The Woman on Pier 13
Tonight’s movie is, I guarantee, one of the strangest you’ll ever see. It’s The Woman on Pier 13, released in 1950 by RKO and starring Robert Ryan and Laraine Day. The title is strictly meaningless, except insofar as the movie has a woman in it, and takes place in San Francisco where they have a waterfront with more than a dozen piers. You’ll get a much better idea of what it is if I tell you its original title, which was I Married a Communist. That title, which was removed after a few weeks of preview screenings, catches exactly the right flavour of trashy hysteria that fills the movie.
The story tells of a rising executive in the shipping industry whose younger days, back in the 30s, had featured an active involvement in the American Communist Party. It’s a past that comes back to haunt him when Communist Party brass decide they can use him to create labour havoc on the waterfront, and start blackmailing him. And there are lots of additional complications in this amazing story. Ryan is a newly-wed, whose courtship of Laraine Day was a whirlwind affair in which they never really got to know each other—and so there’s this kind of horror-movie plot where you, as a young wife, discover that your new husband is somebody much different and much scarier than you thought he was, resulting in the screaming tabloid headline “I Married a Communist!” Also in the past Ryan was involved not just with the Communist Party but with a fellow-travelling young woman, Janis Carter, whom he had dropped but who now shows up again to create trouble for him. Then there’s Laraine Day’s puppyish younger brother John Agar, who gets twisted around the little finger of that sophisticated former lover of Ryan, and duped into becoming a union troublemaker.
Yikes, I don’t know where to start in cataloguing the mindblowing absurdities of this movie. Probably the most ludicrous single thing is the film’s conception of American Communist Party organization and ruthlessness. The commies, headed up by wonderfully brutal and callous local Party chief Thomas Gomez, behave exactly like the robot monsters painted by anti-Communist rhetoric of the time. Deaf to pity, compassion, or indeed any feeling at all in his tyrannical manipulation of people for the Party’s fiendish destructive ends, Gomez is constantly telling people not to be ruled by emotion, and not to whine about whatever horrendous impossible task he’s giving them.
No maniacal gangster boss is as frightening as this cold, impassive, merciless monster. And it’s an appropriate comparison, because what these communists are is essentially gangsters. They intimidate and murder and tyrannize, they drop people in the ocean and run them over with cars and throw them out of high windows, and they skulk around in warehouses and waterfronts carrying snub-nosed .38s exactly like hoods and crooks. They’ve also got secret messages and networks of agents and sinister plots and all this other Junior-G-Man stuff that hurls the movie irretrievably onto the naive level of Saturday-matinee serials not entirely suitable for grownups.
This wholesale adoption of crime-movie conventions of character and action and setting is one of the things that gives The Woman on Pier 13 its pungent noir flavour—especially when those conventions are often staged in the full-blooded noir visual style of expressionist menace. The ridiculousness of treating a political movement as if were just another version of the criminal underworld is obviously something that never occurs to the movie for a minute.
The film’s rabid, strident anti-communist rhetoric is something unusual in a Hollywood movie. Not that there aren’t lots of anti-communist Hollywood movies, but most of them don’t go all the way to shrill propaganda, as this one does. In fact the movie was a notable flop in 1950, proving that audiences rarely enjoy being preached at when the preaching gets too obvious. And this overinsistence is accompanied by a general cheesiness in the whole movie—a quality that’s certainly augmented nowadays when the versions in circulation are of a distinctly second-rate visual quality. The movie looks even cheaper than it is, but this only adds to that inimitable B-movie effect. Think of it as a somewhat upmarket Ed Wood movie about the communist menace and you’ll be pretty much on the right track.
From the perspective of film noir, what’s most fascinating about The Woman on Pier 13 is how hysteria about communism translates so effortlessly into the language and style of film noir. Fear of the communist menace becomes just another version of noir anxiety and paranoia in an environment of nightmarish helplessness. What happens to Robert Ryan here is the extremely noir experience of humming along in life with everything looking great when some earlier, long-buried, mistake rises up and bites him, “out of the past,” just like with Robert Mitchum in the movie of that title. The political content of the situation may obscure this resemblance a little, but that expressionist/noir sense of never being safe, of always being vulnerable to some fateful principle of doom, usually connected with personal guilt or weakness, is here in full-blown form. And, as I said, the style pitches in 100%, with lots of sequences that look pure noir.
[screen movie]
When The Woman on Pier 13 was released by RKO in 1950, the studio was owned and controlled by multi-millionaire Howard Hughes—a figure of legendary strangeness and possible insanity. Under the seven years of his stewardship between 1948 and 1955, production ground almost to a halt, nobody could do anything without Hughes’s approval and nobody could ever find him to get it, and the once-proud studio was converted into simply a valuable tax write-off for the tycoon’s other businesses. Of course it was a bad period everywhere in Hollywood, with box-office returns falling off from all-time highs to all-time lows as television came into the picture. In fact the anxiety caused by constant box-office crises during the noir period is probably one factor contributing to the nature of noir.
Another was the anxiety and paranoia surrounding the communist witch-hunts in Hollywood. Together with a cornucopia of weirdnesses, Hughes had violent anti-communist feelings, and he deliberately set up The Woman on Pier 13 as a loud statement of “loyalty” to America and hatred of commie bastards. It had been three years since the first round of the House Unamerican Activities Committee investigations into communists in Hollywood, and all the studios were running scared and blacklisting personnel and getting employees to sign “loyalty oaths”—though not all of them shared Hughes’s deliberate appetite for the sport. From ground level, the idea that you, as somebody working in Hollywood, might be pulled out of your Beverly Hills swimming pool, hauled in front of a Kafkaesque tribunal, and compelled to denounce your friends or lose everything, is of course itself the scenario of a film noir.
The fear of communists burrowing from within might look like a political condition, but it makes the most sense as a psychological condition, even a pathological one. Probably the best place to see this in American cinema is in the B-movie science-fiction boom of the 1950s, where the fear of communists tends to get routinely translated into the fear of bug-eyed aliens. A movie like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a paranoid masterpiece of anti-communist anxiety, where your neighbours, your friends, even your family members might look all right, but are really secretly alien pods devoid of emotions and working for some dreadful communal purpose. And that’s really the same paranoia as you see in The Woman on Pier 13, where there’s this constant sense of shock that in, say, Christine’s ritzy cocktail parties, all the guests in tuxedoes and mink stoles are actually communist agents, or that on the midway the guy in the booth opposite that you ask to help you is another commie in disguise.
Similarly, it’s shocking to think that these pitiless communist gangsters are blackmailing and killing people all around you, and you had no idea! Even their resemblance to gangsters is upsetting, because you can understand gangsters, they’re motivated by greed and lust for individual power, but who can understand communists, with their talk about the common man and economic exploitation?
Equally symptomatic is the way that communist hysteria gets mixed up with sexual hysteria. This confusion of hysterias is a common characteristic of all kinds of melodrama, where tension is always arising from the fact that things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, and there’s a kind of smothered panic that things are going to go out of control. So one set of fears overlaps with and reinforces another set of fears that, at least in practical terms, it has nothing to do with. In The Woman on Pier 13 it’s extremely strange how fear of infection and domination by communism seems to be connected with, and even the same as, infection and domination by women. In the first place a lot of emphasis is placed on Robert Ryan as “a real man,” meaning a tough, strong, dominant man—even a violent man. When communists and women start removing his power, it’s not just a political crisis, it’s a crisis of his masculinity too. His communism in the old days was a matter of hard times acting on immature masculinity—he got involved in street fights and other violent labor actions. It’s not his violence that’s a problem, it’s what cause he’s devoting his violence to—now he’s got his values straightened out and is going to be strong for capitalism, which is a good thing. In the end, of course, he can’t actually be rehabilitated. The best he can do is to use that bull-headed aggression in charging into a hail of bullets and die killing a commie.
But somehow his communism is mixed up with his involvement with Christine, somehow maybe it’s her fault—just as it’s her fault that young Don is going commie. That is, somehow his mistaken committment to the communist political movement and his mistaken committment to this woman of scary intelligence and sophistication are the same thing. The communist threat and the threat of the femme fatale get conflated in a way that has nothing to do with history or experience but everything to do with a common source for both psychological anxieties. At the same time the movie wants to keep women in the role of impulsive, emotional creatures, so Christine is in love with both men and is finally a bad communist because she has feelings.
Then there’s the Laraine Day character: her husband is keeping a secret from her. Is he having an affair with another woman? Could he even have killed somebody? Well, actually he did, but that’s not the problem. No, it’s something even more shameful: he’s being blackmailed by the commies to sabotage labour negotiations. And when she wants to penetrate communist lines she has to forsake her “natural” place as virtuous wife and play the role of vamp who wants her husband murdered: she has to be a treacherous and libidinous woman to enter the world of communism.
Altogether the movie is a delirious screech of anxiety and hostility, whose total overreaction is exactly the measure of its trashiness and kitschiness. The fact that the whole stylistic mechanism of film noir is invoked to carry this hysteria is just the icing on the cake.