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I thought I'd quit, but you can't quit
The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) was produced and unsuccessfully premiered as I Married a Communist and might as well have retained the original title for all the new one did to class up the joint. A pet project of Howard Hughes following his takeover of RKO in 1948, it's a hysterically ham-handed exposition of anti-Communist paranoia better suited to a speech by Joseph McCarthy than the B-minus noir whose destabilizing shadows it wraps around a narrative with the ideological nuance of toast points and an attention to character that gives agitprop a bad name. The effect it creates is fascinating, although not necessarily aspirational: its tough-minded wake-up call to an unsuspecting America is simultaneously binky-bonkers and boring.
In light of the legacy of the Second Red Scare, I cannot wish for this production to have been the critically persuasive and commercially profitable broadside it had every delusion of being, but it legitimately impresses me that it fails so hard. Paranoiacally speaking, anti-Communist film noir is a gimme. It's a tailor-made revelation of the world behind the world, the gnawing distrust of every familiar face and institution given concrete and yet elusive justification in the shape-shifting of a threat which can manifest out of the dearest and most banal touchstones of American life, the engulfing shadows waiting for the slightest of false steps as the apophenia of dread assumes the confirmation of conspiracy. Instead, the more stridently the film insists on the clear and present danger of its Red Menace, the more tacked on it feels. With minimal alterations in dialogue and none at all to the plot, The Woman on Pier 13—a more than usually meaningless title, not least because the Embarcadero in San Francisco where its Communist activity is concentrated is conspicuously lacking in a Pier 13—would play as a paint-by-numbers crime picture of the once-in-never-out school, as a newly married shipping executive finds himself blackmailed with the sins of his former life as a hot-headed longshoreman to deadlock an important round of negotiations between labor and management to the detriment of the waterfront and the benefit of the underworld figures who hold the paper on our hero's checkered past, who would frankly make more sense as racketeers than members of the Communist Party USA. Their strong-arm tactics are pure Black Mask, leavening extortion and intimidation with brazenly brutal murders and the obligatory blonde bait on tap. Instead of the respectable front of a downtown office, their headquarters are a classically criminal warehouse on the docks where a freight elevator gives onto a barren maze of catwalks by the light of the third degree and tower cranes stand silent witness to the black silk of the water closing for the last time over a squealer's head. The syndicate echoes are unmissable when the protagonist is peremptorily ordered to resume his Party dues by turning over two-fifths of his salary to the shell charity of "Mankind, Inc." Godfather-like, the Communist ringleader pronounces, "The Party decides who's out and when." It suits the film's political vacuity that its ostensible Reds never articulate or even allude to the ideals that make them such implacable opponents of democracy except in clichéd cracks like "What a wonderful advertisement for our American system of free enterprise," nor for all their patter about contacts and cells and indoctrination do we seem to catch them doing very much subversive or seditious. Their crimes are mostly concerned with disposing of their own for disloyalty at a rate that ironically suggests Stalinist purges less than McCarthyist witch-hunts. The waterfront tie-up is a MacGuffin, its purpose never explained even as its strategies are laid out; that one of them entails the infiltration of the ILWU produces the novelty of an anti-Communist, pro-union picture, but then the necessity of denying the intertwined histories of socialism and labor in the United States leads to the preposterous alarmism of "How would you like to see the Commies take over the union and dump it in the ashcan when they get through using it?" We are left to the tautological conclusion that it's bad because the Commies are behind it and the Commies are behind it because it's bad, a triumph for conspiracy theory and dramatically something of a dud. Unlike their successors in the full swing of the atom-obsessed 1950's, the Communists of The Woman on Pier 13 have no designs on government secrets, on political appointments, even on the apple pie of American values—judging by the scene in which their pet contract killer tries to chisel a little extra on top of his payoff for doing such a "nice neat job," they're as friendly to the laws of supply and demand as the next capitalist. At times their thuggishness feels left over not only from a gangster film but the Nazi saboteurs who menaced this self-same waterfront in the imagination of World War II, as if the film cannot conceive of a Soviet menace on American soil except through the pop culture of earlier paradigms of villainy. It denatures the fearmongering; it can't sustain the insistence that Communism is more than the latest craze of bogeyman. By the time the moll is snapping at her handler, "Emotion is something you're not built to understand or appreciate," it's hard to shake the suspicion that this film might have been less stupid if it had fast-forwarded to the science fiction and instead of mobsters they were all pod people or ants.
Not the least of the sins of The Woman on Pier 13 is squandering a cast that could have stocked a more than decent noir had they been given less shrilly monotonous material to work with. Cast against his political convictions, Robert Ryan plays the doomed Brad Collins né Frank Johnson without the apologetics of a friendly witness, rather the haunted determination of a betrayed idealist—perhaps as close to the conflicted history of a Depression-era activist on the far side of WWII as the Red-baiting pieties of the script would allow. Unafraid of the exposure of his Party record, unmoved by the reappearance of his lover from his Jersey agitator days, he capitulates only at the resurrection of a cold-case murder charge: "That shop steward who was killed in the street fight during that wildcat walkout . . . You remember that very well, don't you?" It's nice of the film not to oblige him to repudiate his past as a labor organizer which has made him such a trusted bridge between the owners and the workers of the Cornwall Shipping Company, but it treats his CPUSA membership like the proverbially wrong way of going after the right thing, which by the laws of HUAC and the PCA means he never had it to begin with. "I lost everything the day you walked in on me with that Party card." No such human affordances are permitted to mar the pulp ruthlessness of Vanning, the card-carrying kingpin whom the equally left-wing Thomas Gomez has to put over as a triple threat of agent, apparatchik, and Al Capone, one minute involved in surveillance worthy of J. Edgar Hoover, the next orchestrating the night's defenestration or hit-and-run, a man who seems to have no personality beyond the furtherance of his Party's schemes. Too businesslike for fanaticism, he nonetheless can't be accused of humorless socialist realism when he dismisses an objection as wearily as if he can't think of everything himself: "We'll tell you what to do. How you do it is your problem." As Jim Travis, representing the dockworkers, Richard Rober makes a solid job of the tough, sincere union man who can't understand why his old ally across the bargaining table has suddenly become the bosses' hardline mouthpiece, but John Agar as Don Lowry can do very little with his cautionary cartoon of a useful idiot who if he thinks at all, does it with his dick as he chases after the radicalizing charms of Janis Carter's Christine Norman, one of those Red ice queens who double as the specter of the sexually independent career woman—a photojournalist who uses her assignments as cover for her un-American activities—until she betrays her politics with her femininity by falling in love with her stooge and becomes punitively expendable, leaving only a carefully edited suicide note behind. The audience knew better when she passionately claimed, "Maybe it is possible to be Communists and still be human beings, too." It's all so cookie-cutter conservative that it's disappointing without being surprising that the film cheats Laraine Day's Nan Collins out of the perspective promised by both of its titles, sidelining her hurt and alienation in favor of Brad's moral agony, which makes it even weirder and more rewarding that she steps so confidently into the limelight of the third act for a brief turn as the heroine of the woman's picture this one doesn't otherwise even pretend to be.
It can't be an accident that the film's best sequence has nothing to do with Communism except in the sense that Nan is infiltrating the ring which has taken possession of her husband; it plays like an insert from a production which heard about characterization, ambiguity, even sexual tension once. Primed with the likely identity of her brother's killer by a grief-spiteful Christine, Nan goes after the man as unhesitatingly as a Woolrich heroine and finds him in his sleazo-violent element as the proprietor of a shooting gallery at Playland, putting his arm around a female customer to guide her aim with his signature pick-up line, "You need practice, baby, you need lots of practice." Played by William Talman in his screen debut and a jacket loud enough to clash with the midway's neon, Bailey's a tricky customer; we saw his dog-toothed smile as he watched the desperately pleading man he'd dumped into the harbor like so much garbage drown, but off the clock of the Party's killings he's a two-bit wolf who can't leave his assistant in charge of the concession without the ostentatious toughness of "Keep your mitts out of that till or I'll stomp them." Nan attracts his attention by elegantly drilling four targets like she's got murder on her mind, then lets him take her out to his regular nightspot on Pacific Street and clock her as a prospective client, spinning an ingenuously hard-luck story of a no-good husband who just happens to have a lot of insurance; although she compliments his dancing and drinks deliberately from his glass, she doesn't vamp him so much as she lets his own conceit lead him on until she just needs to challenge him, "Show me your clippings," for him to spill his guts about her brother's murder. For once in its thud of propaganda, the picture feels like noir. Nan's horrified by Bailey, but she has to maintain her front of professional interest with a frisson of sexual intrigue, the surest hook for a hood so convinced he's God's gift to women that he's putting the moves on a would-be widow like he's never seen the end of Double Indemnity (1944). He's a dangerous creep, not just a drunken one, sociopathically snickering as he reveals the details of his hit-and-run specialty without a sign of awareness that they might not be so smart to share; he could turn nasty if he suspects her imposture, but then again he could turn nasty if he takes her bait. He's still chortling, "No evidence—no nothing—accident!" as Nan absorbs the horror of what she's just heard, her face hardening with the knowledge or her next move, and the scene is immediately short-circuited by the arrival of another Communist to enlighten Bailey and imperil Nan and nothing ever comes of her excursion into the demimonde rouge except for some nice location shooting. No wonder audiences were disappointed by the billing of I Married a Communist if these five twisty minutes were as much subjectivity as "I" got. It's cute that Talman was cast off-kilter right out of the gate, but I'd have let Day pursue him a lot farther if I wanted their scenes to salvage the pic.
While it seems not to be true that the script of I Married a Communist was employed by Hughes as a kind of litmus test for Communist sympathies among RKO personnel, the film's self-inflicted production hell did take it a year to land a director in the person of Robert Stevenson; the screenplay likewise went through generations of divers hands before winding up with the combined credits of Charles Grayson, Robert Hardy Andrews, George W. George, and George F. Slavin and the cast announcements were a revolving door. The dark lantern photography of Nicholas Musuraca makes the whole affair look far better than it has any right to, although the production design by Albert D'Agostino is not immune to such anvillicious infelicities as captioning an argument about Communist influence on the waterfront with the shadow of a cargo hook with some freight hanging off it in exactly the silhouette of a hammer and sickle. The ending makes dynamically rat-run use of the empty, occluded spaces of the warehouse, but the apportionment of the body count by the final credits leaves The Woman on Pier 13 the most literally better-dead-than-Red film I have ever seen. It's impressive in its foot-shooting way. It stumps so relentlessly against Communism that it neglects to establish what it's crusading for. It wants to be The Manchurian Candidate (1962), but the best it can manage is Reefer Madness (1936). You don't have to take my word for it; it's on the Internet Archive in a sketchy transfer, but it's a sketchy movie. Fortunately, TCM's Summer Under the Stars has some immediately upcoming Robert Ryan with which to recover and I can find plenty of film noir that isn't burdened with lines like "One Party member should be able to indoctrinate one thousand non-Party members, unquote." This ashcan brought to you by my neat backers at Patreon.
In light of the legacy of the Second Red Scare, I cannot wish for this production to have been the critically persuasive and commercially profitable broadside it had every delusion of being, but it legitimately impresses me that it fails so hard. Paranoiacally speaking, anti-Communist film noir is a gimme. It's a tailor-made revelation of the world behind the world, the gnawing distrust of every familiar face and institution given concrete and yet elusive justification in the shape-shifting of a threat which can manifest out of the dearest and most banal touchstones of American life, the engulfing shadows waiting for the slightest of false steps as the apophenia of dread assumes the confirmation of conspiracy. Instead, the more stridently the film insists on the clear and present danger of its Red Menace, the more tacked on it feels. With minimal alterations in dialogue and none at all to the plot, The Woman on Pier 13—a more than usually meaningless title, not least because the Embarcadero in San Francisco where its Communist activity is concentrated is conspicuously lacking in a Pier 13—would play as a paint-by-numbers crime picture of the once-in-never-out school, as a newly married shipping executive finds himself blackmailed with the sins of his former life as a hot-headed longshoreman to deadlock an important round of negotiations between labor and management to the detriment of the waterfront and the benefit of the underworld figures who hold the paper on our hero's checkered past, who would frankly make more sense as racketeers than members of the Communist Party USA. Their strong-arm tactics are pure Black Mask, leavening extortion and intimidation with brazenly brutal murders and the obligatory blonde bait on tap. Instead of the respectable front of a downtown office, their headquarters are a classically criminal warehouse on the docks where a freight elevator gives onto a barren maze of catwalks by the light of the third degree and tower cranes stand silent witness to the black silk of the water closing for the last time over a squealer's head. The syndicate echoes are unmissable when the protagonist is peremptorily ordered to resume his Party dues by turning over two-fifths of his salary to the shell charity of "Mankind, Inc." Godfather-like, the Communist ringleader pronounces, "The Party decides who's out and when." It suits the film's political vacuity that its ostensible Reds never articulate or even allude to the ideals that make them such implacable opponents of democracy except in clichéd cracks like "What a wonderful advertisement for our American system of free enterprise," nor for all their patter about contacts and cells and indoctrination do we seem to catch them doing very much subversive or seditious. Their crimes are mostly concerned with disposing of their own for disloyalty at a rate that ironically suggests Stalinist purges less than McCarthyist witch-hunts. The waterfront tie-up is a MacGuffin, its purpose never explained even as its strategies are laid out; that one of them entails the infiltration of the ILWU produces the novelty of an anti-Communist, pro-union picture, but then the necessity of denying the intertwined histories of socialism and labor in the United States leads to the preposterous alarmism of "How would you like to see the Commies take over the union and dump it in the ashcan when they get through using it?" We are left to the tautological conclusion that it's bad because the Commies are behind it and the Commies are behind it because it's bad, a triumph for conspiracy theory and dramatically something of a dud. Unlike their successors in the full swing of the atom-obsessed 1950's, the Communists of The Woman on Pier 13 have no designs on government secrets, on political appointments, even on the apple pie of American values—judging by the scene in which their pet contract killer tries to chisel a little extra on top of his payoff for doing such a "nice neat job," they're as friendly to the laws of supply and demand as the next capitalist. At times their thuggishness feels left over not only from a gangster film but the Nazi saboteurs who menaced this self-same waterfront in the imagination of World War II, as if the film cannot conceive of a Soviet menace on American soil except through the pop culture of earlier paradigms of villainy. It denatures the fearmongering; it can't sustain the insistence that Communism is more than the latest craze of bogeyman. By the time the moll is snapping at her handler, "Emotion is something you're not built to understand or appreciate," it's hard to shake the suspicion that this film might have been less stupid if it had fast-forwarded to the science fiction and instead of mobsters they were all pod people or ants.
Not the least of the sins of The Woman on Pier 13 is squandering a cast that could have stocked a more than decent noir had they been given less shrilly monotonous material to work with. Cast against his political convictions, Robert Ryan plays the doomed Brad Collins né Frank Johnson without the apologetics of a friendly witness, rather the haunted determination of a betrayed idealist—perhaps as close to the conflicted history of a Depression-era activist on the far side of WWII as the Red-baiting pieties of the script would allow. Unafraid of the exposure of his Party record, unmoved by the reappearance of his lover from his Jersey agitator days, he capitulates only at the resurrection of a cold-case murder charge: "That shop steward who was killed in the street fight during that wildcat walkout . . . You remember that very well, don't you?" It's nice of the film not to oblige him to repudiate his past as a labor organizer which has made him such a trusted bridge between the owners and the workers of the Cornwall Shipping Company, but it treats his CPUSA membership like the proverbially wrong way of going after the right thing, which by the laws of HUAC and the PCA means he never had it to begin with. "I lost everything the day you walked in on me with that Party card." No such human affordances are permitted to mar the pulp ruthlessness of Vanning, the card-carrying kingpin whom the equally left-wing Thomas Gomez has to put over as a triple threat of agent, apparatchik, and Al Capone, one minute involved in surveillance worthy of J. Edgar Hoover, the next orchestrating the night's defenestration or hit-and-run, a man who seems to have no personality beyond the furtherance of his Party's schemes. Too businesslike for fanaticism, he nonetheless can't be accused of humorless socialist realism when he dismisses an objection as wearily as if he can't think of everything himself: "We'll tell you what to do. How you do it is your problem." As Jim Travis, representing the dockworkers, Richard Rober makes a solid job of the tough, sincere union man who can't understand why his old ally across the bargaining table has suddenly become the bosses' hardline mouthpiece, but John Agar as Don Lowry can do very little with his cautionary cartoon of a useful idiot who if he thinks at all, does it with his dick as he chases after the radicalizing charms of Janis Carter's Christine Norman, one of those Red ice queens who double as the specter of the sexually independent career woman—a photojournalist who uses her assignments as cover for her un-American activities—until she betrays her politics with her femininity by falling in love with her stooge and becomes punitively expendable, leaving only a carefully edited suicide note behind. The audience knew better when she passionately claimed, "Maybe it is possible to be Communists and still be human beings, too." It's all so cookie-cutter conservative that it's disappointing without being surprising that the film cheats Laraine Day's Nan Collins out of the perspective promised by both of its titles, sidelining her hurt and alienation in favor of Brad's moral agony, which makes it even weirder and more rewarding that she steps so confidently into the limelight of the third act for a brief turn as the heroine of the woman's picture this one doesn't otherwise even pretend to be.
It can't be an accident that the film's best sequence has nothing to do with Communism except in the sense that Nan is infiltrating the ring which has taken possession of her husband; it plays like an insert from a production which heard about characterization, ambiguity, even sexual tension once. Primed with the likely identity of her brother's killer by a grief-spiteful Christine, Nan goes after the man as unhesitatingly as a Woolrich heroine and finds him in his sleazo-violent element as the proprietor of a shooting gallery at Playland, putting his arm around a female customer to guide her aim with his signature pick-up line, "You need practice, baby, you need lots of practice." Played by William Talman in his screen debut and a jacket loud enough to clash with the midway's neon, Bailey's a tricky customer; we saw his dog-toothed smile as he watched the desperately pleading man he'd dumped into the harbor like so much garbage drown, but off the clock of the Party's killings he's a two-bit wolf who can't leave his assistant in charge of the concession without the ostentatious toughness of "Keep your mitts out of that till or I'll stomp them." Nan attracts his attention by elegantly drilling four targets like she's got murder on her mind, then lets him take her out to his regular nightspot on Pacific Street and clock her as a prospective client, spinning an ingenuously hard-luck story of a no-good husband who just happens to have a lot of insurance; although she compliments his dancing and drinks deliberately from his glass, she doesn't vamp him so much as she lets his own conceit lead him on until she just needs to challenge him, "Show me your clippings," for him to spill his guts about her brother's murder. For once in its thud of propaganda, the picture feels like noir. Nan's horrified by Bailey, but she has to maintain her front of professional interest with a frisson of sexual intrigue, the surest hook for a hood so convinced he's God's gift to women that he's putting the moves on a would-be widow like he's never seen the end of Double Indemnity (1944). He's a dangerous creep, not just a drunken one, sociopathically snickering as he reveals the details of his hit-and-run specialty without a sign of awareness that they might not be so smart to share; he could turn nasty if he suspects her imposture, but then again he could turn nasty if he takes her bait. He's still chortling, "No evidence—no nothing—accident!" as Nan absorbs the horror of what she's just heard, her face hardening with the knowledge or her next move, and the scene is immediately short-circuited by the arrival of another Communist to enlighten Bailey and imperil Nan and nothing ever comes of her excursion into the demimonde rouge except for some nice location shooting. No wonder audiences were disappointed by the billing of I Married a Communist if these five twisty minutes were as much subjectivity as "I" got. It's cute that Talman was cast off-kilter right out of the gate, but I'd have let Day pursue him a lot farther if I wanted their scenes to salvage the pic.
While it seems not to be true that the script of I Married a Communist was employed by Hughes as a kind of litmus test for Communist sympathies among RKO personnel, the film's self-inflicted production hell did take it a year to land a director in the person of Robert Stevenson; the screenplay likewise went through generations of divers hands before winding up with the combined credits of Charles Grayson, Robert Hardy Andrews, George W. George, and George F. Slavin and the cast announcements were a revolving door. The dark lantern photography of Nicholas Musuraca makes the whole affair look far better than it has any right to, although the production design by Albert D'Agostino is not immune to such anvillicious infelicities as captioning an argument about Communist influence on the waterfront with the shadow of a cargo hook with some freight hanging off it in exactly the silhouette of a hammer and sickle. The ending makes dynamically rat-run use of the empty, occluded spaces of the warehouse, but the apportionment of the body count by the final credits leaves The Woman on Pier 13 the most literally better-dead-than-Red film I have ever seen. It's impressive in its foot-shooting way. It stumps so relentlessly against Communism that it neglects to establish what it's crusading for. It wants to be The Manchurian Candidate (1962), but the best it can manage is Reefer Madness (1936). You don't have to take my word for it; it's on the Internet Archive in a sketchy transfer, but it's a sketchy movie. Fortunately, TCM's Summer Under the Stars has some immediately upcoming Robert Ryan with which to recover and I can find plenty of film noir that isn't burdened with lines like "One Party member should be able to indoctrinate one thousand non-Party members, unquote." This ashcan brought to you by my neat backers at Patreon.
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I Married a Monster from Outer Space is absolutely the better movie! It was such a weird experience. This one had all the ingredients for a viable programmer except the script. And then it had Howard Hughes, which may have been its real problem.
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That may also have been a better movie.
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Now I want toast points and soft-boiled egg. They have nothing to lose but their shells.
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Lord, it wasn't good!
Now I want toast points and soft-boiled egg. They have nothing to lose but their shells.
I feel we should be able to serve this meal with the cheese sandwich ending. I love you.
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I was thinking of the meal pairing in general terms, but let's be honest, this movie has a cheese sandwich first act.
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Holy wow, though. At least it gives you the occasion for a lot of excellent zings, all of which I appreciated.
a narrative with the ideological nuance of toast points and an attention to character that gives agitprop a bad name. --surely now someone on Tumblr or somewhere can give me an ideological conversation between toast points? Please? Anyone?
its tough-minded wake-up call to an unsuspecting America is simultaneously binky-bonkers and boring. --I totally get this. Things that are nuts and boring simultaneously.
With minimal alterations in dialogue and none at all to the plot, The Woman on Pier 13—-a more than usually meaningless title, not least because the Embarcadero in San Francisco where its Communist activity is concentrated is conspicuously lacking in a Pier 13—-would play as a paint-by-numbers crime picture --Of course it is! Of course it is!
It suits the film's political vacuity that its ostensible Reds never articulate or even allude to the ideals that make them such implacable opponents of democracy except in clichéd cracks like "What a wonderful advertisement for our American system of free enterprise," nor for all their patter about contacts and cells and indoctrination do we seem to catch them doing very much subversive or seditious. --"How to Communist.. Am I doing it right, Bert? Am I Communisting?" "Sure, Doug, sure. That's how it's done."
We are left to the tautological conclusion that it's bad because the Commies are behind it and the Commies are behind it because it's bad, a triumph for conspiracy theory and dramatically something of a dud. --Ayup, sounds right. Like drug dealers and terrorists.
a triple threat of agent, apparatchik, and Al Capone --I appreciate the alliteration.
it's on the Internet Archive in a sketchy transfer, but it's a sketchy movie. FAIR, completely fair.
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Hello! Asynchronous communication is one of the points of writing. It's how you get to argue with the dead.
Holy wow, though. At least it gives you the occasion for a lot of excellent zings, all of which I appreciated.
Thank you! I am relieved to know there was some utility to the film.
-surely now someone on Tumblr or somewhere can give me an ideological conversation between toast points? Please? Anyone?
I bet it's a cute four-panel cartoon when you find it.
--"How to Communist.. Am I doing it right, Bert? Am I Communisting?" "Sure, Doug, sure. That's how it's done."
And this made me crack up, which I appreciate in turn.
-Ayup, sounds right. Like drug dealers and terrorists.
Exactly! The existence of this movie interests me sociologically, it just isn't much help if what you wanted to do was enjoy a movie.
(It probably does look unfairly good on film.)