Ray Milland's Noir Characters

Some actors are born noir: like Robert Ryan and Robert Mitchum, who seem all too much at home in the shadowy, treacherous worlds of their films. Some actors achieve noir—like determined, hard-working Dick Powell—and some have noir thrust upon them.

Ray Milland belongs somewhere in the latter two classes, another amiable lightweight who proved surprisingly effective on the shady side of the street. He went on to play a choice selection of anxious, hounded noir protagonists, amoral seducers—even the devil himself. Ray Milland was born Alfred Reginald Jones in Wales in 1907. The passion of his youth was riding, and by 21 he was a member of the Royal Household Cavalry. He was accomplished at fencing, boxing, and sharp-shooting, but had to quit the guards to make a living after his stepfather cut off his allowance. In the early thirties he spent a few disappointing years in Hollywood, returning to England after being dropped by MGM. He would return in 1934 with a contract at Paramount, and spend the rest of the decade as a leading man in romantic comedies like Easy Living (1937) and Billy Wilder’s directorial debut, The Major and the Minor (1942).

However, the first glimpse of his flair for vileness came as early as 1931, in the deliriously enjoyable James Cagney vehicle Blonde Crazy. Cagney and Joan Blondell play a pair of con artists who fleece their way through Depression-era hotel society. “That dirty double-crossing rat!” Cagney cries. Milland has only a few minutes of screen time, but we’re quite ready to buy him as a dirty double-crossing rat, because he’s a kind of anti-Cagney: suave, complacent, privileged, with a set of pearly whites perfect for lying through.

It was not until 1944 that Milland ventured into noir territory, and at first it was as an innocent and baffled hero (rejected by the Air Force, he was a civilian flight instructor during the War). In the beautiful, melancholy ghost story The Uninvited he is kindly and protective of the young Gail Russell, who is fatally lured by the spirits in her old family home.

Like The Uninvited, Fritz Lang’s 1944 Ministry of Fear (included in Dark Crimes: Volume 2 - TCM Vault Collection) is set in England; based on a novel by Graham Greene, it depicts wartime Britain as a place where vipers nest under tea-cozies. A network of Nazi spies infests a quaint village fete run by the “Mothers of the Free Nations;” microfilm of top-secret plans is hidden in a cake “made with real eggs;” a bomb is planted in a suitcase full of used books; a murder is framed in a parlor séance; and an arch-villain (Dan Duryea) poses as a Saville Row tailor, toying with a pair of fabric-shears. When we see Londoners in their pajamas going down into the Tube during an air-raid, the surreal vision implicates a whole nation in the practice of hiding evil and terror under a mask of normality.

Milland as Steven Neill is first seen from behind in a dark room as he watches the pendulum of a clock, waiting for the moment that will signal his release from an asylum where he was sent for the mercy killing of his sick wife. Milland is his usual smiling, jovial self, but we wonder: Is he really normal? Is he cured? When strange things begin happening as soon as he leaves the gates of the asylum, we wonder if the creepy not-rightness of everything might be his own projection onto the world.

Milland was initially hesitant about playing a tormented alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945), feeling he knew nothing about the sordid subject. He plays a frustrated would-be writer whose perfectionism prevents him from completing any project. As the movie goes along, Milland brings a more and more visceral quality to his character’s physical and emotional suffering. The little sob he gives when he discovers the bottle hidden in a ceiling light fixture; the glazed, haggard desperation of his face as he staggers up Third Avenue trying to find a pawn shop to hock his typewriter; the terrible humiliation when he’s caught stealing from a woman’s purse in a nightclub—we really feel these, and no less the laugh of pure elation as he settles in with a bottle, or the mellow grandiosity he wallows in when he can afford drinks at the bar.

Bars and booze cause trouble for Milland again in the much more enjoyable The Big Clock (1948). This rare workplace noir delves into the sinister side not of big business or politics or the law, but of an up-to-the-minute corporation ruled by efficiency, a media empire that is a world unto itself, ultimately feeding on its own energy. Based on a 1946 novel by Kenneth Fearing, John Farrow’s film feels remarkably contemporary in the 21st century, obsessed with time, work-life imbalance, and a merciless media that strips bare people’s lives. The office building in which most of the movie takes place is a brilliant noir setting, with its cavernous offices coldly decorated in cutting-edge International Style, its dark marble corridors, and the giant futuristic clock mechanism revolving at its center.

In a performance that mingles easy bonhomie with the new anxiety of his noir persona, Milland plays George Stroud, the quick-witted editor of Crimeways magazine, one organ in the massive Janoth Enterprises. In an opening voice-over, George presents himself as the archetypal noir everyman: “How did I get into this? I’m no criminal. I was a respectable citizen. When did it all go wrong?” Fittingly, George’s only actual crime is to lose track of time—he misses the train for a long-awaited family vacation because he’s busy drinking stingers with Pauline and holding forth in an elated, tipsy monologue about green clocks and the battle of man against time. As is always the case in good noir, there is a suggestion that George’s minor transgression represents a deeper subversive impulse.

While the movie dutifully presents George as devoted to his wife, Georgette (Maureen O’Sullivan), it also changes her from the book’s likeable mate to a nagging, suspicious spouse. Pauline, by contrast, is a witty, worldly dame. A convenient dissolve leaves it ambiguous whether anything “happens” between George and Pauline, but we root for him to miss his train for West Virginia. The Big Clock presents a totalitarian vision of corporate life—Janoth eavesdrops on his employees, controls all aspects of their lives, and is backed by a mute henchman (Harry Morgan, in a marvelous performance of wordless menace) sporting a black fascist-style uniform.

So Evil My Love (1948) represents, with Desert Fury (1947), the best work of English-born director Lewis Allen. Ann Todd, as a woman who is both prey and predator, achieves a miraculous blend of icy dominion and quivering subservience. Just as Mark spots her vulnerability and makes her (initially) his victim, Olivia finds her own victim in an old school friend, Susan Courtney (Geraldine Fitzgerald, all brittle nerves and threadbare prettiness). It is Mark who comes up with the idea of blackmailing the wretchedly married Courtneys, but once she gives in, Olivia takes an appalling pleasure in how easily she can manipulate her weak and foolish friend. She exults in having “the whip hand” over the icily powerful Henry Courtney, and when he counter-blackmails her with full knowledge of Mark’s criminal past, she seizes a chance to eliminate him. Mark, who had been planning to run away with Kitty (Moira Lister) once he got the blackmail money, is confronted by the realization that he actually loves Olivia and can’t abandon her.

The lovers have to pass through evil to get to goodness; their smirking and gloating are all gone, revealing a shaken sincerity. There is no simple path to reform or redemption, through a series of plot twists (starting with Kitty’s spiteful revelation) that are both genuinely shocking and densely ambiguous. Mark demonstrates how he has been changed by love when he agrees to forge some Rembrandts in order to get enough money to take Olivia away to America.

To become a better person, capable of love and compassion, he betrays his only ideal. In this film, feelings like love and guilt act like fevers or poison, getting under people’s skin and changing or destroying them from inside. Film noir is fundamentally expressionistic. The noir style externalizes inner states; shadows on the walls are projections of private fears or painful memories.

There is some debate over whether John Farrow’s Alias Nick Beal (1949) should be considered noir, but its contemporary version of the Faust story, with the devil pursuing the soul of an ambitious politician, merely gives explicit form to the forces of corruption and temptation that usually remain submerged. The eternal theme of the Faustian bargain is implicit in so many noir stories, in the moment where the protagonist takes that first wrong step, thinking that somehow he will be able to get the reward without paying the price. The Catholic Farrow’s ardent faith suffuses the film, but his Satan, like most from Milton’s onward, has far more style and charisma than the representatives of virtue pitted against him.

What makes Milland so effective is the chilling degree to which he appears genuinely inhuman. But it’s also something Milland does with his eyes, a way of tilting his head and rolling back his upper eyelids so the eyes have a creepy flat glitter like the pennies on a corpse’s face. You get the feeling that his skin would be icy to the touch —only he doesn’t like to be touched.

Dial M for Murder (1954), a role that firmly establishes his place among the classic movie villains. The film was originally released in 3D, but ironically its characters are strictly one-dimensional. Dial M seems to emanate entirely from Hitchcock’s coldly calculating side; it’s an impeccably cruel puppet theater governed by superficial plot mechanics. Grace Kelly’s falsely accused innocent is such a weakly helpless victim that it’s hard to care about her, while Robert Cummings’s supportive Other Man is a nonentity. By default, Milland as the husband scheming to murder his wife dominates the film, and he scores a perfect 10 on the hatefulness meter. But it’s a one-note performance: after gloating and smirking through all his vile machinations, he reacts to being caught with yet another chortle, denying us the satisfaction of seeing him suffer while also robbing the character of any nuance. Dial M manages to avoid any of the complicated ambivalence that a love triangle ought to produce—qualities amply on display in The River’s Edge (1957), in which Milland manages to burrow even deeper into the moral slime.

A sexy city girl, Meg (Debra Paget) is grossly out of place on the hardscrabble ranch where she lives with her husband, Ben Cameron (Anthony Quinn). You can sympathize with Ben’s frustration at her incompetence and whining, but you also can’t blame her for being fed up with finding scorpions in her slippers and mud spurting out of the shower-head. When her former lover and partner in crime, Nardo Denning (Ray Milland), shows up and whisks her into town, she luxuriates in a hotel bubble bath. Seducing her into running away with him, Nardo plies her with dancing, cocktails, and flattery, all spread out on a bed of suave lies about his earlier betrayal. After Ben agrees to guide the lovers on an arduous journey across the Mexican border, the film strikes out into the wilderness, where the true characters of all three are laid bare and they find resolution and renewal.

This classical conceit brings the movie closer to westerns, with their journeys that test and reward both physical and psychological stamina, than to film noir, in which people driven into extreme settings are usually diminished and ultimately destroyed. But the accrual of deceit, betrayal, and manipulative power games gives the film a dark cast, spiked with mordant humor and brisk, streamlined pacing. Nardo Denning, who rolls into the movie in a pale pink Thunderbird (actually Dwan’s car), wearing a cream suit and burgundy ascot, is the apotheosis of all Ray Milland’s dirty double-crossing rats.

With his syrupy voice, darting eyes, and cat-that-ate-the-canary smile, he looks exactly like a man carrying a million dollars he stole from his best friend—which he is. His rival sums him up succinctly: “If you were on a desert island with that guy, and there was nothing but rocks, pretty soon he’d have all the rocks moved over to his side of the beach.” The denouement that follows feels contrived in some ways: for Nardo’s last-minute change of heart to be convincing we would first have to believe he has one—though it is filled with poetic justice and poetic imagery. The loss or destruction of ill-gotten money is something of a noir cliché (The Killing), but few examples are more striking than the beautiful shot of cash fluttering like leaves down a hillside, or a raven—omen of death—holding a crumpled $100 bill in its beak. Most powerful of all is the sight of Ben, who was willing to burn thousands of dollars to save his wife, wading into the river grabbing up handfuls of bills—until Meg shames him into dropping them.

Ray Milland was one of the old guard, a living relic from the studio system days. He didn’t hide his disdain for the mumbling method actors of the 1950s and 1960s. “They look and sound like bums,” he told one columnist, “and they would probably be bums if they didn’t get acting work.” He was quite vocal about the death of Hollywood, complaining to reporters about the end of glamour, and how the new generation of actors were just “whores” selling to the highest bidder. Milland never warmed to the modern actors, but he grew to enjoy the freedom offered by the new era. The demise of the studio structure also allowed him to pursue his real passion: directing. “Do you think I want to be an actor for the rest of my life?” he told the Associated Press.

Directing, he said, meant “I wouldn’t have to look at myself in a mirror anymore.” In 1950 he told Hollywood columnist Gene Handsaker that he’d begged Paramount to let him direct, but was told that he was paid a large salary to act, and that he shouldn’t make waves. But he found acting less appealing after winning his Oscar for The Lost Weekend (1945). “You’re always hoping the next role will be interesting,” he told Handsaker, “and it seldom is.” Milland’s philosophy about filmmaking was simple enough. “It is usually much easier to make a good picture than it is to make a bad one,” he wrote, “because the good one inevitably has the one indispensable element, a good story. When you have that, you don’t need stars, just good actors.” “Picture making isn’t always goofy,” he wrote. “Studio craftsmen and technicians can build anything, from a castle to a cargo ship. They can reproduce hurricanes and monsters, disembodied dreams and ghosts. They can turn ugliness into beauty, and make swans look like pelicans.”

Milland plays Baldwin, following a tradition found in noir, when soft-spoken family men have to fight when backed against a wall. At times Baldwin seems inspired by the barriers of civilization breaking down. Baldwin’s apparent love of chaos might’ve been a nice area to explore, but Milland only had about 90 minutes to play with. Besides, Panic in Year Zero (1962) is a potboiler, not a sociopolitical tract. Milland directs it as such, cranking up the suspense and keeping the pace brisk. Considering the film was produced by the AIP team of Sam Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, photographed by Gilbert Warrenton who had been working since the silent era, Milland did a lot with a little.

He’s helped by the presence of Jean Hagen as his wife (she once played a noir dolly in The Asphalt Jungle), and he also gets a solid performance from a pre-beach party Frankie Avalon as his son. Rather than the usual theremin music heard in this sort of film, Les Baxter fills the end-of-the-world scenario with a screaming horn section and syncopated rhythms that might have been right at home in noir. Panic in Year Zero may well be Milland’s best work as a director, just because of its sheer pulsating energy. Yet, the ending is strangely downbeat. One of the soldiers mutters, “There go five who aren’t radioactive,” suggesting the sort of upside-down world that could only happen in noir. The Les Baxter horns start screaming again, and Baldwin is shown driving his family back home along a dark, empty highway, to whatever remains of Los Angeles.

X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963) had more in common with H.G. Wells than James M. Cain, but this tale of a man who discovers a serum for super vision has a kinship with noir films like D.O.A. (1950), as Dr. James Xavier (Milland) races against time while his hyper-powerful eyeballs deteriorate. Harkening back to Tyrone Power’s character in Nightmare Alley (1947), Xavier ends up working with a crooked carny owner (Don Rickles), using his extreme vision to bilk customers. At the film’s end, goaded by an overzealous tent show revivalist, he actually plucks his own eyes out. There is a legend, possibly apocryphal, that the original script had Milland scream after blinding himself, “I can still see!” X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes still works remarkably well 50 years later, thanks to Corman’s breathless tempo, the florid cinematography of Floyd Crosby, and of course, Milland’s intense performance. He may be surrounded by lab equipment, but Xavier’s desperation is decidedly noir. It’s not a stretch to say Xavier owes a bit to Milland’s character in The Lost Weekend.

As he grows addicted to the eye serum, Xavier has occasional fits that recall the famous delirium tremens encounter with the bat. He can see right through us, right into the muck of our gross American ways, and he sees what he secretly may have suspected all along. He sees into people’s bodies and identifies illnesses, which in turn allows him to see the bumbling of our medical practitioners. He sees into the sleazy underbelly of carny life, and the overall crookedness of America. What he sees disgusts him, but he can’t stop looking. He’s the ultimate voyeur, and the entire world has become his “rear window.”

Noir was only one component of Ray Milland's long career, and a somewhat unlikely success for an affable, conservative family man who titled his memoirs Wide-Eyed in Babylon. But most of the roles for which he’s best known and most admired were on the devil’s turf, where he proved a narrow-eyed, remarkably adept navigator of the crimeways. -"The Noir Career of Ray Milland" by Imogen Sara Smith for "Noir City" magazine (Spring 2014)