Robert Florey's Danger Signal (1945) is almost a first-class feminist noir. The fact that it is not is due almost entirely to a last-minute access of dude ex machina that is as narratively nonsensical as it is thematically unwelcome, but until that derailing failure of nerve it offers some neat variations on the web of the homme fatal, including the kind of heroine more often seen as a cautionary victim and one of the most delightful psychiatrists I have seen in her decade.
The setting is once again Los Angeles, the unglamorous one of housing shortages and returning servicemen where Hilda Fenchurch (Faye Emerson) works as a public stenographer and notary, a cool, long-jawed blonde whose tortoiseshell glasses and severely pinned hair advertise her as a woman who's all business—not only does she have a widowed mother (Mary Servoss) to support, her younger sister (Mona Freeman) is being treated for TB at a sanitarium out of town. Friendly enough with one of her regular clients, the Austrian-accented Dr. Silla (Rosemary DeCamp), she seems briskly oblivious to the hesitant interest of another, the classically absentminded Dr. Lang (Bruce Bennett). With surprising ease, however, she connects with Ronnie Marsh (Zachary Scott), the vagrant but appealing veteran who comes limping along with his suitcase just as she's taking down the room-for-rent sign her mother hung out that afternoon. He introduces himself as an aspiring writer, tells a few yarns from army life by way of bona fides, by the end of the evening fits as comfortably into the Fenchurch household as if he's always lived there. Within the month, he and Hilda are day-tripping for an afternoon by the sea and dinner by candlelight: "Cool salmon mayonnaise, good vintage wine, dessert . . . Here's to people like us." Dark-eyed and sharp-smiling, alternately self-deprecating and bold, Ronnie makes not a dream lover but a persuasive one and by the time they're taking the scenic route home the next morning, Hilda's wearing his grandmother's ring. Unfortunately, because we are the audience and we have the advantage of third person omniscient, we know there's nothing to be trusted in his satisfied smile. I likened Scott to Reynardine in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and here he is indeed an American Mr. Fox, right down to the golden ring he gives each of his victims in turn, its treacherous inscription promising Till death do us part. He got that game ankle from dropping off a fire escape just ahead of the authorities, that ruptured duck by lifting it from a real veteran's lapel. I was reminded of nothing so much as The Stepfather (1987) by his matter-of-fact introduction, which looked only like robbing and deserting an unconscious lover until we heard the griefstricken husband challenge the official verdict of suicide. Isn't it cute that when Ronnie hits a snag in his latest plot, he gets Hilda to help him out by brainstorming a suicide note for one of his characters in her own handwriting? Just as cute as the flattering attentions he's paying to Anne now that she's returned full of glowing vitality and an inheritance of $25,000 in trust for her marriage, all in secret from a still besotted Hilda, of course, until an awkward encounter with the boy she thought her sister was seeing (Richard Erdman) spills the beans. One lie reveals another, as Hilda discovers that all the time Ronnie has been coasting rent-free because of his literary unsuccess, he's been selling his pulp tales on the profitable sly—and as soon as she understands that she no longer has any idea what this charming man she invited across her threshold is or is not capable of, she knows that she'll do whatever it takes to stop him.
I had seen Emerson before, but never as a protagonist, and I adore the fact that she is. Especially following the sleight-of-hand with the suicide note, it's not difficult to imagine a version of this story that disposes of Hilda as soon as her suspicions are confirmed, leaving her sister as the true, Gothically imperiled heroine, the final girl who'll unmask her robber bridegroom at last. It may have gotten its most famous airing in Psycho (1960), but I've seen protagonists swapped out in noirs before. Instead, once it's established itself around Hilda, Danger Signal not only sticks with this compromised, self-effacing, not actually a doormat of a woman but furnishes her with an unexpected ally in the person of Dr. Silla, the rare Hollywood psychiatrist who knows her work and doesn't have to wade through too much Freud to let the audience know it. Early in the film, having just finished transcribing a lecture on "morbid psychology," Hilda remarks, "It's amazing what goes on in some people's heads." Dr. Silla smiles, gently correcting her with something like the moral of the film: "In anybody's head, Hilda." She's on the younger side of middle-aged, dark-haired and émigré-chic, and when a distressed, disheveled Hilda knocks her up in the middle of the night after coming far too close to murdering her false-hearted lover in the first shock of betrayal, we are braced for her to gaslight our heroine, too. Surely she'll think it's all jealous fantasy, as Anne flared defensively when Hilda tried to warn her, as their mother couldn't bring herself to believe about that nice young Ronnie Marsh. Many a man has switched his affections to a younger, prettier model with a bigger bankroll; it might make him a jerk, but that's a far cry from a serial killer. "He's got to be stopped," Hilda cries desperately, her gun confiscated by a somber Dr. Silla. "He can't go on doing things like this . . . All I can think about is how to stop his lying—the way he smiles, the way he talks to my mother and to Anne—" The psychiatrist soothes her, gets her a drink, turns down the lights as Hilda lies on the couch, exhausted and pliable, and then she says with professional firmness, "He sounds like a scoundrel. A charming one, but thoroughly ruthless and dishonest. Your impulse to destroy him is natural enough." Of course she counsels Hilda against actually doing so, but it's exhilarating just to hear her take the other woman at her word, an almost audible shift into a higher narrative gear. She asks to be introduced to Ronnie, to get a better idea of what they're up against. I don't think I've seen anyone like her in a film noir before. Over lunch and a walk in the garden, she draws out her quarry masterfully, playing on his contempt for her gender and her profession, his self-enchantment with his own irresistibility, his inability to refrain from negging her even while he reshapes himself before our eyes into his idea of what a science-minded older woman wants, which just happens to look to an objective viewer like a pseudo-Nietzschean blowhard who thinks he can pass off Lebensraum as a scientific solution for the elimination of war so long as he doesn't use the word. He actually claims she reminds him of his mother, like that's Kryptonite for the lady Freud. It's a brilliant deflation of a character who we begin to realize may only have looked like an unstoppable Don Juan because he was practicing his pick-up artistry on the romantically inexperienced Hilda and the barely legal Anne. Seductive and destructive as the man currently calling himself Ronnie Marsh may be, he's really not that smart—debriefing Hilda afterward, Dr. Silla sums him up as "a great egotist and extremely susceptible." Her plan is to work on disentangling him from Anne while Hilda rests and regroups at the doctor's beach cottage. Looking at these two women together, we don't doubt for a minute that they can take him.
Besides, the film is not exactly overflowing with competitive male heroism. Erdman's Bunkie Taylor is as aw-shucks as his name, a nice kid—he brings Anne flowers before asking her out for movie night with the gang—but no Dobie Gillis. Bennett had been an Olympian silver medalist and a collegiate track and field star, but Dr. Lang is six foot three of permanent Clark Kent, a man so gawky he looks in real danger of getting hung up in his own glasses whenever he has to take them off or put them back on. One of his apologetic interruptions may unwittingly forestall one murder, but he misses the spark of another right under his own microscope. It's a slide of Bacillus botulinus (Clostridium botulinum), which he explains to Hilda is "one of the deadliest poisons ever turned loose in the pantry" before she can remind him that she typed four copies of a paper on it for him once. "Your memory is better than mine," he admits ruefully. Transfixed by the multiplying wriggle of the Gram-positive rods, Hilda asks, "How does it affect people?" Misconstruing her antecedent, Lang sighs, "Oh, they get angry at me." He's not unthinkable as a suitor, in the shy, clumsy, sincere way of so many screen boffins, but he's no savior unless pointed in the right direction by Dr. Silla, who puts together the significance of a falsely signed telegram with a missing vial of B. botulinus faster than you can say biowarfare for one, please.
( In order to be happy, you have to be a little ruthless. )
If you can deal with the damp splat of the ending, I still recommend the majority of Danger Signal. It rarely goes where it seems to be pointing; it allows its heroine to discover some dark places inside her own head; its villain is understood to exist on the continuum of ordinary male contempt for women, just a little more literal than most about disposing of his conquests. Without much more than low-key lighting and the occasional high or low angle, God-level cinematographer James Wong Howe makes the familiar interiors of houses and offices look as estranged and uncertain as the loneliest city street. I watched the film on TCM's Noir Alley; it can be found on DVD; if it were safe to run a movie house right now, I'd triple-feature it between The Leopard Man (1943) and The Prowler (1951). Dr. Silla has made my shortlist of great movie mental health professionals, and I assure you it is a very short list indeed. This fiction brought to you by my morbid backers at Patreon.
The setting is once again Los Angeles, the unglamorous one of housing shortages and returning servicemen where Hilda Fenchurch (Faye Emerson) works as a public stenographer and notary, a cool, long-jawed blonde whose tortoiseshell glasses and severely pinned hair advertise her as a woman who's all business—not only does she have a widowed mother (Mary Servoss) to support, her younger sister (Mona Freeman) is being treated for TB at a sanitarium out of town. Friendly enough with one of her regular clients, the Austrian-accented Dr. Silla (Rosemary DeCamp), she seems briskly oblivious to the hesitant interest of another, the classically absentminded Dr. Lang (Bruce Bennett). With surprising ease, however, she connects with Ronnie Marsh (Zachary Scott), the vagrant but appealing veteran who comes limping along with his suitcase just as she's taking down the room-for-rent sign her mother hung out that afternoon. He introduces himself as an aspiring writer, tells a few yarns from army life by way of bona fides, by the end of the evening fits as comfortably into the Fenchurch household as if he's always lived there. Within the month, he and Hilda are day-tripping for an afternoon by the sea and dinner by candlelight: "Cool salmon mayonnaise, good vintage wine, dessert . . . Here's to people like us." Dark-eyed and sharp-smiling, alternately self-deprecating and bold, Ronnie makes not a dream lover but a persuasive one and by the time they're taking the scenic route home the next morning, Hilda's wearing his grandmother's ring. Unfortunately, because we are the audience and we have the advantage of third person omniscient, we know there's nothing to be trusted in his satisfied smile. I likened Scott to Reynardine in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and here he is indeed an American Mr. Fox, right down to the golden ring he gives each of his victims in turn, its treacherous inscription promising Till death do us part. He got that game ankle from dropping off a fire escape just ahead of the authorities, that ruptured duck by lifting it from a real veteran's lapel. I was reminded of nothing so much as The Stepfather (1987) by his matter-of-fact introduction, which looked only like robbing and deserting an unconscious lover until we heard the griefstricken husband challenge the official verdict of suicide. Isn't it cute that when Ronnie hits a snag in his latest plot, he gets Hilda to help him out by brainstorming a suicide note for one of his characters in her own handwriting? Just as cute as the flattering attentions he's paying to Anne now that she's returned full of glowing vitality and an inheritance of $25,000 in trust for her marriage, all in secret from a still besotted Hilda, of course, until an awkward encounter with the boy she thought her sister was seeing (Richard Erdman) spills the beans. One lie reveals another, as Hilda discovers that all the time Ronnie has been coasting rent-free because of his literary unsuccess, he's been selling his pulp tales on the profitable sly—and as soon as she understands that she no longer has any idea what this charming man she invited across her threshold is or is not capable of, she knows that she'll do whatever it takes to stop him.
I had seen Emerson before, but never as a protagonist, and I adore the fact that she is. Especially following the sleight-of-hand with the suicide note, it's not difficult to imagine a version of this story that disposes of Hilda as soon as her suspicions are confirmed, leaving her sister as the true, Gothically imperiled heroine, the final girl who'll unmask her robber bridegroom at last. It may have gotten its most famous airing in Psycho (1960), but I've seen protagonists swapped out in noirs before. Instead, once it's established itself around Hilda, Danger Signal not only sticks with this compromised, self-effacing, not actually a doormat of a woman but furnishes her with an unexpected ally in the person of Dr. Silla, the rare Hollywood psychiatrist who knows her work and doesn't have to wade through too much Freud to let the audience know it. Early in the film, having just finished transcribing a lecture on "morbid psychology," Hilda remarks, "It's amazing what goes on in some people's heads." Dr. Silla smiles, gently correcting her with something like the moral of the film: "In anybody's head, Hilda." She's on the younger side of middle-aged, dark-haired and émigré-chic, and when a distressed, disheveled Hilda knocks her up in the middle of the night after coming far too close to murdering her false-hearted lover in the first shock of betrayal, we are braced for her to gaslight our heroine, too. Surely she'll think it's all jealous fantasy, as Anne flared defensively when Hilda tried to warn her, as their mother couldn't bring herself to believe about that nice young Ronnie Marsh. Many a man has switched his affections to a younger, prettier model with a bigger bankroll; it might make him a jerk, but that's a far cry from a serial killer. "He's got to be stopped," Hilda cries desperately, her gun confiscated by a somber Dr. Silla. "He can't go on doing things like this . . . All I can think about is how to stop his lying—the way he smiles, the way he talks to my mother and to Anne—" The psychiatrist soothes her, gets her a drink, turns down the lights as Hilda lies on the couch, exhausted and pliable, and then she says with professional firmness, "He sounds like a scoundrel. A charming one, but thoroughly ruthless and dishonest. Your impulse to destroy him is natural enough." Of course she counsels Hilda against actually doing so, but it's exhilarating just to hear her take the other woman at her word, an almost audible shift into a higher narrative gear. She asks to be introduced to Ronnie, to get a better idea of what they're up against. I don't think I've seen anyone like her in a film noir before. Over lunch and a walk in the garden, she draws out her quarry masterfully, playing on his contempt for her gender and her profession, his self-enchantment with his own irresistibility, his inability to refrain from negging her even while he reshapes himself before our eyes into his idea of what a science-minded older woman wants, which just happens to look to an objective viewer like a pseudo-Nietzschean blowhard who thinks he can pass off Lebensraum as a scientific solution for the elimination of war so long as he doesn't use the word. He actually claims she reminds him of his mother, like that's Kryptonite for the lady Freud. It's a brilliant deflation of a character who we begin to realize may only have looked like an unstoppable Don Juan because he was practicing his pick-up artistry on the romantically inexperienced Hilda and the barely legal Anne. Seductive and destructive as the man currently calling himself Ronnie Marsh may be, he's really not that smart—debriefing Hilda afterward, Dr. Silla sums him up as "a great egotist and extremely susceptible." Her plan is to work on disentangling him from Anne while Hilda rests and regroups at the doctor's beach cottage. Looking at these two women together, we don't doubt for a minute that they can take him.
Besides, the film is not exactly overflowing with competitive male heroism. Erdman's Bunkie Taylor is as aw-shucks as his name, a nice kid—he brings Anne flowers before asking her out for movie night with the gang—but no Dobie Gillis. Bennett had been an Olympian silver medalist and a collegiate track and field star, but Dr. Lang is six foot three of permanent Clark Kent, a man so gawky he looks in real danger of getting hung up in his own glasses whenever he has to take them off or put them back on. One of his apologetic interruptions may unwittingly forestall one murder, but he misses the spark of another right under his own microscope. It's a slide of Bacillus botulinus (Clostridium botulinum), which he explains to Hilda is "one of the deadliest poisons ever turned loose in the pantry" before she can remind him that she typed four copies of a paper on it for him once. "Your memory is better than mine," he admits ruefully. Transfixed by the multiplying wriggle of the Gram-positive rods, Hilda asks, "How does it affect people?" Misconstruing her antecedent, Lang sighs, "Oh, they get angry at me." He's not unthinkable as a suitor, in the shy, clumsy, sincere way of so many screen boffins, but he's no savior unless pointed in the right direction by Dr. Silla, who puts together the significance of a falsely signed telegram with a missing vial of B. botulinus faster than you can say biowarfare for one, please.
( In order to be happy, you have to be a little ruthless. )
If you can deal with the damp splat of the ending, I still recommend the majority of Danger Signal. It rarely goes where it seems to be pointing; it allows its heroine to discover some dark places inside her own head; its villain is understood to exist on the continuum of ordinary male contempt for women, just a little more literal than most about disposing of his conquests. Without much more than low-key lighting and the occasional high or low angle, God-level cinematographer James Wong Howe makes the familiar interiors of houses and offices look as estranged and uncertain as the loneliest city street. I watched the film on TCM's Noir Alley; it can be found on DVD; if it were safe to run a movie house right now, I'd triple-feature it between The Leopard Man (1943) and The Prowler (1951). Dr. Silla has made my shortlist of great movie mental health professionals, and I assure you it is a very short list indeed. This fiction brought to you by my morbid backers at Patreon.
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