Liz Scott - Noir City Sentinel - Vol. 5, No. 3

Lizabeth Scott
Noir’s Quicksilver Anti-Heroine
LIBELED LADY
By Anastasia Lin
Special to the Sentinel
R
ekindled into a cult figure by the film noir
revival, Lizabeth Scott has lived for more
than fifty years “in seclusion” in large part
due to off-screen issues that remain as murky and
convoluted as many of the films she appeared in.
Turning eighty-eight this fall, Scott is simultaneously
noir’s most recognizable face and its most absent
celebrity—an odd, lingering duality that an examination of her films will show was part of her persona
from nearly the first moment she appeared on screen.
Born Emma Matzo in Scranton, Pennsylvania
on September 29, 1922, she was a lively, curious firstborn who has retained a strong maternal streak within
her family. She came to New York in the midst of
World War II as a model, but as with many ambitious
young women emboldened by wartime conditions,
she had bigger aspirations: “I wanted to be Katherine
Cornell,” she would reminisce in later years. (And
one can readily see that frustrated theatricality in several of her overly drawn early film performances.)
Producer Hal Wallis, in what would soon be the
death throes of a stormy association with Jack L.
Warner, was a man with a marked weakness for
blondes: the young Lizabeth Scott, with her wide-set
eyes, hyper-erect posture, and dark, striking brows,
was turning heads in New York at a whiplash-induc-
ing rate. As a result, Wallis pursued Scott for nearly a
year before meeting her. A poor screen test for Warners proved to be a disguised blessing, for when Wallis
left for Paramount (birthing the affiliated production
company approach that would be prominent in Hollywood’s impending free-for-all), Scott was among the
first that Wallis signed.
Linked romantically for years, Scott and Wallis
had a passive-aggressive frisson that teetered between
mentoring and mind games. Early on Scott showed an
independent streak, pushing to be loaned out to other
studios. Wallis wasn’t so sure that Scott was ready to
play the lead in a film like Dead Reckoning (1947),
and her inability to bring it off with the type of
panache demonstrated by Lauren Bacall (who had the
advantage of some unique “chemistry” with
Humphrey Bogart) was one of the reasons why their
relationship cooled—and why Scott’s career reached
a plateau so quickly.
It might have been during the war [WWII]
women became more self-sufficient… Up to that
time, they were portrayed as clinging, feminine creatures. I mean totally feminine, and inundated emotionally—that hidden level of emotion that a woman
was supposed to have for a man… Now women are
no longer that way.
Lizabeth Scott and Humphrey Bogart in Dead Reckoning
Scott’s own words, from an interview with
Alain Silver, echo both the stages of her relationship
with Hal Wallis and the misogyny that was the understructure of the femme fatale—a lack of emotion
reflected in a world where the concept of nurture has
been discarded.
Oddly, Lizabeth Scott never portrayed a femme
fatale in a Hal Wallis production. All of the films where
she did so were loan-outs or independent productions.
38 Noir City Sentinel FALL 2010
John Seitz, but an extremely
accomplished craftsman in his
own right) gave Scott a lavish
glamour tableau, especially in
her silent reaction shots. The fact
that she didn’t register even a
scintilla of streetwise sense in
her characterization of an ostensible “blue collar girl” was
glossed over. Her earlier career
as a model was sent up in a scene
where she gives Van Heflin a
tour of her new outfit—complete
with removable skirt.
The “eye candy” approach
worked well, and Martha Ivers
was a hit—more due to the tense
triangle between Van Heflin, Barbara Stanwyck, and Kirk Douglas,
but Scott was swept along for the
ride. As a result, Wallis gave her
the lead in the grimly gay sageIn her first noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (opposite Van Heflin) Scott was
brush noir Desert Fury, a film
still more model than actress
designed to take full advanThat was the great reality in psychological
tage of Scott’s youthful glow.
drama—what you’re calling film noir—that you
An ultra-rare Technicolor noir, Desert Fury
could be involved emotionally but what you had to
(1947) showcased Arizona locations and a rapdo, you had to do. It reflects the fact that there are
turous color scheme coordinated to Scott’s comso many facets in human beings… At that time, to
plexion, facial expressions—even her wardrobe.
myself, it was psychological and dramatic because it
She’s no longer incongruously hardscrabble;
showed all these facets of human experience and
instead she’s incongruously innocent and
conflict: that these women could be involved with
impetuous at the same time, lurching into a
their heart and yet could think with their minds.
hornet’s nest of past pain and homoerotic reckonings. At times it seems she’s being pursued
The “great reality” to which Scott alludes was
more passionately by her own mother (Mary
not brought to bear on the roles she played in Wallis’s Astor) than by the two men who are, in theory at
version of film noir. At Paramount, those roles were least, rivals for her favors (Burt Lancaster and
given to established stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta John Hodiak). Too well bred to be truly bratty,
Young. When they weren’t—as was the case with Scott has to settle for simmering in a film that
Gail Russell, sadly miscast in Calcutta—the results desperately needs something more fiery than the
were disappointing.
endless innuendo it dispenses. While the film
Scott was groomed as a troubled “good girl,” has its delirious moments—most of them profirst as Toni Marachek, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks vided by Astor and Wendell Corey, playing
with-a-heart-of-gold type, in The Strange Love of Hodiak’s sour but strangely soulful “friend”—
Martha Ivers (1946). As per Wallis’s plan, director of things just never quite come to a boil.
photography Victor Milner (often overshadowed in
When Rita Hayworth backed out of playthe scheme of things at Paramount by lens legend ing Coral Chandler in Dead Reckoning (1947),
Scott pestered Wallis to make a loan-out deal. He
did so, but with a good deal of reluctance: the
screenplay was muddled, much more so than the
type of dark films Wallis preferred to make
(unlike other “noir auteurs,” Wallis eschewed
flashback narration, only allowing a bare minimum of it in I Walk Alone). An inordinate
amount of time in the film is spent in misdirection about Coral Chandler’s character: the backand-forth is so dizzying that one is almost
exhausted at the point when the film finally
makes up its mind.
For Lizabeth Scott, the role was clearly
confusing, even though she clearly understood
the idea that Coral was supposed to be struggling
with her own nature. The “good bad girl” concept got a strenuous and ultimately tenuous
workout here: Coral Chandler is a “bad good bad
good bad” girl (if one has counted the script flipflops accurately). Scott is so exhausted at the end
of the film that she goes wooden, capitulating to
a hopelessly muddled role after a valiant attempt
to tame it.
Dead Reckoning also started a trend of
having Scott sing—something Wallis glommed
onto as a kind of compensatory romanticism to
soften her often-brittle persona. (Scott’s low
voice and unusual timbre often made her seem
more strident than sweet, even in “good girl” roles.)
Though she professed bewildered distaste at the idea
at the time (as it was repeated, talisman-like, in a
number of subsequent noirs), she eventually warmed
up to the idea as her career stalled and she put a great
deal of effort into singing—just as the vogue for
vamping had gone into a steep decline.
Wallis quickly made Scott back into a “good
bad” girl in I Walk Alone (1948), but here she is
clearly third fiddle to Burt Lancaster (going into
attack-dog mode for the first time in his career as a
double-crossed mobster) and Kirk Douglas (already
in the solid upward arc of his “heel” cycle). Scott gets
to sing a song, is handed roughly twelve ounces of
feminine moral weight, and winds up as a gooey
appendage to Lancaster.
Wallis could not create any kind of follow-up for
this success d’estime; there were no Paramount properties that could advance Scott’s position. Barbara Stanwyck was still owning all the plum parts on the lot:
Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), Thelma Jordon (1949),
No Man of Her Own (1950). Wallis focused on maxi-
FALL 2010 Noir City Sentinel 39
Scott perfectly embodies the idealized fantasy of the femme fatale opposite Jane Wyatt's proud, pragmatic housefrau in
Andre de Toth's brilliant Pitfall
mizing Scott’s loan-out salary, and prevented her from
returning to the stage on numerous occasions.
Andre de Toth cleverly cast Scott in Pitfall
(1948), his sly but devastating assessment of the
looming post-WWII malaise in America, which he
and William Bowers recalibrated from Jay Dratler’s
source novel (nothing more or less than an hysterical
send-up of James M. Cain). Scott plays Mona
Stevens, luscious but alienated model who finds herself caught between three increasingly nightmarish
versions of the “red-blooded American male” (Dick
Powell, Byron Barr, Raymond Burr).
It is the grown-up, full-bodied version of the
“good bad girl” with a devastating twist: Mona
Stevens should be a femme fatale, but she isn’t—and
she pays a heavy price for not being so. Rising to the
eloquence in the proto-feminist critique of a malevolently re-emergent patriarchy, Scott embodies the
duality of her character with a knowing sadness,
fashioning a perfect mix of anger and resignation.
When she gave her love to the man,
unlike the wife, she gave her total self. The
wife gave her self, but in a different way;
she had to take care of the child, had to
go to church, had to mop the floor and
what not... The femme fatale, the glamour, the beautiful clothes, the speedboat—she was the dream… The romantic ideal could be achieved with her.
Director Byron Haskin, treading water
between his Warners career as a special effects
wizard and his reinvention as a purveyor of hitech 50s science fiction, also saw something in
Scott, something that apparently had escaped Wallis.
“You could see that something more shaded was what
she was searching for, something more…precarious
[emphasis mine]. When I was handed Roy Huggins’s
novel [Too Late For Tears] as a potential property, I
immediately thought of her.”
That was the most amazing film to make,
because they didn’t have a script… Every day
they’d give us the pages that we were to shoot the
following day... There was an immediacy, a
freshness in this film.
It’s probably no wonder that Scott threw herself
into the role of Jane Palmer with a sense of gusto—
was she working out her frustrations with Wallis
when she made the astonishing transformation from
housewife to murderess in Too Late for Tears (1949)?
There is little duality to be found in Jane Palmer,
though Roy Huggins’ script gives her some Phyllis
Dietrichson-like backstory as a kind of belated explanation. Scott doesn’t really nail Jane’s character until
the very end, when she has made her (temporary)
escape to Mexico. In a few brief scenes, we see Jane
embrace her obsession and grow into a persona that
clearly eschews the notion of marriage. We get a brief
glimpse of what femme fatales do when they actually
get away with their misdeeds—they become feminist
free agents.
Scott, who has up to this point been a bit too
overt in displaying the roughening edges of her character’s pose of gentility, achieves a new level of relaxation in these brief scenes—a “character state of
mind” that she will return to in later noirs. For a little
while, at least, Jane Palmer has defied the patriarchy
in all of its forms—smarmy but smothering (as
embodied in her husband Alan, played by Arthur
Kennedy), lowdown and conniving (Dan Duryea in
a hammy turn as grifter Danny Fuller, who knows
the scoop about the $60,000 that Jane is trying to
hold on to), smirky and covert (Don DeFore, a
most avuncular avenger). It is a character a
good bit ahead of its time.
Thanks to her two most recent performances, Jacques Tourneur was interested in
casting Scott in his odd little football melodrama, Easy Living (1949; no relation to the
Ray Milland-Jean Arthur screwball comedy
from the ’30s). Scott as a spoiled trophy wife
was an interesting stretch; like Ida Lupino’s
Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), however, Easy Living pushed into subject
matter that was about a decade away
from becoming truly mainstream.
Wallis continued to make good
money from Scott’s loanouts, but
her career was on a treadmill.
There were no meaty
roles for Scott over the next
couple of years: Dark City
(1950) pretty much rehashed
I Walk Alone; a second loanout to RKO reuniting her
with Dead Reckoning
director John Cromwell,
The Company She Keeps
40 Noir City Sentinel FALL 2010
(1950), was a pale version of Paid in Full (1950),
Wallis’ last effort to give Scott a role with some nuance:
both these films were ultimately overwhelmed by their
own soap suds.
Two more loan-outs the following year continued Scott’s on-again, off-again stalemate. RKO’s The
Racket (1951) made her a chanteuse once again, leav-
ing her even less room to operate than in Paramount’s
versions of the “gangster noir” formula. More engaging but decidedly minor was Scott’s turn in Two of a
Kind (1951), a send-up of noir that found her in a
more amiable version of her Jane Palmer character,
tossing coy barbs like tiny grenades back and forth
with Edmond O’Brien. The film pulls its punches,
however, and limps to a flat
conclusion.
After being mostly
wasted in Red Mountain
(1951), Paramount’s toosolemn take on Quantrill’s
raiders, Scott ventured to England. There she found a congenial co-star in Paul Henreid,
whose days as a ’40s foreign
heartthrob were long since
past and who had begun to
reinvent himself, eventually
moving behind the camera.
The young British director
Terence Fisher, soon to graduate into horror films for
Hammer Studios, proved to
have an able touch, and so
Scott’s last top-notch noir performance would surface in a
film fittingly entitled Stolen
Face (1952). The plot—plastic surgeon loses gorgeous
pianist girlfriend and decides
to replace her by reshaping the
disfigured face of a Cockney
bad girl—is pure noir hokum,
but Scott brings off her dual
role with almost shocking
ease, demonstrating how she
had mastered a more naturalistic acting style even in the
face of egregious contrivance.
(She even nails a Cockney
accent!) Despite a botched
ending, Stolen Face shows
just how far Scott had progressed in the seven years
she’d starred in films; sadly,
virtually no one in Hollywood
got the chance to view the evidence of her evolution.
There were to be no
more double-edged roles for
Scott; Wallis simply played
out the contractual string,
using the loan-out as a way to
sidestep the evidence of a mismanaged career. (The best he
could do at Paramount in 1953
was to steer Scott into a wan
Martin & Lewis vehicle,
Scared Stiff.) Veering between
one-dimensional roles—bad
girl in Bad For Each Other
(1953) and stalwart sidekick
to an embattled John Payne in
Silver Lode (1954), Alan
Dwan’s B-take on High Noon,
Scott was on a merry-goround going nowhere.
And that carousel came
unhinged (in a manner similar
to the one that Alfred Hitchcock “relocates” in Strangers
on a Train) in September
1954, when the scandal sheet
Confidential published allegations that Scott had
solicited sex from lesbian call girls. She was linked to
Parisian “madame” Frede, whom Marlene Dietrich had
befriended; the publisher, Robert Harrison, indulged in
a little “sexual Darwinism” by assigning Scott to the
legion of so-called “baritone babes” who engaged in
such subversive activities as wearing pants.
Scott sued for libel the following year, but would
wind up dropping the suit. But she had assessed the
damage that had been done to what was already a floundering career, and privately decided to step away from
acting once her contract with Wallis was fulfilled. The
last film under that contract, Loving You (1957) paired
her with Elvis Presley, and makes for a fascinating contrast with a much darker take on the invasion of the
cornpone into American mass culture, Elia Kazan’s
overheated A Face in the Crowd (1957).
Both Scott and Patricia Neal play professional
women who find and nurture a charismatic male
singing star, with differing results. They are both
“baritone babes” who show steely reserve with the
men who surround them; Neal’s character is given the
type of dualistic conflict between her professional and
personal life that Scott had so eloquently addressed in
Pitfall nearly a decade earlier. Off screen, Neal was
not tainted by sexual scandal, despite a protracted
affair with Gary Cooper at the outset of her Hollywood career, and she would conform to society’s definition of “normal” by bearing children.
Lizabeth Scott did not conform. She valued her
freedom and independence. She found the ways of the
patriarchy to be stifling, and moved on with her life—
a very personal life—just as soon as her contractual
obligations had been fulfilled. Her silence regarding
that life dovetails back to the duality that intrigued her
from an early age—the forced dichotomy between a
woman’s mind and heart, and the ongoing conflict
about the ownership of a woman’s body and soul. Too
beautiful to be taken seriously, too unusual and odd to
be accepted solely as eye candy, Lizabeth Scott
embodies the tension that already existed in sexual
politics in America in the 1940s and 50s—a tension
that has still yet to be resolved. For that reason and
several more, her performance in Pitfall will continue
to resonate as one of the most eloquent, realistic portrayals of “woman’s fate” in American society. n
M