Siodmak's Phantom Lady: Dark Psychosis

Authors such as Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain pull you in with pitch-perfect dialogue and a way of describing the world that makes readers smile and aspiring writers cry. So with the summer reading season upon us, there’s no better time to take a walk down rain-dampened city streets with lovers, killers, sharp private detectives, shadowy figures in fedoras and smart dames with plenty of ulterior motives. Source: www.concordmonitor.com

Produced by Joan Harrison for Universal, Siodmak’s 'Phantom Lady' premiered at Loew’s State Theater in New York City on February 17, 1944. The film’s plot was based on a 1942 novel by Cornell Woolrich, but it changed both the novel’s original story line and character motivation in significant ways. With the figure of the psychotic artist Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), a fascist modernist in thin disguise, Siodmak’s Phantom Lady added a dimension to Woolrich’s original conception that not only permitted new narrative possibilities but also struck the political nerve of the time. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward praise Phantom Lady for Siodmak’s exquisite manipulation of mise-en-scène. The film’s atmospheric images of New York streets and jazz clubs, of jails and apartment interiors, of desire and excess, they argue, recall the iconography of Weimar cinema.

Assisted by his cinematographer, Woody Bredell, Siodmak, in particular in the jazz club sequence, “brilliantly interweaves expressionistic decor with American idiom. If watched without sound, the scene could be from one of the classic German films of the 1920s.” Whether one considers the film’s use of canted angles, disjointed continuity, expressive close-ups, visual allegory or synecdoche, spotlights, or chiaroscuro effects; whether one brings into focus the film’s iconography of schizophrenia, hysteria, paranoia, or sexual stimulation —all might be understood as part of a performative recollection of Weimar expressionism authored by a non-expressionist exile-stranded in Hollywood.

Thomas Gomez, Ella Raines and Franchot Tone in "Phantom Lady" (1944) directed by Robert Siodmak

For Jack Marlow, modern technology signifies the root of all evil. Insisting on the authority of the original, the here and now of the genius work, Marlow considers modern machines of reproduction to be catalysts of aesthetic banality; they enable an ominous dominance of Zivilisation over Kultur. Nazi cinema privileged conductors of explicitly “masculine” music such as Bach and Beethoven. Excessive masculinity, driven to the point of murderous paranoia, is also at the core of Marlow’s aesthetic project. Marlow’s New York studio, brightly lit and hygienically cleansed of all traces of modern civilization, is populated by a variety of sculptures that clearly recall the monumental work of Nazi artists such as Arno Breker and Joseph Thorak. For Marlow authentic art, just like politics, expresses the will to power and form. Liberalism’s valorization of justice, equality, and freedom thwart the political calling of authentic art. It causes Marlow to launch a double attack on modern life, one against the postaesthetic rule of mass art and diversion and one against liberal democracy and the equalizing rationality of social engineering.

As if temporarily slipping into the role of the film’s director, Marlow seems to manipulate for his own purposes what the film at other moments employed in order to unmask Marlow’s jargon of authenticity. After Marlow and Kansas finally discover the phantom lady, Marlow—panicked by the unraveling of the case—pretends to call Inspector Burgess and inform him about Henderson’s innocence. To do so, he positions himself behind the windowpane of a gas station, tinkering with a public telephone without properly dialing. The camera alternates between Kansas’s point of view, who is situated in the car outside and observes Marlow’s gestures as if projected onto a big screen.

Siodmak’s Phantom Lady recognizes lack and fragmentation as the modern hallmark of subjectivity and human reciprocity. Instead of signifying an ominous intrusion of the uncanny, the splitting of sounds and sights can offer antidotes to Marlow’s deadly aesthetics of closure, uniqueness, and total presence. The gas station sequence, in this sense, testifies to the contradictory ways in which Marlow—like his fascist predecessors in 1930s and 1940s Europe—seeks to incorporate modern tools and experiences into a vitalistic rejection of civil society and modern liberalism. Switching back and forth between Kansas’s space of viewership and Marlow’s cinema of simulated speech, camera and editing expose Marlow as a dexterous forger of authenticity and existential resolution. Marlow’s mise-en-scène, as seen by Kansas, is a counterfeit in multiple ways. What in Kansas’s perspective appears to be a silent cinema generating powerful sounds of redemption is revealed by the film’s alternating shots as a sound cinema producing vicious silence.

Film noir thus projects male lack and paranoia —that which he cannot tolerate in himself— onto the female other as deformation, fragmentation, and impediment. As Silverman summarizes: “The female voice, like the female body, is more frequently obliged to display than to conceal lack—to protect the male subject from knowledge of his own castration.” -"The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood" (2002) by Lutz Koepnick

Carol confers with the condemned Scott in silhouette shots in a dark prison room that seems like nothing from real life. An unadorned set for a lonely elevated rail station becomes as threatening as a haunted house. What makes 'Phantom Lady' noir is the unhappy, unhinged underworld that Carol's investigations uncover. Characters suffer from depression or are psychotic. Otherwise decent citizens are easily bribed to condemn an innocent man. Only Carol's refusal to give up stands in the way of Scott's execution. Joan Harrison built on this early success to continue producing with and without Alfred Hitchcock, eventually working on over two hundred TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Source: www.dvdtalk.com