful dress. The mood is hushed and peaceful. Gladys looks at Nick with unease, sensing that this is not a guy that chooses to visit old churches. "Maybe we should have gone to the beach." Nick assures her that "this is swell" but his gaze flickers around. You can see that he's not uncomfortable here and the very fact of this surprises him. They go into the chapel, talk to the priest, and walk some more.

All the while, you can feel Nick's tension; he knows something new is happening to him and he can't understand it. Garfield's performance is pitched so perfectly that all the character's repressed feelings come through in his eyes and his voice and the way he shoves his hands in his pockets. All of a sudden, he begins to tell Gladys about how it reminds him of the churches he saw in Italy as a soldier. "All wrecked...statues all over the place, paintings ripped to pieces, everything smashed." He admits he'd forgotten it until now and it makes him wonder why people can't get along in the world, just be happy. "Are you happy?" Gladys asks. "I wasn't," Nick whispers, realizing everything in that instant. "Until I met you." Their lips meet.

Final Six Words:

Shady dealings can promise sunny futures

Performance Spotlight: Ingrid Bergman in Notorious

Note: This is the third post in a series dedicated to For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, looking at some of my personal favorite performances in Hitchcock films. The donation button and links for the blogathon can be found by scrolling down.

Ingrid Bergman in Notorious

  

"Dry your eyes, baby, it's out of character."

In 1950, Ingrid Bergman was denounced on the Senate room floor because she had left her husband Peter Lindstrom for her director Roberto Rossellini. She was already pregnant with Rossellini's baby. Senator Edwin C. Johnson denounced her as "an apostle for degradation" and a "powerful influence for evil." It was a bizarre twist in a career that, Joan of Arc aside, was far from being a parade of saintly good girls. Her breakthrough role had, in fact, been as the adulterous lover in Intermezzo. You have to wonder if Johnson (who never gained much greater fame than "the man who slut-shamed Ingrid Bergman") was much of a movie-goer. It was one of those scandals that would have popped like a soap bubble if it had come around only a few years later. As it is, it stands as the strange dark side of America's love for Ingrid Bergman.  And in that sense, it's an eerie parallel to one of Bergman's greatest roles in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious.

In Notorious, Bergman is Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, who is recruited to bring down her father's friends. But Alicia is a perpetually sloshed good-time girl who, to co-opt Bogart's line, sticks her neck out for nobody. The task of convincing her falls to the attractive, brooding agent sent to tail her, T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant). Devlin and Alicia fall in love, but their affair is cut short by the news that Alicia must go to work. And for Alicia, work means "landing" Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), a wealthy Nazi spy who was infatuated with her once before. Alicia urges Devlin to convince her not to do it, but instead, he bitterly eggs her on. This frustrated love triangle only becomes more twisted when the besotted Alex marries Alicia, drawing the cold anger of his mother (Leopoldine Konstantin). Alicia's spying soon hits pay dirt, but her suspicious actions alert Alex to her true nature. And once he realizes what she is, he'll use any means to dispose of her before his compatriots find out.

As a Hitchcock fan, I've had to endure many glib assessments of the Master of Suspense, one of them being, "Man, Hitchcock had problems with women, didn't he? What a misogynist." And it never fails to make me grind my teeth. He tortured his female characters, he had a blonde fetish, he obsessed over women he couldn't have so sure, he's a misogynist, it's that simple. But for me, the central dividing line of misogyny isn't about mistreatment or sexualization, it's about viewpoint. Hitchcock's female characters always have a viewpoint and a very strong, complex one at that. Hitchcock was fascinated by the problems women had to face, by their nightmares and questions and strengths. Sometimes his female characters are strong heroines like Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt, sometimes they're spunky and sharp like Patricia Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train, and sometimes they're duplicitous and conflicted like Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. But it's rare to find any Hitchcock female who's reduced to something as simple as "madonna" or "whore." Which brings us back to Notorious.

Notorious gives us a heroine who's racked up quite a sexual history and because of that, the man she loves refuses to trust her. Yet because of her past, the government will ask her to essentially prostitute herself to a Nazi so that they can gain information. She does this, not so much out of self-sacrificing nobility as out of hurt that her lover Devlin won't even try to talk her out of it. He is likewise unable to accept that she could do a thing like that.  But one of the many fascinating things about Notorious is that Alicia, and by extension Ingrid Bergman, is no ambiguous femme fatale. We are never left in doubt that she loves Devlin and hates what she's being asked to do. She's the sympathetic heart of the film, the sole woman in a movie that seems only to exist of men who want something from her. Well, until Leopoldine Konstantin enters the picture, but that's not exactly consolation.

It can be difficult to appreciate how intelligent and nuanced Bergman's reactions are until you break down the script and realize just how many scenes boil down to "Devlin says something nasty, Alicia is upset." Imagine how unbearable that could get with an actress who played only that single note of wounded love. But Bergman always shades her responses. In the scene where a newly sober Alicia is celebrating that fact with Devlin, Bergman gives a barely-hidden vulnerability to the sarcastic line, "I'm pretending I'm a nice, unspoiled child whose heart is full of daisies and buttercups." After Devlin cuts her down with a cold, "Nice daydream," Bergman immediately orders another drink, her expression daring him to throw another insult. Then she follows it with the achingly sad, "Why won't you believe in me, Dev, just a little?" Bergman flashes an almost imperceptible smile after that line, as if the urge to smile is a compulsion she can't fight (If you tried to count how many times Bergman smiles in this film, you would be forced to give up before the half-hour mark). In the immediate scene after, as Alicia is taunting Dev with the possibility of his attraction to her, Bergman gives just the barest touch of anger to the line, "Makes you sick all over, doesn't it?"

Give credit to Ben Hecht's excellent script for the character of Alicia. As written, she's a woman who uses her own pain as a weapon, cutting herself down with insults ("tramp," "drunk," "no-good gal") and sarcastic quips ("I'm only fishing for a little bird call from my dream man").  She would rather insult herself than wait for Devlin to do it for her. But she also wants to draw a reaction from him, some proof of his emotion for her, and if the only way she can do that is by picking a fight then she will. It's one of the cruelest love stories ever put on the film. Cruelest because it is a love story and these two need each other and we have to spend an entire film watching them hurt each other.

Bergman's performance is so crucial to this film that I can't imagine any other actress taking the part. I could picture Gloria Grahame playing up the abusive and sexual elements of the script but could Grahame seem quite so comfortable moving about this glittering world? I could see Linda Darnell or Rita Hayworth as the innocent bad girl but neither of them had Bergman's gift for emotional need. Or her ability to take an overly literal aspect of the story and make it ring true. Take an early scene where Alicia explains why she is the way she is:

"When he told me a few years ago what he was, everything went to pot. I didn't care what happened to me. Now I remember how nice he once was, how nice we both were. Very nice. It's a very curious feeling, a feeling as if something had happened to me, not to him. You see I don't have to hate him anymore - or myself."

This is an easy way out for the audience. Now they don't have to worry about sympathizing with a loose woman. She's not bad just because she enjoys sex and alcohol, she's bad because her father damaged her. But Bergman manages to save this speech. She starts out dazed, wondering. But her voice gradually grows in strength, and instead of pop psychology, we see a rare moment of Alicia understanding a relationship and feeling better because of it. 

I sometimes feel that Bergman doesn't get the credit she deserves for this performance, partly because it's Bergman and we expect her to be great, and partly because Cary Grant and Claude Rains are so flat-out, height-of-their-careers superb that the temptation is to talk more about them. Well that and Leopoldine Konstantin's ability to stop a film in its tracks just by lighting up a cigarette. I think that although Bergman has the most overtly emotional role, Grant and Rains perhaps reveal more to the audience. They have more to conceal and so we play closer attention to what they let us see. 

Hitchcock films always have revelations to offer and my latest one, upon rewatching this film is, "This ending owes a lot to Camille, doesn't it?" We have the woman who has sacrificed health, love, and security for a man who only realizes it as she lays dying. But while Camille is the story of a woman who's led a shallow life and finds nobility in her sacrifice, Notorious takes the view that maybe it's the men who ask her to make such sacrifices that are truly the sick ones. Alicia's cause may be a patriotic one, but the movie sidesteps on the issue of whether that redeems her or whether she needed to be redeemed in the first place. What we have is the story of the crimes men and women commit for love. If Senator Johnson had gone to the movies more often, he might have learned something.

This post is part of For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon. If you want to make a donation (proceeds are going towards the restoration of The White Shadow, a formerly lost film that helped kick-start the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock's career), here is the link.