“Two Alone”: A Noir Pastoral
It gets darker in the country than in the city.
Urban areas are thought to teem with crime and vice, but for city dwellers used to crowded, well-lit streets there’s a special terror about lonely rural roads at night. To the wary urbanite, the country—while it may be pretty for a Sunday outing—is a place of isolation, ignorance, backwardness and intolerance. This distrust feeds a strain of the rural gothic that trickles through Hollywood movies, always marginal and often subversive. Less common than the swampy, overripe Southern gothic, this genre of bucolic noir portrays farm life as mean, hard-bitten, joyless, and rife with exploitation—less salt-of-the-earth than salt-in-the-wounds.
F.W. Murnau’s City Girl (1929) set the template. Here Murnau inverted the pattern of Sunrise (1928), in which George O’Brien’s restless farmer is corrupted by an immoral city vixen and redeemed by a his wholesome, pure-hearted peasant wife. In City Girl, the eponymous heroine spends her days slinging hash in a Chicago lunch counter, sweating and footsore, batting away passes from endless hordes of male customers. At night she goes home to the roar of the El outside her cramped little room, blows the dust off her pitiful potted flower, listens to the chirping of a mechanical bird toy, and dreams of a better life outside the city. But when she marries a naive farm boy and goes home with him to the wheat fields, she’s briskly disillusioned. She has to contend with her harshly disapproving, bible-thumping father-in-law, who dominates her spineless husband; with a crowd of lecherous hired hands whose leering and pawing are worse than anything at the lunch counter; with thankless toil and her in-laws’ grim obsession with profit.
City Girl was caught in the changeover to sound, made as a silent but released in a mangled form with added musical and dialogue scenes. (The silent version has since been recovered and is now the only version available.) Among the changes that came with the adoption of sound was an intense urbanization of Hollywood’s output. The difficulty of location shooting and the influx of actors and writers from New York may have been the causes, but the whole tone of pre-Code movies is urban: wised-up, fast-paced, slangy.
Even when someone tried to make a film extolling the virtues of rural life, it seems they just couldn’t stop sneering and shuddering. The Purchase Price (1933), a total mis-fire by William Wellman, follows the basic trajectory of City Girl but is made with complete disregard for narrative logic or credibility. Barbara Stanwyck plays a nightclub singer so fed up with life on the Big Street, and with her seemingly amiable racketeer boyfriend, that she decides to flee to North Dakota as a mail-order bride. There she behaves like a brainwashed gulag inmate, cheerfully undergoing her re-education-through-labor: waking at dawn in a room so cold the water in her pitcher is frozen, and slogging through back-breaking toil in support of a churlish ingrate husband. (Played by the charmless George Brent, he pounces on her without preamble on their wedding night, and is so deeply offended by her rejection that he refuses ever to give her a second chance.) Of course, who would want to earn a cushy living warbling a song or two in a silver lamé gown when she could don an unflattering apron and a pair of galoshes and tote heavy pails of water along muddy paths while fending off cretinous rustics and suffering the scorn of a man with a chronic sniffle? Umm….
Somehow I imagine that the men who wrote The Purchase Price (the screenplay was by Warner Brothers regular Robert Lord, having an off day) were about as fond of clean country living as Oscar Levant, whose freak-out upon finding himself on the remote Neshobe Island is memorably recorded in Harpo Marx’s sublime autobiography, Harpo Speaks. He describes how Levant dissolved into panic when dragged off to this idyllic spot: “‘Birds!’ he wailed. ‘There are birds here! The sickest creatures on God’s earth! Trees! Even the trees are psychotic! Bugs! Don’t tell me there aren’t any insects here because I know there are!’ He grabbed my arm. ‘Harpo,’ he said, ‘What have you done to me? Take me away from here. Take me away from here!’”
Rural gothic films succeed where they avoid Purchase Price-style hypocrisy and are unapologetic in their antagonism. The completely unexpected Two Alone (1934) is such a triumph. It is unexpected both because this kind of dark, brooding, romantic, Borzagean tale was out of fashion in 1934, and because no one involved in the film had a distinguished record elsewhere. Director Elliott Nugent started as an unpreposessing actor (he’s the wimpy love interest in the talkie version of The Unholy Three, and had his best role as an emotionally damaged ex-pilot in The Last Flight) and as a director churned out mainly lightweight fare and earnest mediocrities like the 1949 Great Gatsby. The cast is headed by bland B leads—lovely Jean Parker, whose acting is rudimentary, and perennial kid-brother Tom Brown—and by a crew of usually predictable character actors. But nothing about this film is predictable.
It opens with barnyard footage that prepares you for a quaint rustic comedy (an expectation encouraged by the presence of ZaSu Pitts’s name in the credits). But the scenes of farmer Slag (Arthur Byron) rousting his family out of bed for another workday have a nasty edge: he’s a mean bastard, his wife (Beulah Bondi) is a sour-faced shrew, and their daughter is all one would expect from such a love match. The next shock is our first view of Mazie (Parker), bathing naked in a stream, her fully exposed rear ogled by Slag in a creepy Suzanna-and-the-Elders scene.
Mazie is an orphan and essentially a slave to her foster family, who exploit her powerlessness to the full. When the stingy, iron-fisted Slag growls self-righteously that “No one ever gave me anything,” one can hear the echo from today’s G.O.P. candidates. The protestant work ethic has drained this family of the last drop of humanity; they’re more miserly with compassion than with coin, and their flinty obsession with squeezing every penny from their workers and their land is related to Slag’s predatory lust and his wife’s barren prudishness. (When a hired man quits, Mrs. Slag confronts him with a shotgun and goes through his suitcase to make sure he didn’t steal any spoons; he jokes unkindly that she doesn’t need the shotgun to protect herself from him.) When Mazie falls in love with Adam (Brown), a reform school runaway who becomes another de facto slave, their romantic and sexual union is the ultimate threat to the Slags: a combined threat of rebellion, of idleness, of emotional warmth, of fertility, of freedom.
These themes are woven cleverly through the film. There is an ambiguous scene at the beginning where the middle-aged hired hand George Marshall (Willard Robertson) talks to Mazie by the well as she’s fetching water. Robertson was a character actor distinguished by his hard slitty eyes, and he usually played cops and sheriffs—the kind you know won’t believe your story. Here, he’s kind to Mazie, but his interest seems suspicious, especially when they talk about her unknown father, and Marshall opines that “no substitute has been found yet” for a biological father. It later turns out that Marshall is her father, that he has sought her ought and plans to rescue her. Hence the well, where Mazie looks at her reflection and imagines she is seeing her mother’s face, becomes a symbol of revelation—truth emerging from the well, as in the old adage. Yet it remains an ominous image too: in the end Mazie will throw herself into the well as Slag attacks Adam, who is now the father of her unborn child.
We first see Adam literally falling off the back of a truck, where he has been hitching a ride, and tumbling down a dusty slope. Tom Brown has a baby face that usually shone with gee-whiz, schoolboy cockiness under slicked-back hair. Here, with his hair tousled and a look of wary bitterness on his dirt-streaked face, he’s surprisingly attractive and forceful. Adam was sent to reform school after beating up his father, who abused his mother; Slag sees a chance to benefit by concealing Adam and blackmailing him into working for no wages.
Mazie and Adam bond first like brother and sister. Their awakening to something more comes in a dark, weirdly sexy scene that suggests anything but innocent pastoral romance. Left behind while the Slags are off at their daughter’s wedding, the young couple sits around a fire outdoors with Sandy (Charley Grapewin), a harmlessly demented dipsomaniac whose daughter (Pitts, in a very minor role) locks him in the shed to keep him out of trouble. Sandy starts telling them about the customs of Indian weddings, in which the groom has to chase down the bride. As he beats hypnotically on an upturned bowl to imitate the tom-toms, Adam and Mazie are unnerved and then possessed by the drumming; they run off into the dark woods and kiss.
Later, after they run away together, they succumb again in a field full of cloyingly sweet night flowers. But their sexual passion leads them into a love as pure and faithful as anything in Borzage. Their position as outcast waifs who find salvation in one another recalls Lucky Star—where crippled Charles Farrell and ragged farm girl Janet Gaynor develop an achingly delicate love in a bleak, slovenly rural gothic setting. The loveliest moment in Two Alone comes when Mazie, who has just realized she’s pregnant, faints and is carried into the house by Slag, who shoos Adam away. Ordered back to her chores as soon as she revives, Mazie goes to the porch for firewood. Through the window, we see Adam standing outside in the lashing rain, waiting to find out if she’s all right. It’s a beautifully framed and lit image that illustrates, without mawkishness, Adam’s devotion and the forlorn yearning of the young lovers kept apart.
Perhaps it’s unlikely that this story would end well, that the one good father would win out over all the bad fathers. George Marshall shows up in the nick of time after Adam has brawled with and been shot by Slag, and Mazie has thrown herself in the well. Adam still has to go back to reform school, but it’s a generally hopeful ending—and it comes as a great relief. It’s a tribute to the small film’s emotional power that we really don’t want to see the the luckless young lovers suffer any more.
Two Alone feels out of place at the tail end of the pre-Code era; it looks both backward to silent melodramas and forward to rural gothic noirs like Borzage’s Moonrise (1948), Jean Negulesco’s Deep Valley (1947), and Delmer Daves’ The Red House (1947). In Deep Valley, Ida Lupino is an isolated girl whose parents’ frosty, sick, mutually punishing relationship has reduced her to timid, stammering neurosis. She blossoms after meeting another wounded soul (Dane Clark), a convict escaped from a chain gang that is building a road through the remote woods; but he can’t free himself from his compulsively violent nature, and finds escape only in death. Clark had his finest hour in the gorgeous and haunting Moonrise, as a young man ostracized by his nasty Southern backwater town because his father was hanged for murder.
The past lingers longer in small towns and lonely farmsteads than in cities, where anonymity and change constantly wash around the inhabitants. This makes rural noir a more natural phenomenon than is commonly assumed, since the fatal grip of the past is a central noir theme. The Red House is a psychological haunted-house tale, and if one is not too distracted by the incongruity of Edward G. Robinson and Judith Anderson playing both siblings and farmers, it achieves a dense atmosphere of decay and blight. One-legged Pete Morgan (Robinson) relies on both spooky rumors and a hired redneck with a shotgun to keep people out of the woods around a ruined farmhouse that harbors the macabre secret of the woman he loved and killed. The woman’s daughter, ignorant of her past, is Morgan’s adopted daughter, and as his mind crumbles he begins to mistake her for his long-lost love, a disturbingly incestuous delusion. There’s a campfire-story creepiness about this film, you can almost hear the twigs snapping and see the light flickering, making the woods beyond blacker.
Bring a flashlight. It gets dark out there in the country.
by Imogen Sara Smith