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I'm a public servant—I'm supposed to hear your troubles
If I were given to lists of favorite movies, The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) would go in my top drawer of noir. It isn't the bleakest, the trickiest, or the most subversive, but it's so beautifully shape-changing, a Pyrrhic triumph of romanticism for the shadow side where no one, not even the story, casts anything as simple as a split.
It's a small-town night in southern California, after hours in a maze of municipal offices where the cleaning lady is almost the only person soaking up the hollows of desk-light. White-dressed, white-gloved, demurely decorated as befits the companion of a wealthy aunt lately troubled by prowlers and the scare of a break-in, the woman who gave her name as Thelma Jordon (Barbara Stanwyck) is recognized by the man who asked for it as "a lady in distress, a pretty lady. Distress is my specialty tonight." Like so many of the things people say in this picture, it's not entirely false and it's not the whole truth. Looking for a chief investigator, she's found instead an assistant district attorney doing his best Sydney Carton, which is to say that he's a lawyer and he's drunk—after five years of playing second fiddle to his in-laws in his own marriage, Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) is spending his anniversary with a quart of rye instead of his wife and trying to nerve himself up to the recommended remedy of picking up a "dame." His chances with the politely disengaged stranger seem slim to a slap in the face, especially after a pass of such appalling ineptitude that it testifies better than any protests to his normal fidelity, but the transparency of his loneliness topped by the insistence of his offer to fix the parking ticket she got for wasting her time with him salvage the evening to the surprising point of a passionate kiss, right before Thelma punts him and his three-sheets professions of love out of her car and back to the wife she's correctly divined is waiting up for him, turning away on her pillow to pretend she hasn't seen her husband as plastered as he is. As benders go, it's not much to brag about, and its epilogue by daylight between an unruffled Thelma and a sincerely apologetic Cleve doesn't seem to invite a reprise. Nonetheless, when her husband meets her preparations for their traditional summer at the beach house with the diffident proposal that this year she and the children could just stay home with him, Pamela Marshall (Joan Tetzel) laughs so fondly it might haunt her in weeks to come: "You sound as though there's some blonde after you and you're frightened."
Scripted by Ketti Frings from a treatment commissioned by Hal Wallis from Marty Holland specifically for Stanwyck to star in, The File on Thelma Jordon burns slower than any other noir of my acquaintance; indeed, despite some early, accumulating signs that all is not as it appears to the fast-falling Cleve, the elegantly paced estrangement of its entire first act could belong as easily to some other disillusioned genre, one of the post-war melodramas of suburban anomie exploring the emptiness and constriction of the conventional hallmarks of middle-class success. Cleve isn't philandering out of boredom, a conjugal bed gone cold. The Marshalls' marriage is in trouble beyond the normal parameters of poshlost. It's dominated by the interference of her father, a retired judge so well-known and influential that his son-in-law can never forget that he didn't get his job with the DA's office on his own merits, who dotes on his dark-haired sprite of a daughter as if she didn't have a husband and two children of her own, none of which would cut so deeply if she didn't seem so content to be doted on at the expense of her connection to her spouse, whose ever more obvious avoidance is not helping matters: "Why does he do this to me? Every time mother and father are here—" Their feelings for one another are bittersweetly clear in the way they rush together at the realization that Cleve mistook Pam's summer packing for a more final kind of moving out. It would take a lot less than a blonde to crack them apart. It makes his infidelity more complicated, less sympathetic perhaps, more real. His affair with Thelma seems to form out of a shared and wistful sense of alienation as much as attraction, whatever the dark horse wattage of that mash in the front seat of her sedan. Without apparent consciousness of any double entendre, she describes herself over the drinks that turn into their first, illicit, interrupted date as "a great extra partner," a former hotel hostess who filled in at bridge and tennis as pleasantly and invisibly as she now reads magazines to her aunt, the enticing copy of their advertisements intended for other, more privileged consumption. "It's just that I'm so tired of being on the outside looking in," she distills down the problem, and then lightly to Cleve, unmistakably, "And here I am again, doing the same thing with you." They kiss before the gates of her aunt's garden, in which it should go without saying there may be discovered a snake. There's a stifled, adolescent quality to their romance as they spend most of their dates parked clandestinely in local lovers' lanes, Thelma always waiting for him in the tree-walled road outside her aunt's estate after he's rung her up under another assumed name. Especially with Cleve dividing his time between the work nights he can spare for his lover and the weekends he's committed to his family, inevitably it recalls her account of a brief, disenchanting liaison with a gambler in Florida, the kind of man who promised glamour but whose gifts always had other women's names inside them. "Come on," Thelma sighs as a second pair of headlights pulls up to the glittering strip of the overlook where they have been discussing everything from the state of Cleve's marriage to their own uncertain future, "we're being driven out of here, too." Their relationship belongs to the shadows, but the shadows are no refuge. They contain too many other things, like the car that sometimes seems to be tailing them, the man who materializes possessively out of the night-slicked leaves, the Gothic bedlam that erupts inside the mansion of Vera Edwards (Gertrude Hoffman) on the wind-shaken night her niece was supposed to borrow the car for a weekend for two. When the film tips at last into the reckless moment of noir, it's a doozy: a sort of counter-forensic scramble to repair a disturbed crime scene with all the right fingerprints in all the right places, unraveling against the clock of the time it should have taken a horror-stricken niece to phone the police on discovering her aunt dead on the floor beside her open safe. With $200,000 of missing emeralds and a rewritten will in play, wire-rimmed chief investigator Miles Scott (Paul Kelly) has more than suspicions. "I don't think there was a burglar. Cozy her up," he instructs the colleague who's been watching silently all the while he interviews his prime suspect, the dead woman's sole heir. "See what you can get out of her," and while the cops out in the garden are plaster-casting his own footprints, Cleve closes himself in the sunroom with Thelma and the first of this story's skins begins to peel off.
In the screenplay's one lapse into the psychobabble that marred Frings' previous effort for Paramount, cynically top-dollar defense attorney Kingsley Willis (Stanley Ridges) uses the metaphor of schizophrenia to illustrate his relationship with his clients: "To me, the world is full of innocent lambs and I'm their lawyer . . . I am the right hand and I must never know what the left hand has done." Similar images of self-division are strung throughout The File on Thelma Jordon, making it all the more interesting to me that the film actually doesn't run on the straight duality of something like The Accused (1949). Its characters exist in the unstable space between their public faces and their shadow selves, their assigned roles and their unplumbed capacities. Long before we understand to what end, it should occur to even an open-minded audience that Thelma has been—most effectively in casual, almost subcutaneous tugs and nudges at his boundaries and his ambivalence—manipulating Cleve, but when we finally get hard evidence of it, it doesn't solidify her as a villain any more than the appearance of Tony Laredo (Richard Rober) in the flashy demon lover's flesh reassures us of her victimhood instead. It isn't quite a chiasmus, but the film is deliberately playing with the established expectations of the duplicitous woman and the deceivable man. She gives away more than a femme fatale is supposed to; he sees more than a fall guy should.
Late in the dangerous game of Thelma's trial, we are introduced to a familiar stranger: a dolled-up, off-the-shoulder peroxide blonde whose jaded poise seems hardly scratched by the gambling raid in which she gave a false name to the Florida police. The creased photograph looks so parodically the picture of a bad girl, it calls back to the indelibly noir image of Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, bright-haired as what Francesca Forrest once evocatively dubbed the gaslighting sun; it's the sucker punch line to Pam's innocent teasing, Cleve's pixilated paean to "Thelma, pretty Thelma, Thelma with the light brown hair." What she once described as her shiny life with Tony is full of shadier secrets than his double-dealing and as urgently as she begs Cleve to believe that "it's not me . . . as I was once, maybe, but not now," seeing that the two of them are currently engaged in a complicated maneuver to acquit her of a murder she has at the very least tampered with, it's a little difficult to credit that she's left her criminal days behind her. And yet this contradiction makes her more compelling than if she had merely flipped over a new face with dissociative simplicity, the good-time bad penny in her gambling man's pocket. Her mention of wanting to be an actress is more than the private admission of playing a role. It's part of her yearning to be on the inside, a desire for not just the material insulations of money and status, but the trickier condition of belonging, and if she needed to make herself over into someone other than her hard blonde self in order to be trusted by her aunt and the authorities and not be suspected in the matter of a fortune of emeralds, any actor could have told her that a role is a two-way street. Sitting up on the overlook with the sequined flag of her scarf glimmering in the dusk, Thelma gently criticizes Cleve for concealing their affair from Pam: "You feel as though she let you down, but you let her down. You should have told her." Crimewise, it's the worst advice she could give. Even a rumor of impropriety between herself and Cleve would ruin his utility to her as the sap up her sleeve, but she speaks as if she's genuinely forgotten that she could be cultivating him for any reason beyond affection; she sounds as sadly wise as the other woman with more ethics than her hesitating man, readier to lose him than enable any more of his running around. Perhaps the pretense is becoming real, or at least attractive enough that she'll let herself wish it were. Perhaps there was more reality in it from the start than she reckoned with. The photograph does not disprove the general trajectory of the rootless, unsatisfied life she related to Cleve, but it does illuminate how much she expurgated from her relationship with Tony, not least the changes she let it make to her. Complacent in the success of their scheme, he assures her, as much like a manager as a lover, that now she can "get the right clothes again, dye that mousy hair, get back that sexy look" which he obviously prefers for her. We can't help recalling, and perhaps from her unreadable expression, neither can she, the contrast of Cleve who saw her hair in its natural color and her face without its siren's paint and said as if it kept catching him in wonder, "Why is it you first meet a woman and she's only pretty? After a few weeks, she's beautiful." She denies adamantly to Tony that the infatuation is mutual, but the classic failure mode of a honeytrap has always been ending up stuck in it, too. Stanwyck doesn't play these ambiguities inscrutably; she lets us see the small glitches of her reactions that make sense after the fact as pointers to her conflicted priorities. It doesn't leave the impression of unknowability, but it does put paid to the idea of locating some singular Thelma Jordon at the bottom of her file. Blonde and brunette, hard-boiled and vulnerable, whoever we're watching, like her or not, she's real.
Cleve shifts shape in our understanding as unpredictably as Thelma. The next critic who wants to call Corey wooden or bland should, after fighting me, address themselves to the high-wire act of his opening scenes in which we get less than a minute's sobriety out of Cleve before he's ferreted the rye out of Miles' desk and started downing shots as fast as he can talk through them. With his pale, clownish face and his bow tie and the glum, slightly self-conscious disclosures of his marital troubles that give way to the free-floating oversharing of the intensely sloshed, he looks like exactly the sort of schmuck a femme fatale should happen to, blinking awkwardly at the bottle he was about to drink straight from and blurting past a courteous try at defusing the embarrassment of his situation, "Oh, I'm drunk. Extremely, thank you." It's a risky introduction for a character who has to shoulder half the film's emotional gravity, especially since we won't see him on the other side of his unaccustomed jag until both his personal and professional lives have been filtered through it, and as such it relies on the actor to convince us of the intelligence and unhappiness underlying his dissolving ability to locate the correct number of syllables in a word like "permanently." It doesn't quite work on Thelma—he gets more of her attention by identifying himself as an ADA—but the comedy drops right out of the way his voice softens suddenly, honestly between the two halves of "I'm harmless—and I'm lonesome." Their relationship really begins not with his kiss, but with her parking ticket. His relationship with his wife has become so characterized by everything her father takes care of first, her anniversary present being the last and most territorial straw, that making even the trivial distress of a ticket disappear feels like an achievement, a small foothold of competence. In hindsight, of course, it's a forewarning of his willingness to bend the rules for Thelma, but in the moment it makes him feel not completely useless and that in itself can be very attractive. "I'll do anything possible," he swears in the seconds before her arrest, a knight-errant's pledge. "Anything." Not just his love for Thelma, but his resentment of the career he's never felt he earned layers a fascinating element of spite into his strategy to protect her by disqualifying the ambitious DA (Barry Kelley) who would have nailed her just for the headlines and prosecuting the case against his lover himself. If he succeeds, he'll prove his legal know-how beyond any shadow of nepotism, the double-edged brinksmanship of anonymously guiding the defense while surreptitiously undermining the prosecution and concealing moreover his involvement in the crime scene as the much-sought "Mr. X," and he'll pay for it with his reputation—the DA's fair-haired fuck-up, the over-eager second-stringer with the biggest chance of his career who muffed it, muddled his arguments and antagonized the jurors and didn't just squander the damningly airtight evidence of the defendant's criminal past, he left the barn door of Mr. X so wide open that the defense could make it the capstone of their already strong case. It's a breathtaking, self-immolating love-gift, a dive no one should suspect except the woman it was devised to save. And all the while he's dedicating all this nerve and invention to the acquittal of Thelma Jordon, Cleve can barely have a real conversation with the wife he owes more than brush-off answers, can't stand up to his father-in-law to the point of ducking out of the beach house, it's thrilling to watch him precisely miscalibrate his opening statement or roadblock the course of justice with "a fast call from Mr. X to Mr. Willis" and when it comes to facing up to the mess of his own life, godspeed finding a spine on that man. His most romantically admirable qualities come tangled up with the ones that make him a maddening nebbish and the film is too smart to let him off the hook for it.
Between authorship and casting, it is tempting to regard Cleve as a kind of evolution of Lieutenant Dorgan of The Accused. The earlier character doesn't throw the state's case for love, but he doesn't need to: he disclaims his side as "a weak case, full of holes" and reassures the defendant that she's got "a great guy pleading for you" and the film's final shots bear out his forecast of the prosecution's success. Without reading the respective source materials by Holland and June Truesdell, I don't want to verge into tinfoil hat territory by crediting the likeness to Frings, but despite the signal differences in the crimes involved, there doesn't seem all that much distance between a chief investigator looking forward to losing the case against the woman he loves and an assistant district attorney making sure of it. It's a deeply noir attitude toward the justice system, and as such in keeping with the Wallis house style of the time. It is almost certainly unfair to wonder if Corey's irresistible way with a rueful line had something to do with it. No matter its origins, it raises the irony limit on the movie along with the opportunity for metatheater, since the courtroom is itself a performance space. Alone with Thelma for the first time since her arrest on the pretext of offering a plea bargain, Cleve illustrates their predicament with a sharp shift into prosecutor mode, hammering the hard questions of her cross-examination until she cries out in protest and he pulls them both up against the fact as blunt as a missing safeword: "You can't tell me, 'Stop it, Cleve!' in court!" Her cellmates who chorus their support as she prepares to face the verdict don't know the half of their double-speaking: "If you win, spit in the prosecutor's eye! And if you get together with your Mr. X, bring him around sometime!" In the hubbub after the trial, she'll barely get a glimpse from her circle of congratulations and reporters as he makes his loser's publicity-dodging exit. Perhaps we should consider them well-mated after all, a pair of mixed-up tricksters in not so dissimilar fields, the close-up magic of love-talk, the kayfabe of the law, like all the best cons only to come clear at the end.
At the bottom of the censor's notes on the first draft script of The File on Thelma Jordon, which concern themselves primarily with cleaning up the language and cutting down the love scenes, the PCA file records a tantalizing admonition: "Page 159: This kiss should definitely be omitted, as it tends to glorify the whole adulterous relationship." Were the lovers supposed to share, in their final scene, one last kiss? If so, the studio might as well have left it in; with no apologies to Joseph Breen, the effect of the finished picture is far more romantic tragedy than moral lesson, even if it looks at first like anything but. Contracting from the camera-flashed bustle of the courtroom to the funereal vacancies of a house too darkly echoing for the hurried human movements inside it, the confrontation staged in the library where Cleve once frantically raced to help Thelma establish her innocence now seems to confirm only the cruelest interpretation of her guilt, from the seduction of her strategically selected patsy to the murder of her aunt who surprised her mid-theft to the dark, amused presence, sauntering in drink in hand as if for a ringside seat at the kill, of the man she claims to have really loved all along, a dame only if belle and sans merci. "You must have known," she urges her shell-shocked knight to admit, "except you didn't want to know . . . You were the fall guy, Cleve, right from the beginning." To his credit, finally resolving his own glitches of suspicion and credulity that we could never fully square, he makes himself answer, "Yes. You're right. I suppose, as you said, I must have known you killed her all along," but there's little dignity in the admission when Tony can use it to taunt him with a blackmail threat for "Mr. X," crowned with the booby prize that Cleve that sad, drunken night wasn't even their intended mark. "Your tough luck. It was supposed to be Scott, who could destroy evidence. But you were so anxious." The word feels like a mild euphemism; perhaps even eager was too sexual for the PCA. But Rober who had just been intimidating Corey in Any Number Can Play (1949) delivers it with such a sneer, it becomes so multivalently contemptuous—pathetically horny, emotionally desperate, a sucker so gullible he hardly required seducing—that the pistol-butt Cleve catches across the skull as he whirls to Thelma for corroboration of this fresh hell is arguably the insult, not the injury. We who overheard the argument between Thelma and Tony in between Cleve's phone call and arrival may suspect that once again this surface is not as clear-cut as it seems, but that won't help the tall, heartsick man dropping his face against the half-open door as if he can't even look the deserted house in the eye. Even without the kick in the ribs which had to be deleted from the final print, it's hard to imagine a much harsher disillusioning. Not incidentally, I can't believe any time was wasted on policing the kisses between Cleve and Thelma when the sexual current between Thelma and Tony is unnervingly detailed. The way he boasts about changing her mind and sets about doing it as if it gives him a kick to turn her on with her fall guy waiting explains more of their history than a dozen reports from the Florida police. Frings nonetheless makes a point of heading off the "soothing angle" of Thelma as a catspaw as firmly as she forces Cleve to acknowledge his complicity—neither of them gets out of their responsibilities, but the film doesn't mean for their bad decisions alone.
It's the major reason the last scene between the lovers does not deliquesce into slush, as a deathbed reunion otherwise runs a high risk of doing. It helps that Thelma is in the hospital for the extraordinarily hardcore act of plunging a cigarette lighter into Tony's eye and running them both off the road into a flaming wreck from which she alone was hurled, Cleve hastening to her side to find that she's confessed everything to Miles "except who Mr. X is." Quietly as consenting, Cleve says, "Why don't you tell him?" We never saw this fragile shining in her eyes when she slipped into his car from her aunt's house, gripped his arms in the county jail: "I love him. That's why." It's that simple, the Tacroy principle in action. Cleve lied for her—for days on end—and no matter the cost to himself, made sure he was believed. The only proof of love she can offer in return is the same kind of protection, keeping him clear of her crimes even after she had no expectation of seeing him again, much less telling him to his face what their last meeting had forced her to turn to a lie, giving him a chance to salvage whatever she left of his life. She doesn't know that he has already made his own confession of misconduct to the DA, nor that by keeping back his knowledge of her guilt, he has remained, a strange kind of fidelity, her fall guy: "The girl you prosecuted, threw the case for. I don't have to ask you why. You believed in her." Just so, she dies, taking his name with her, keeping faith with Mr. X. It's so damned romantic, it's selfless and requited, it doesn't set their lives right, it's inconvenient and destructive and real. Those empty streets of night Cleve drifts off into as the film fades only a little faster to black could so easily be the night that fetched him up out of itself following the credits that we might wonder if anything's changed, except everything has. We aren't told how to calculate it, the losses of life and profession, home and heart. Thelma found something she loved more than the fast life with Tony; Cleve found her worth the quixotic sacrifice. It's a terrible waste, it's the one true thing. "I loved her. Let's put it that way." The film does its conservative best in its last few seconds to reassure us of the future of the Marshalls' marriage, but barring a hell of an intervention from the nascent field of family therapy, I wouldn't hold out hope. They may still love one another, but nothing about the death of Thelma Jordon resolves any of their problems as a couple, not Cleve's inability to hold a conversation like an adult human being, not Pam's inability to set boundaries like one—separate from her husband's adultery and disbarment, it may be a dealbreaker that she allowed her father to set a private detective on him and didn't tell him about it. Like the discursive, essential build of its first half-hour, this emphasis on relationships leaves The File on Thelma Jordon feeling half in, half out of a classification of domestic noir. It's really powered by romance, revealed ultimately as an interlocking of love triangles, and it could be slotted handily under the designation of a woman's picture if its protagonist weren't Cleve. I am not aware of a name for the male equivalent, even though his story is just as emotionally driven as anything starring Bette Davis. It would have been reviewed at the time as a melodrama, which I may have to settle for.
If The File on Thelma Jordon had to be the noir swan song of Robert Siodmak, whose direction of a stunning twelve examples between 1944 and 1950 contributed as much to the style as the fiction of Cornell Woolrich or the cinematography of John Alton, it was at least a high note. Between the photography of George Barnes and the art direction by Hans Dreier and Earl Hedrick, it's full of gorgeously staged set pieces, some dark and some day. As the shutters bang outside and the wind hisses the branches, the stairwell the aunt peers fearfully down into is filled like a pool with a swaying depth of shadows, as if by descending she might drown. Spidering around the dim-sliced corpse-scene of the library, the lovers' haste to restage a discovery of murder is at once tautly suspenseful and blackly funny as the phone begins to ring, a light switches on in the gatehouse, Cleve forgets that his fingerprints shouldn't be on Thelma's banister and polishes for dear life. They live so much in a night-world, the sun seems to catch them in a rare and slightly inappropriate element, but her last morning's march from the jail to the courthouse—played respectively by the Los Angeles County Jail and what was then the Santa Ana County Courthouse—is a crane-shot, indomitable tour-de-force as the press of reporters and spectators swells behind her, arm in arm with her lawyer and never once, even as she sweeps under the skyway where Cleve slows in his tracks to stare after her and up the turn of the stairs where Tony waits in the throng, looking anything but ahead. Even casual shots can be flamboyantly composed, as when the camera withdraws from the forensic findings of the plaster casts to the McCoy of Cleve himself, mirror-doubled for a wink as the point of view slides by. The sophistication of the script lends itself well to the rabbit hole of trying to decode the nuances of conversation in hindsight and the plot really is not all that much like Double Indemnity (1944), Pitfall (1948), or even Pushover (1954), which feels otherwise like its closest cousin in casting and relationships. Without ever playing like an acting exercise, it's the showcase for Stanwyck that it was designed to be, but in addition to the treat of Corey with his cat's mouth and his deep-hollowed eyes in a full-blown romance, I admire the long-limbed jumble in which he climbs from the back into the front seat of Thelma's 1946 Chrysler Town & Country, suggesting that only by the luck of the dumb-assed does he avoid doing himself a mischief on the gearshift. The non-speaking parts of the Marshall children were played by Robin and Jonathan Corey, the actor's real-life kids. I have no idea of the provenance of the sheepdog. By now it should be exhaustively apparent if this film will hold interest for anyone other than me, but I do think it's an objectively terrific picture. I waited for it to come around earlier this month on TCM's Noir Alley, after which it turned out to exist rather decently on YouTube and Olive Films has the Blu-Ray/DVD. What a wealth of loopholes there are in the statement "I don't believe anything I don't see." This file brought to you by my beautiful backers at Patreon.
It's a small-town night in southern California, after hours in a maze of municipal offices where the cleaning lady is almost the only person soaking up the hollows of desk-light. White-dressed, white-gloved, demurely decorated as befits the companion of a wealthy aunt lately troubled by prowlers and the scare of a break-in, the woman who gave her name as Thelma Jordon (Barbara Stanwyck) is recognized by the man who asked for it as "a lady in distress, a pretty lady. Distress is my specialty tonight." Like so many of the things people say in this picture, it's not entirely false and it's not the whole truth. Looking for a chief investigator, she's found instead an assistant district attorney doing his best Sydney Carton, which is to say that he's a lawyer and he's drunk—after five years of playing second fiddle to his in-laws in his own marriage, Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) is spending his anniversary with a quart of rye instead of his wife and trying to nerve himself up to the recommended remedy of picking up a "dame." His chances with the politely disengaged stranger seem slim to a slap in the face, especially after a pass of such appalling ineptitude that it testifies better than any protests to his normal fidelity, but the transparency of his loneliness topped by the insistence of his offer to fix the parking ticket she got for wasting her time with him salvage the evening to the surprising point of a passionate kiss, right before Thelma punts him and his three-sheets professions of love out of her car and back to the wife she's correctly divined is waiting up for him, turning away on her pillow to pretend she hasn't seen her husband as plastered as he is. As benders go, it's not much to brag about, and its epilogue by daylight between an unruffled Thelma and a sincerely apologetic Cleve doesn't seem to invite a reprise. Nonetheless, when her husband meets her preparations for their traditional summer at the beach house with the diffident proposal that this year she and the children could just stay home with him, Pamela Marshall (Joan Tetzel) laughs so fondly it might haunt her in weeks to come: "You sound as though there's some blonde after you and you're frightened."
Scripted by Ketti Frings from a treatment commissioned by Hal Wallis from Marty Holland specifically for Stanwyck to star in, The File on Thelma Jordon burns slower than any other noir of my acquaintance; indeed, despite some early, accumulating signs that all is not as it appears to the fast-falling Cleve, the elegantly paced estrangement of its entire first act could belong as easily to some other disillusioned genre, one of the post-war melodramas of suburban anomie exploring the emptiness and constriction of the conventional hallmarks of middle-class success. Cleve isn't philandering out of boredom, a conjugal bed gone cold. The Marshalls' marriage is in trouble beyond the normal parameters of poshlost. It's dominated by the interference of her father, a retired judge so well-known and influential that his son-in-law can never forget that he didn't get his job with the DA's office on his own merits, who dotes on his dark-haired sprite of a daughter as if she didn't have a husband and two children of her own, none of which would cut so deeply if she didn't seem so content to be doted on at the expense of her connection to her spouse, whose ever more obvious avoidance is not helping matters: "Why does he do this to me? Every time mother and father are here—" Their feelings for one another are bittersweetly clear in the way they rush together at the realization that Cleve mistook Pam's summer packing for a more final kind of moving out. It would take a lot less than a blonde to crack them apart. It makes his infidelity more complicated, less sympathetic perhaps, more real. His affair with Thelma seems to form out of a shared and wistful sense of alienation as much as attraction, whatever the dark horse wattage of that mash in the front seat of her sedan. Without apparent consciousness of any double entendre, she describes herself over the drinks that turn into their first, illicit, interrupted date as "a great extra partner," a former hotel hostess who filled in at bridge and tennis as pleasantly and invisibly as she now reads magazines to her aunt, the enticing copy of their advertisements intended for other, more privileged consumption. "It's just that I'm so tired of being on the outside looking in," she distills down the problem, and then lightly to Cleve, unmistakably, "And here I am again, doing the same thing with you." They kiss before the gates of her aunt's garden, in which it should go without saying there may be discovered a snake. There's a stifled, adolescent quality to their romance as they spend most of their dates parked clandestinely in local lovers' lanes, Thelma always waiting for him in the tree-walled road outside her aunt's estate after he's rung her up under another assumed name. Especially with Cleve dividing his time between the work nights he can spare for his lover and the weekends he's committed to his family, inevitably it recalls her account of a brief, disenchanting liaison with a gambler in Florida, the kind of man who promised glamour but whose gifts always had other women's names inside them. "Come on," Thelma sighs as a second pair of headlights pulls up to the glittering strip of the overlook where they have been discussing everything from the state of Cleve's marriage to their own uncertain future, "we're being driven out of here, too." Their relationship belongs to the shadows, but the shadows are no refuge. They contain too many other things, like the car that sometimes seems to be tailing them, the man who materializes possessively out of the night-slicked leaves, the Gothic bedlam that erupts inside the mansion of Vera Edwards (Gertrude Hoffman) on the wind-shaken night her niece was supposed to borrow the car for a weekend for two. When the film tips at last into the reckless moment of noir, it's a doozy: a sort of counter-forensic scramble to repair a disturbed crime scene with all the right fingerprints in all the right places, unraveling against the clock of the time it should have taken a horror-stricken niece to phone the police on discovering her aunt dead on the floor beside her open safe. With $200,000 of missing emeralds and a rewritten will in play, wire-rimmed chief investigator Miles Scott (Paul Kelly) has more than suspicions. "I don't think there was a burglar. Cozy her up," he instructs the colleague who's been watching silently all the while he interviews his prime suspect, the dead woman's sole heir. "See what you can get out of her," and while the cops out in the garden are plaster-casting his own footprints, Cleve closes himself in the sunroom with Thelma and the first of this story's skins begins to peel off.
In the screenplay's one lapse into the psychobabble that marred Frings' previous effort for Paramount, cynically top-dollar defense attorney Kingsley Willis (Stanley Ridges) uses the metaphor of schizophrenia to illustrate his relationship with his clients: "To me, the world is full of innocent lambs and I'm their lawyer . . . I am the right hand and I must never know what the left hand has done." Similar images of self-division are strung throughout The File on Thelma Jordon, making it all the more interesting to me that the film actually doesn't run on the straight duality of something like The Accused (1949). Its characters exist in the unstable space between their public faces and their shadow selves, their assigned roles and their unplumbed capacities. Long before we understand to what end, it should occur to even an open-minded audience that Thelma has been—most effectively in casual, almost subcutaneous tugs and nudges at his boundaries and his ambivalence—manipulating Cleve, but when we finally get hard evidence of it, it doesn't solidify her as a villain any more than the appearance of Tony Laredo (Richard Rober) in the flashy demon lover's flesh reassures us of her victimhood instead. It isn't quite a chiasmus, but the film is deliberately playing with the established expectations of the duplicitous woman and the deceivable man. She gives away more than a femme fatale is supposed to; he sees more than a fall guy should.
Late in the dangerous game of Thelma's trial, we are introduced to a familiar stranger: a dolled-up, off-the-shoulder peroxide blonde whose jaded poise seems hardly scratched by the gambling raid in which she gave a false name to the Florida police. The creased photograph looks so parodically the picture of a bad girl, it calls back to the indelibly noir image of Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, bright-haired as what Francesca Forrest once evocatively dubbed the gaslighting sun; it's the sucker punch line to Pam's innocent teasing, Cleve's pixilated paean to "Thelma, pretty Thelma, Thelma with the light brown hair." What she once described as her shiny life with Tony is full of shadier secrets than his double-dealing and as urgently as she begs Cleve to believe that "it's not me . . . as I was once, maybe, but not now," seeing that the two of them are currently engaged in a complicated maneuver to acquit her of a murder she has at the very least tampered with, it's a little difficult to credit that she's left her criminal days behind her. And yet this contradiction makes her more compelling than if she had merely flipped over a new face with dissociative simplicity, the good-time bad penny in her gambling man's pocket. Her mention of wanting to be an actress is more than the private admission of playing a role. It's part of her yearning to be on the inside, a desire for not just the material insulations of money and status, but the trickier condition of belonging, and if she needed to make herself over into someone other than her hard blonde self in order to be trusted by her aunt and the authorities and not be suspected in the matter of a fortune of emeralds, any actor could have told her that a role is a two-way street. Sitting up on the overlook with the sequined flag of her scarf glimmering in the dusk, Thelma gently criticizes Cleve for concealing their affair from Pam: "You feel as though she let you down, but you let her down. You should have told her." Crimewise, it's the worst advice she could give. Even a rumor of impropriety between herself and Cleve would ruin his utility to her as the sap up her sleeve, but she speaks as if she's genuinely forgotten that she could be cultivating him for any reason beyond affection; she sounds as sadly wise as the other woman with more ethics than her hesitating man, readier to lose him than enable any more of his running around. Perhaps the pretense is becoming real, or at least attractive enough that she'll let herself wish it were. Perhaps there was more reality in it from the start than she reckoned with. The photograph does not disprove the general trajectory of the rootless, unsatisfied life she related to Cleve, but it does illuminate how much she expurgated from her relationship with Tony, not least the changes she let it make to her. Complacent in the success of their scheme, he assures her, as much like a manager as a lover, that now she can "get the right clothes again, dye that mousy hair, get back that sexy look" which he obviously prefers for her. We can't help recalling, and perhaps from her unreadable expression, neither can she, the contrast of Cleve who saw her hair in its natural color and her face without its siren's paint and said as if it kept catching him in wonder, "Why is it you first meet a woman and she's only pretty? After a few weeks, she's beautiful." She denies adamantly to Tony that the infatuation is mutual, but the classic failure mode of a honeytrap has always been ending up stuck in it, too. Stanwyck doesn't play these ambiguities inscrutably; she lets us see the small glitches of her reactions that make sense after the fact as pointers to her conflicted priorities. It doesn't leave the impression of unknowability, but it does put paid to the idea of locating some singular Thelma Jordon at the bottom of her file. Blonde and brunette, hard-boiled and vulnerable, whoever we're watching, like her or not, she's real.
Cleve shifts shape in our understanding as unpredictably as Thelma. The next critic who wants to call Corey wooden or bland should, after fighting me, address themselves to the high-wire act of his opening scenes in which we get less than a minute's sobriety out of Cleve before he's ferreted the rye out of Miles' desk and started downing shots as fast as he can talk through them. With his pale, clownish face and his bow tie and the glum, slightly self-conscious disclosures of his marital troubles that give way to the free-floating oversharing of the intensely sloshed, he looks like exactly the sort of schmuck a femme fatale should happen to, blinking awkwardly at the bottle he was about to drink straight from and blurting past a courteous try at defusing the embarrassment of his situation, "Oh, I'm drunk. Extremely, thank you." It's a risky introduction for a character who has to shoulder half the film's emotional gravity, especially since we won't see him on the other side of his unaccustomed jag until both his personal and professional lives have been filtered through it, and as such it relies on the actor to convince us of the intelligence and unhappiness underlying his dissolving ability to locate the correct number of syllables in a word like "permanently." It doesn't quite work on Thelma—he gets more of her attention by identifying himself as an ADA—but the comedy drops right out of the way his voice softens suddenly, honestly between the two halves of "I'm harmless—and I'm lonesome." Their relationship really begins not with his kiss, but with her parking ticket. His relationship with his wife has become so characterized by everything her father takes care of first, her anniversary present being the last and most territorial straw, that making even the trivial distress of a ticket disappear feels like an achievement, a small foothold of competence. In hindsight, of course, it's a forewarning of his willingness to bend the rules for Thelma, but in the moment it makes him feel not completely useless and that in itself can be very attractive. "I'll do anything possible," he swears in the seconds before her arrest, a knight-errant's pledge. "Anything." Not just his love for Thelma, but his resentment of the career he's never felt he earned layers a fascinating element of spite into his strategy to protect her by disqualifying the ambitious DA (Barry Kelley) who would have nailed her just for the headlines and prosecuting the case against his lover himself. If he succeeds, he'll prove his legal know-how beyond any shadow of nepotism, the double-edged brinksmanship of anonymously guiding the defense while surreptitiously undermining the prosecution and concealing moreover his involvement in the crime scene as the much-sought "Mr. X," and he'll pay for it with his reputation—the DA's fair-haired fuck-up, the over-eager second-stringer with the biggest chance of his career who muffed it, muddled his arguments and antagonized the jurors and didn't just squander the damningly airtight evidence of the defendant's criminal past, he left the barn door of Mr. X so wide open that the defense could make it the capstone of their already strong case. It's a breathtaking, self-immolating love-gift, a dive no one should suspect except the woman it was devised to save. And all the while he's dedicating all this nerve and invention to the acquittal of Thelma Jordon, Cleve can barely have a real conversation with the wife he owes more than brush-off answers, can't stand up to his father-in-law to the point of ducking out of the beach house, it's thrilling to watch him precisely miscalibrate his opening statement or roadblock the course of justice with "a fast call from Mr. X to Mr. Willis" and when it comes to facing up to the mess of his own life, godspeed finding a spine on that man. His most romantically admirable qualities come tangled up with the ones that make him a maddening nebbish and the film is too smart to let him off the hook for it.
Between authorship and casting, it is tempting to regard Cleve as a kind of evolution of Lieutenant Dorgan of The Accused. The earlier character doesn't throw the state's case for love, but he doesn't need to: he disclaims his side as "a weak case, full of holes" and reassures the defendant that she's got "a great guy pleading for you" and the film's final shots bear out his forecast of the prosecution's success. Without reading the respective source materials by Holland and June Truesdell, I don't want to verge into tinfoil hat territory by crediting the likeness to Frings, but despite the signal differences in the crimes involved, there doesn't seem all that much distance between a chief investigator looking forward to losing the case against the woman he loves and an assistant district attorney making sure of it. It's a deeply noir attitude toward the justice system, and as such in keeping with the Wallis house style of the time. It is almost certainly unfair to wonder if Corey's irresistible way with a rueful line had something to do with it. No matter its origins, it raises the irony limit on the movie along with the opportunity for metatheater, since the courtroom is itself a performance space. Alone with Thelma for the first time since her arrest on the pretext of offering a plea bargain, Cleve illustrates their predicament with a sharp shift into prosecutor mode, hammering the hard questions of her cross-examination until she cries out in protest and he pulls them both up against the fact as blunt as a missing safeword: "You can't tell me, 'Stop it, Cleve!' in court!" Her cellmates who chorus their support as she prepares to face the verdict don't know the half of their double-speaking: "If you win, spit in the prosecutor's eye! And if you get together with your Mr. X, bring him around sometime!" In the hubbub after the trial, she'll barely get a glimpse from her circle of congratulations and reporters as he makes his loser's publicity-dodging exit. Perhaps we should consider them well-mated after all, a pair of mixed-up tricksters in not so dissimilar fields, the close-up magic of love-talk, the kayfabe of the law, like all the best cons only to come clear at the end.
At the bottom of the censor's notes on the first draft script of The File on Thelma Jordon, which concern themselves primarily with cleaning up the language and cutting down the love scenes, the PCA file records a tantalizing admonition: "Page 159: This kiss should definitely be omitted, as it tends to glorify the whole adulterous relationship." Were the lovers supposed to share, in their final scene, one last kiss? If so, the studio might as well have left it in; with no apologies to Joseph Breen, the effect of the finished picture is far more romantic tragedy than moral lesson, even if it looks at first like anything but. Contracting from the camera-flashed bustle of the courtroom to the funereal vacancies of a house too darkly echoing for the hurried human movements inside it, the confrontation staged in the library where Cleve once frantically raced to help Thelma establish her innocence now seems to confirm only the cruelest interpretation of her guilt, from the seduction of her strategically selected patsy to the murder of her aunt who surprised her mid-theft to the dark, amused presence, sauntering in drink in hand as if for a ringside seat at the kill, of the man she claims to have really loved all along, a dame only if belle and sans merci. "You must have known," she urges her shell-shocked knight to admit, "except you didn't want to know . . . You were the fall guy, Cleve, right from the beginning." To his credit, finally resolving his own glitches of suspicion and credulity that we could never fully square, he makes himself answer, "Yes. You're right. I suppose, as you said, I must have known you killed her all along," but there's little dignity in the admission when Tony can use it to taunt him with a blackmail threat for "Mr. X," crowned with the booby prize that Cleve that sad, drunken night wasn't even their intended mark. "Your tough luck. It was supposed to be Scott, who could destroy evidence. But you were so anxious." The word feels like a mild euphemism; perhaps even eager was too sexual for the PCA. But Rober who had just been intimidating Corey in Any Number Can Play (1949) delivers it with such a sneer, it becomes so multivalently contemptuous—pathetically horny, emotionally desperate, a sucker so gullible he hardly required seducing—that the pistol-butt Cleve catches across the skull as he whirls to Thelma for corroboration of this fresh hell is arguably the insult, not the injury. We who overheard the argument between Thelma and Tony in between Cleve's phone call and arrival may suspect that once again this surface is not as clear-cut as it seems, but that won't help the tall, heartsick man dropping his face against the half-open door as if he can't even look the deserted house in the eye. Even without the kick in the ribs which had to be deleted from the final print, it's hard to imagine a much harsher disillusioning. Not incidentally, I can't believe any time was wasted on policing the kisses between Cleve and Thelma when the sexual current between Thelma and Tony is unnervingly detailed. The way he boasts about changing her mind and sets about doing it as if it gives him a kick to turn her on with her fall guy waiting explains more of their history than a dozen reports from the Florida police. Frings nonetheless makes a point of heading off the "soothing angle" of Thelma as a catspaw as firmly as she forces Cleve to acknowledge his complicity—neither of them gets out of their responsibilities, but the film doesn't mean for their bad decisions alone.
It's the major reason the last scene between the lovers does not deliquesce into slush, as a deathbed reunion otherwise runs a high risk of doing. It helps that Thelma is in the hospital for the extraordinarily hardcore act of plunging a cigarette lighter into Tony's eye and running them both off the road into a flaming wreck from which she alone was hurled, Cleve hastening to her side to find that she's confessed everything to Miles "except who Mr. X is." Quietly as consenting, Cleve says, "Why don't you tell him?" We never saw this fragile shining in her eyes when she slipped into his car from her aunt's house, gripped his arms in the county jail: "I love him. That's why." It's that simple, the Tacroy principle in action. Cleve lied for her—for days on end—and no matter the cost to himself, made sure he was believed. The only proof of love she can offer in return is the same kind of protection, keeping him clear of her crimes even after she had no expectation of seeing him again, much less telling him to his face what their last meeting had forced her to turn to a lie, giving him a chance to salvage whatever she left of his life. She doesn't know that he has already made his own confession of misconduct to the DA, nor that by keeping back his knowledge of her guilt, he has remained, a strange kind of fidelity, her fall guy: "The girl you prosecuted, threw the case for. I don't have to ask you why. You believed in her." Just so, she dies, taking his name with her, keeping faith with Mr. X. It's so damned romantic, it's selfless and requited, it doesn't set their lives right, it's inconvenient and destructive and real. Those empty streets of night Cleve drifts off into as the film fades only a little faster to black could so easily be the night that fetched him up out of itself following the credits that we might wonder if anything's changed, except everything has. We aren't told how to calculate it, the losses of life and profession, home and heart. Thelma found something she loved more than the fast life with Tony; Cleve found her worth the quixotic sacrifice. It's a terrible waste, it's the one true thing. "I loved her. Let's put it that way." The film does its conservative best in its last few seconds to reassure us of the future of the Marshalls' marriage, but barring a hell of an intervention from the nascent field of family therapy, I wouldn't hold out hope. They may still love one another, but nothing about the death of Thelma Jordon resolves any of their problems as a couple, not Cleve's inability to hold a conversation like an adult human being, not Pam's inability to set boundaries like one—separate from her husband's adultery and disbarment, it may be a dealbreaker that she allowed her father to set a private detective on him and didn't tell him about it. Like the discursive, essential build of its first half-hour, this emphasis on relationships leaves The File on Thelma Jordon feeling half in, half out of a classification of domestic noir. It's really powered by romance, revealed ultimately as an interlocking of love triangles, and it could be slotted handily under the designation of a woman's picture if its protagonist weren't Cleve. I am not aware of a name for the male equivalent, even though his story is just as emotionally driven as anything starring Bette Davis. It would have been reviewed at the time as a melodrama, which I may have to settle for.
If The File on Thelma Jordon had to be the noir swan song of Robert Siodmak, whose direction of a stunning twelve examples between 1944 and 1950 contributed as much to the style as the fiction of Cornell Woolrich or the cinematography of John Alton, it was at least a high note. Between the photography of George Barnes and the art direction by Hans Dreier and Earl Hedrick, it's full of gorgeously staged set pieces, some dark and some day. As the shutters bang outside and the wind hisses the branches, the stairwell the aunt peers fearfully down into is filled like a pool with a swaying depth of shadows, as if by descending she might drown. Spidering around the dim-sliced corpse-scene of the library, the lovers' haste to restage a discovery of murder is at once tautly suspenseful and blackly funny as the phone begins to ring, a light switches on in the gatehouse, Cleve forgets that his fingerprints shouldn't be on Thelma's banister and polishes for dear life. They live so much in a night-world, the sun seems to catch them in a rare and slightly inappropriate element, but her last morning's march from the jail to the courthouse—played respectively by the Los Angeles County Jail and what was then the Santa Ana County Courthouse—is a crane-shot, indomitable tour-de-force as the press of reporters and spectators swells behind her, arm in arm with her lawyer and never once, even as she sweeps under the skyway where Cleve slows in his tracks to stare after her and up the turn of the stairs where Tony waits in the throng, looking anything but ahead. Even casual shots can be flamboyantly composed, as when the camera withdraws from the forensic findings of the plaster casts to the McCoy of Cleve himself, mirror-doubled for a wink as the point of view slides by. The sophistication of the script lends itself well to the rabbit hole of trying to decode the nuances of conversation in hindsight and the plot really is not all that much like Double Indemnity (1944), Pitfall (1948), or even Pushover (1954), which feels otherwise like its closest cousin in casting and relationships. Without ever playing like an acting exercise, it's the showcase for Stanwyck that it was designed to be, but in addition to the treat of Corey with his cat's mouth and his deep-hollowed eyes in a full-blown romance, I admire the long-limbed jumble in which he climbs from the back into the front seat of Thelma's 1946 Chrysler Town & Country, suggesting that only by the luck of the dumb-assed does he avoid doing himself a mischief on the gearshift. The non-speaking parts of the Marshall children were played by Robin and Jonathan Corey, the actor's real-life kids. I have no idea of the provenance of the sheepdog. By now it should be exhaustively apparent if this film will hold interest for anyone other than me, but I do think it's an objectively terrific picture. I waited for it to come around earlier this month on TCM's Noir Alley, after which it turned out to exist rather decently on YouTube and Olive Films has the Blu-Ray/DVD. What a wealth of loopholes there are in the statement "I don't believe anything I don't see." This file brought to you by my beautiful backers at Patreon.
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I feel strongly it should not be as obscure as it apparently is; it seems to have spent decades in the memory hole of so many Paramount noirs and while I am grateful that it ever appeared on home video at all, I would really love to hear that it got a restoration from the Film Noir Foundation. It goes without saying that I would love to see it on film, but I still don't know when movie theaters are going to reenter my life.
(I had to make a paranoid double-check that it is not playing next week at the Brattle as part of Noir City Boston 2023 and fortunately it is not, but now I resent not being able to take the time for the 35 mm double feature of Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) and Larceny (1948), especially since the latter co-stars Dan Duryea and I can't remember it ever coming around on TCM.)
MY HEART. (Am I understanding the deathbed conversation correctly? Cleve is Mr. X, so Thelma saying "I love him" is a statement of her love for Cleve?)
Yes! It just has to be communicated in the third person with the third party of Miles still present, which if anything makes my reaction even more augh.
I'm thinking about what the film says about the power of acting. How by throwing the case--by doing that clever job of acting--Cleve actually demonstrates more accomplishment in many realms than he would have merely by successfully prosecuting a case.
It's really true. It's part of the incalculable irony of the romance: it calls so much out of him that he might never have discovered in himself otherwise—out of Thelma, too. Nothing about their last scene could be extrapolated from their respective introductions and yet we believe every word of it because we have watched them turn into the people who are capable of this kind of commitment to one another, just as we watched their relationship turn from con artistry and escapism into the real thing. I was saying to
I immediately decided it must be posh + lost, and refer to stories of the sad, sad suffering of the well-to-do
That's great! Nabokov uses it in his own work to refer a sort of middlebrow mistaking of tacky banality for great meaning and romance, which means my first association with the term is suburban affairs. But I bet he would have appreciated your play on words.
(Hilariously, I was somehow reading along word by word, saw the Francesca, was prepared for you to be mentioning some actor/director/film critic Francesca, then got to the last name, then had to let my rusty brain gears turn a minute.)
You count as a film critic! I loved that phrase of yours so much, it became part of my lexicon, like
--Me! Me, me!
I'm especially glad I managed to write it up, then. I figured it couldn't only be whoever programs Noir Alley (it's probably Eddie Muller) and me.
Thank you for the review
Thank you!