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My horoscope said this was going to be a bad day
Beverly Michaels enters Wicked Woman (1953) like she knows it's a lie. Never mind the down-and-dirty warnings crooned over the title sequence by Herb Jeffries, the young woman with her platinum blonde head tipped against the open window of an interstate bus doesn't look like a siren pair of snake eyes; she looks like most people on a long bus ride, tired and bored. Disembarking in some nameless middle-American whistle-stop, she fascinates first a ticket clerk and then a storefront peeping tom just by seeming to exist unapologetically larger than life, a long-stemmed drink of water in scorching white, carrying her suitcase and her record player and her loose-limbed, tight-clothed body with the same indifferent stride, eating up the miles and men's eyes. And as soon as she's alone in her dingily furnished room that wouldn't be worth its six bucks a week in advance even if she didn't have to fight her fellow boarders for the bathroom, she wipes her wrist across her forehead with a grimace of exhaustion and disgust and all of a sudden we see the work of looking that hot and that cool at the same time, its meager dividends and its absolute necessity when a girl has nothing else to pay her way. In other words, I have finally seen the movie I knew had to exist somewhere since I first started paying attention to the increasingly unsurprising range of women in film noir: a clear-eyed, head-on deconstruction of the femme fatale. Sometimes a heroine isn't a good girl. Quite literally, sometimes she can't afford to be. Your call if it makes her then what the title claims.
Without this crucial shift in perspective, as thrilling and enraging as so many confrontations of patriarchy are, Wicked Woman might be nothing more than a fast, cheap, tantalizingly genderbent revision of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), this time with Michaels' Billie Nash in the role of the tough yet vulnerable drifter hooking up in love and crime with the unsatisfied spouse of her amiable older employer, respectively Richard Egan and Evelyn Scott as Matt and Dora Bannister, the chiseled hunk of a bartender who married into a half-share of the bar and his bookkeeping, day-drinking wife who props it up in more senses than one. Murder is so often the noir go-to, it's genuinely refreshing that the lovers here opt to cut out the third wheel with fraud, relying on a shell game of signatures and double shots to get the bar sold out from underneath its fuddled co-owner for a getaway-funding $25,000. Of course it complicates matters that Matt isn't quite as decisive or Dora as disposable as either of them first appears. But then again, neither is Billie as connivingly in control as she'll be blamed for. Officially five-nine in her bare feet and eye-to-eye with her six-foot co-star in half-heels, Michaels makes a formidable screen presence, her dark-lashed baby-face never more sullen and her skeptical voice never flatter than when she says of the groper she just smashed to the floor with a drinks tray, "He was reaching for something and slipped," but the script co-written by director Russell Rouse and producer Clarence Greene knows she's fighting uphill. Scene after scene delineates the transactional nature of Billie's every interaction with the male world, with the price of everything from a hot meal to an honest job calculated from the bottom line of her body. "A dinner don't entitle you to no special favors, buster," she snaps at Charlie Borg, the gnomelike tailor across the hall played by Percy Helton in a perspiring tour-de-force of creep romanticism, but she has no choice but to make nice with the lechy little man when she needs the spot cash for the right uniform to hustle drinks in: "Doll yourself up—wear a peasant blouse, an off-the-shoulder sweater, tight skirt—you know what they want." She may be a waitress, not a B-girl, but she still needs to be as much of an incitement to thirst as the bowls of pretzels set out on the bar. Her job involves fending off the clientele as much as serving them, deflecting but not rejecting their endless flirtations with brush-offs that sound like come-ons: "No lessons from me, buster. I don't play games." Touch up those roots with the toothbrush burn of peroxide, shave those legs that go on until a metaphor stops them, smile instead of breaking a touchy-feely regular's wrist, it's worth $7.25 a night in tips. That groper who got an earful of shot glass was the man from the employment agency, trying to collect a little extra on the side of his commission. No wonder a girl locks herself in at night with her dog-eared astrology magazines and the half-empty bottle on her dresser and her favorite record playing the lifeline of "Acapulco Nights," slouches to the old refrigerator in the morning to face the day with a swig of mouthwash and a can of beer. No wonder she sets her sights on square-jawed, heroically muscled Matt, a man she might actually want to touch her, especially if he can take her away to the bullfights and cafés and serenades. She lets him in on the fantasy like a fetish, sounding out each syllable into a ticky, breathy incantation—"Mex-i-co Cit-y, A-ca-pul-co"—until he crushes her to his chest, she winds her long arms around his neck and clutches his dark hair and they kiss like starving, fevered love, or at least like desperation. He's her white knight, her meal ticket, her sunk cost fallacy. Even if she loves him, she'll use him as ruthlessly as herself or anyone else within reach if it'll get her to her dream of Acapulco, the place where she imagines everything in her squalid life could be all right. Maybe that's the sign of a "dirty rotten tramp" or a "little floozy," but when all this two-bit poshlost is said and done, Wicked Woman never forgets that the wellspring of Billie's wiles isn't greed or entitlement or cruelty, it's survival. "Maybe later we can go to Mexico," Matt offers once with well-intentioned conciliation, and Billie rounds on him with stark, exhausted fury. "There's never any later," she growls, every fresh dead end, flophouse indignity, make-nice smile suddenly raw in her voice. "Believe me, I know. You bum around from town to town, living in stinking furnished rooms, and there's never any later!" I've seen neo-noirs that didn't remember that.
The ending of Wicked Woman is a peculiar feel-good gut-punch, like a curdled pre-Code. Violently rejected by not-so-knightly Matt after he catches her—in a truly gross tableau of safe-for-work but unambiguous sexual coercion—paying the price of crawly Charlie's silence on the fraudulent sale, Billie departs the film as she came into it, one-way on a Trailways bus from nowhere in particular to wherever she can get. She wears the same all-white ensemble, carries the same suitcase and record player, leans on the counter as carelessly as if we hadn't just seen her a scene ago, crying her eyes out with the wrenched-open anguish of someone who'd almost managed to fool herself that she didn't have a heart to break. As she settles herself aboard the bus to Kansas City, her swinging legs catch the eye of some gum-chewing hick whose reaction shot nearly knocks his hat off the back of his head; as he hastily tries to make himself presentable, Billie turns the highest voltage of her girlish smile on him and the theme song rises over the closing shot of the bus hitting the road—she'll up and leave tomorrow, take all in pay for sorrow, find a new man and start all over again. It's amorally triumphant, especially when set against the equivalent last scene of the Bannisters trapped in their broken marriage like the worst stereotypes of American philandering and nagging. Billie got out free and clear and she hasn't even been punished by the loss of anything more than money she never had her hands on and a man who let her down first. But it's also sad and cyclical, that infinitely receding later she was so desperately trying to break out of. Acapulco doesn't look any closer from Kansas City than it did from her last port of call and you doubt it'll look much different once she gets to New York. Another ticket, another town, another sucker. She's such a big woman. Her world is so terribly small.
I had wanted to see Wicked Woman ever since discovering Beverly Michaels in East Side, West Side (1949), where she beat up Van Heflin in the front seat of his car; I appreciate that it aired this weekend on TCM's Noir Alley and I also appreciate that it exists in varying formats of public domain. Budgeted like one of its own characters sprung for the production, shot for maximum seaminess by Eddie Fitzgerald and studio-bound except when the proto-vérité locations would look seedier, it ranks among the B-est of B-noirs I have seen, but instead of tipping over into camp or exploitation, it hits a nerve of unexpected reality and leaves the audience firmly on the side of its heroine, who at least knows she deserves better. Let me dream a little, maybe she got it someday. Michaels certainly did, marrying Rouse in 1955 and by all accounts enjoying a well-loved life as wife, mother, and eventually cult icon. I can see why. This starting over brought to you by my later backers at Patreon.
Without this crucial shift in perspective, as thrilling and enraging as so many confrontations of patriarchy are, Wicked Woman might be nothing more than a fast, cheap, tantalizingly genderbent revision of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), this time with Michaels' Billie Nash in the role of the tough yet vulnerable drifter hooking up in love and crime with the unsatisfied spouse of her amiable older employer, respectively Richard Egan and Evelyn Scott as Matt and Dora Bannister, the chiseled hunk of a bartender who married into a half-share of the bar and his bookkeeping, day-drinking wife who props it up in more senses than one. Murder is so often the noir go-to, it's genuinely refreshing that the lovers here opt to cut out the third wheel with fraud, relying on a shell game of signatures and double shots to get the bar sold out from underneath its fuddled co-owner for a getaway-funding $25,000. Of course it complicates matters that Matt isn't quite as decisive or Dora as disposable as either of them first appears. But then again, neither is Billie as connivingly in control as she'll be blamed for. Officially five-nine in her bare feet and eye-to-eye with her six-foot co-star in half-heels, Michaels makes a formidable screen presence, her dark-lashed baby-face never more sullen and her skeptical voice never flatter than when she says of the groper she just smashed to the floor with a drinks tray, "He was reaching for something and slipped," but the script co-written by director Russell Rouse and producer Clarence Greene knows she's fighting uphill. Scene after scene delineates the transactional nature of Billie's every interaction with the male world, with the price of everything from a hot meal to an honest job calculated from the bottom line of her body. "A dinner don't entitle you to no special favors, buster," she snaps at Charlie Borg, the gnomelike tailor across the hall played by Percy Helton in a perspiring tour-de-force of creep romanticism, but she has no choice but to make nice with the lechy little man when she needs the spot cash for the right uniform to hustle drinks in: "Doll yourself up—wear a peasant blouse, an off-the-shoulder sweater, tight skirt—you know what they want." She may be a waitress, not a B-girl, but she still needs to be as much of an incitement to thirst as the bowls of pretzels set out on the bar. Her job involves fending off the clientele as much as serving them, deflecting but not rejecting their endless flirtations with brush-offs that sound like come-ons: "No lessons from me, buster. I don't play games." Touch up those roots with the toothbrush burn of peroxide, shave those legs that go on until a metaphor stops them, smile instead of breaking a touchy-feely regular's wrist, it's worth $7.25 a night in tips. That groper who got an earful of shot glass was the man from the employment agency, trying to collect a little extra on the side of his commission. No wonder a girl locks herself in at night with her dog-eared astrology magazines and the half-empty bottle on her dresser and her favorite record playing the lifeline of "Acapulco Nights," slouches to the old refrigerator in the morning to face the day with a swig of mouthwash and a can of beer. No wonder she sets her sights on square-jawed, heroically muscled Matt, a man she might actually want to touch her, especially if he can take her away to the bullfights and cafés and serenades. She lets him in on the fantasy like a fetish, sounding out each syllable into a ticky, breathy incantation—"Mex-i-co Cit-y, A-ca-pul-co"—until he crushes her to his chest, she winds her long arms around his neck and clutches his dark hair and they kiss like starving, fevered love, or at least like desperation. He's her white knight, her meal ticket, her sunk cost fallacy. Even if she loves him, she'll use him as ruthlessly as herself or anyone else within reach if it'll get her to her dream of Acapulco, the place where she imagines everything in her squalid life could be all right. Maybe that's the sign of a "dirty rotten tramp" or a "little floozy," but when all this two-bit poshlost is said and done, Wicked Woman never forgets that the wellspring of Billie's wiles isn't greed or entitlement or cruelty, it's survival. "Maybe later we can go to Mexico," Matt offers once with well-intentioned conciliation, and Billie rounds on him with stark, exhausted fury. "There's never any later," she growls, every fresh dead end, flophouse indignity, make-nice smile suddenly raw in her voice. "Believe me, I know. You bum around from town to town, living in stinking furnished rooms, and there's never any later!" I've seen neo-noirs that didn't remember that.
The ending of Wicked Woman is a peculiar feel-good gut-punch, like a curdled pre-Code. Violently rejected by not-so-knightly Matt after he catches her—in a truly gross tableau of safe-for-work but unambiguous sexual coercion—paying the price of crawly Charlie's silence on the fraudulent sale, Billie departs the film as she came into it, one-way on a Trailways bus from nowhere in particular to wherever she can get. She wears the same all-white ensemble, carries the same suitcase and record player, leans on the counter as carelessly as if we hadn't just seen her a scene ago, crying her eyes out with the wrenched-open anguish of someone who'd almost managed to fool herself that she didn't have a heart to break. As she settles herself aboard the bus to Kansas City, her swinging legs catch the eye of some gum-chewing hick whose reaction shot nearly knocks his hat off the back of his head; as he hastily tries to make himself presentable, Billie turns the highest voltage of her girlish smile on him and the theme song rises over the closing shot of the bus hitting the road—she'll up and leave tomorrow, take all in pay for sorrow, find a new man and start all over again. It's amorally triumphant, especially when set against the equivalent last scene of the Bannisters trapped in their broken marriage like the worst stereotypes of American philandering and nagging. Billie got out free and clear and she hasn't even been punished by the loss of anything more than money she never had her hands on and a man who let her down first. But it's also sad and cyclical, that infinitely receding later she was so desperately trying to break out of. Acapulco doesn't look any closer from Kansas City than it did from her last port of call and you doubt it'll look much different once she gets to New York. Another ticket, another town, another sucker. She's such a big woman. Her world is so terribly small.
I had wanted to see Wicked Woman ever since discovering Beverly Michaels in East Side, West Side (1949), where she beat up Van Heflin in the front seat of his car; I appreciate that it aired this weekend on TCM's Noir Alley and I also appreciate that it exists in varying formats of public domain. Budgeted like one of its own characters sprung for the production, shot for maximum seaminess by Eddie Fitzgerald and studio-bound except when the proto-vérité locations would look seedier, it ranks among the B-est of B-noirs I have seen, but instead of tipping over into camp or exploitation, it hits a nerve of unexpected reality and leaves the audience firmly on the side of its heroine, who at least knows she deserves better. Let me dream a little, maybe she got it someday. Michaels certainly did, marrying Rouse in 1955 and by all accounts enjoying a well-loved life as wife, mother, and eventually cult icon. I can see why. This starting over brought to you by my later backers at Patreon.
no subject
Percy Helton's performance is pretty amazing. (I always think of him as drunk Santa from Miracle on 34th Street.)
no subject
Thank you!
After the great scene of Billie's camaraderie with Dora when they first meet, it made me kind of sad when Billie went for Matt, and I imagined a version of the film with Billie and Dora as the lovers conspiring against the husband.
10/10, would watch your version. It is possible the correct chaser for this film is the Wachowskis' Bound (1996).
Percy Helton's performance is pretty amazing. (I always think of him as drunk Santa from Miracle on 34th Street.)
Oh, my God, I haven't seen Miracle on 34th Street in decades, apparently I no longer recognize anyone from that film except Edmund Gwenn. I feel I should be able to spot Helton anywhere now, though. I respect a person who commits that completely to the sleaze.
no subject
When you hit brilliant, big cat, you hit Brilliant.
no subject
Oh, mow. Love.
no subject
A lot of places but............
no subject
I think the circumstances of 1953 might have been a little different in that regard.
no subject
she fascinates first a ticket clerk and then a storefront peeping tom just by seeming to exist unapologetically larger than life, a long-stemmed drink of water in scorching white, carrying her suitcase and her record player and her loose-limbed, tight-clothed body with the same indifferent stride, eating up the miles and men's eyes. ---I mean, I can hear that as voiceover narration.
And as soon as she's alone in her dingily furnished room that wouldn't be worth its six bucks a week in advance even if she didn't have to fight her fellow boarders for the bathroom, she wipes her wrist across her forehead with a grimace of exhaustion and disgust and all of a sudden we see the work of looking that hot and that cool at the same time --Brava. Okay, reading the rest now...
no subject
Thank you! It was such a vivid film.
no subject
He's her white knight, her meal ticket, her sunk cost fallacy --this is making **me** hungry, making **me** desperate
"There's never any later" --My heart ...
She's such a big woman. Her world is so terribly small --It makes you want to jump into the film and brainstorm with her about other strategies... I mean, as a story, the film is right to do what it did, but if she's a person, we want a better future for her.
Let me dream a little, maybe she got it someday. --That's what I'm saying!
no subject
Thank you.
I mean, as a story, the film is right to do what it did, but if she's a person, we want a better future for her.
That's a well-identified distinction. I have to pin my hopes on whatever happens to her beyond the frame of the story, where by definition an audience cannot follow.