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.
( Maybe I am just a dame and didn't know it. )
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.
( Maybe I am just a dame and didn't know it. )
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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