In the complex world of 1940s and 1950s film noir, good people can turn out to be bad, bad people can turn out to be good, and things aren’t always as straightforward as they seem. That ambiguity often ensnared the female characters of film noir in another web of complexity. Sometimes these women were innocent victims, other times they were sinister manipulators, but they also struggled with the restrictive expectations forced upon women of that era. These characters epitomize Dark City Dames.
The women of film noir, says author Eddie Muller, “helped put a twentieth-century spin on the ancient male-created myth of female power, presenting an alluring and dangerous antidote to Hollywood’s typically prim take on the American female.” Muller’s Dark City Dames, newly revised and expanded, is an in-depth exploration of some of the most memorable female characters of the genre and the experiences of the actresses who portrayed them.
The original version of this book, released in 2000 and now out of print, was structured in two parts. Part 1 consisted of lengthy interviews with six female stars of film noir, and Part 2 presented follow-up interviews with the same women, conducted at the beginning of the 21st century. Müller admits that his choice of actresses featured was constrained by “asking subjects to consent to extensive interviews”, which resulted in the exclusion of some renowned film noir actresses who had passed away or did not wish to be included. The new edition of Dark City Dames revises and updates the two parts of the original book.
The six actresses who participated in the two sets of interviews for Dark City Dames – Jane Greer, Audrey Totten, Marie Windsor, Evelyn Keyes, Coleen Gray, and Ann Savage – tell fascinating and often unnerving stories. All grappled with the contract player system at the major Hollywood studios, in which performers’ long-term contracts allowed studios to assign them to whatever projects they deemed appropriate or available.
Notably, Howard Hughes, owner of RKO Studios, shows up in all six women’s stories. While his erratic and controlling behaviour was extreme, it was not unrepresentative of the harassment and abuse that vulnerable female actresses frequently experienced.
The contract player system often resulted in actresses being cast in films with misogynistic directors or producers, or in roles that offered little opportunity to use their talents. “Although she pined to do comedy,” Muller says of Windsor, “she found herself quickly pigeonholed as the sultry-and-sinister type. Yet she took immense satisfaction in doing a great job, every day.”
Since film noir was considered a “B-movie” genre, other Dark City Dames interviewees, such as Totten and Savage, were cast in film noir roles after “failing” to establish themselves in more mainstream genres. “Failure” in this sense often meant failing to look or behave as an actress was supposed to look or behave, on and off the set.
Keyes played Scarlett O’Hara’s sister in the 1939 blockbuster Gone With the Wind. However, she engaged in an unapologetically turbulent romantic life, and was friends with several of the alleged Hollywood “reds” later blacklisted by the industry. As a result, she told Muller, she “never got the part, the starring role that sends you shooting all the way up there, into the top ranks.”
What comes across strongly in these extensive interviews in Dark City Dames, and to some extent in the follow-up interviews conducted years later, is the determination of these women to succeed, despite the industry and the system being set up to exploit them. “I always felt like I should apologize for being in Hollywood,” Gray recalled. “I felt like I was never going to work again. I was always surprised when they cast me in another picture.”
The Dark City Dames interviews conducted in 2000 reveal that the actresses had mixed feelings about their work in film noir and their artistic legacy. Savage most notably starred in Detour, released in 1945, and later left the industry entirely. When Detour was included in a 1983 retrospective of films by director Edgar G. Ulmer, she had to be persuaded by her friends to attend the screening anonymously. She was astounded to see that the flop film had found a new audience that appreciated it.
“Vera [Savage’s character] in her debut was too far ahead of the curve; her aggressiveness repulsed the average viewer,” Muller suggests. “Today, media-saturated film buffs can, without a twinge of guilt, wallow in Vera’s startling – yes, savage – energy, her undisguised desire to get what she wanted before the clock ran out.”
Muller’s extensive knowledge of the film noir genre makes the profiles of these six performers thoroughly engrossing, and his laconic, hard-edged writing style will be familiar to viewers of his commentaries on the TCM channel’s weekly Noir Alley program. His knowledge also informs Part 3 of Dark City Dames, newly added in this edition, which consists of shorter profiles of ten additional film noir actresses.
Muller explains that some of these are actresses that he has worked with at film festivals and other cinema-related events, and some are performers he has never met but whose work he admires. While several of these actresses drifted into sad circumstances (poverty, substance abuse, mental health challenges) later in life, Muller tells all of their stories respectfully and thoughtfully.
The three-part structure of Dark City Dames is unconventional, and it has the unintended effect of making the book feel somewhat unbalanced. All three parts are well-written, but the interviews in Part 1 are so thorough and detailed that the shorter interviews in Part 2 and profiles in Part 3 seem somewhat superficial in comparison. Nonetheless, the incredible amount of information in the book – and the stunning reproductions of posters, stills, and publicity photos – make Dark City Dames a stirring tribute to women in a film genre “where Pollyanna went after payback, in spades.”