TIM SNELSON
2014 marks both the 20th
anniversary of Hollywood producer Joan Harrison’s death and the 70th
anniversary of her first and most celebrated production Phantom Lady
(1944). This blog reveals the parallels between the protean female producer and
the resilient heroines in her mystery films, and asks what it might tell us
about women’s roles in wartime Hollywood and beyond.
In an October 1945 Chicago Tribune article on Hollywood
producer Joan Harrison titled “Glamour Galvanic,” noted film critic Hedda
Hopper describes her as “a 33 year-old, golden-haired ball of fire with a
temper of a tarantula, the purring persuasiveness of a female archangel, the
capacity for work of a family of beavers, and the sex appeal of a No. 1 glamour
girl.” Hopper’s characterization of “Hollywood’s most successful lady” as a
hybrid creature—simultaneously aggressive spider woman and ethereal innocent,
desirable pinup and desiring predator—reveals much of the simultaneous
liberations and limitations facing women working in wartime and postwar Hollywood. In the immediate postwar context of October
1945 Harrison— a former protégé of Alfred Hitchcock who had worked her way up
from his secretary in London in 1933 to his assistant and scriptwriter in
Hollywood in the early 1940s— reflected on a career as Universal’s first female
producer that had lasted only 18 months. In this time she had transformed from
heroine to femme fatale in the eyes of Universal’s executives, as both her own
and her onscreen alter-egos’ syntheses of multiple femininities and skills for
masquerade became undesirable within the “boys’ club” of Hollywood following
the war.
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| Joan Harrison in the cutting room |
In mid-1943, Universal had appointed
“Hitchcock alumna” Harrison to produce mystery films “from the woman’s angle.” As
Barbara Berch of the New York Times explained, her gender and her
experience with the “master of horror” put her in a unique position to bring a profitable
female perspective to the burgeoning horror and mystery market. Harrison’s appointment is
a clear example of Hollywood bringing in female expertise in order to target a
newly realized female audience for horror and crime films during the war. These
gendered shifts in wartime audiences and the resultant changes to Hollywood’s production strategies are
discussed in my forthcoming monograph for Rutgers University Press, Phantom Ladies: Hollywood Horror and the Home Front, which, as you can see, takes its name from Harrison’s film. Harrison chose Cornell Woolrich’s (under
the pseudonym William Irish) crime novel Phantom Lady (1942) as her
first project, but significantly reconstructed the source material to privilege
a female protagonist’s point of view. In the novel the secretary Carol “Kansas”
Richman is a marginal figure—only the suspect’s girlfriend, not his work colleague.
In the film, however, she takes on the traditionally male investigator’s role. Like
Harrison, Kansas transcends her role as secretary to excel in the perceived
male world of mystery and terror because of, rather than in spite of, her
gender.
In Phantom
Lady, Kansas (Ella Raines) swaps
secretarial duties for hard-boiled detective work when her boss, Scott
Henderson (Alan Curtis), a civil engineer, is sentenced to death for murdering
his wife. She sets out to track down his alibi—the eponymous woman with whom he
shared the night in question but did not exchange names. Mysteriously no one
remembers the “phantom lady” despite the elaborate hat that she wore, which
seemed to get her noticed at the bar where she met Scott and the show she
attended with him. Kansas is plunged into a corrupt New York underworld of
lies, payoffs, betrayal, and murder. In the film’s most celebrated and
controversial jazz club scene—respected critics James and Manny Farber loved
this “orgiastic” sequence, whilst the Production Code Administration,
Hollywood’s internal content regulator, feared its “offensive sex
suggestiveness”—Kansas masquerades as a “hep kitten” called Jeannie to seduce a
lascivious drummer and key witness, Cliff (Elisha Cook Jr.). This frenetic
montage sequence utilizes disorienting camera angles and close-ups as it cuts
between the musicians performing and Kansas dancing, pouring liquor, kissing
Cliff, and applying makeup. It culminates in a frenzied drum solo that cuts
back and forth between Cliff’s increasingly sweaty, manic face and Kansas’s
feigned ecstatic expression (see below):
This
scene is typically attributed solely to director Robert Siodmak—with whom
Harrison, and Raines, would collaborate on her next and final film for
Universal, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945)—but for me it is the
embodiment of Harrison’s quest to capture the complexities and contradictions
of women’s wartime experiences and expectations. The scene perfectly captures Kansas’s
skill for masquerade but also the multiple pressures placed upon women on the
American home front. The spectator appropriates Cliff’s point of view as he
scans her legs adorned in fishnet stockings, but unlike Cliff, the spectator is
aware that this is an elaborate ruse to entrap the predictable drummer.
Harrison herself was well aware of the advantages her sexuality might offer in
the male-dominated world of Hollywood. In an article on Phantom Lady in Time magazine,
she differentiated herself from other producers by saying “I use my sex,” even
exploiting “some leg art” in her studio publicity photographs. The article
continues, “Besides using a pair of ah-inspiring legs, she also uses a mind trained
at the Sorbonne, Oxford, and by England’s shrewdest director.” Like Kansas,
Harrison suggest she was able to get ahead by manipulating the male gaze.
Phantom
Lady was, on
the whole, a critical and box-office success and afforded Harrison more power in
wartime Hollywood. However, as the war came to a close these powers were
retracted and her image as an assertive, independent woman became increasingly
policed and tamed by critics and studio publicists who claimed, for example,
that despite her reputation as a “stormy petrel”, her biggest fear was running out of butter at dinner parties.
Like her films, which celebrate wartime career women’s abilities to synthesize
the twin demands of desirability and productivity, the appeal of the “galvanic”
Harrison was seen as increasingly redundant following the war, as men returned
to reclaim their roles and restore women’s central productive roles of
housekeeping and childbirth. Harrison quit Universal in 1945 after the studio
refused to back her in a long-running battle with the Production Code
Administration over The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry. The
film’s morally ambiguous ending was seen as unpalatable for immediate postwar
audiences and the
studio’s acquiescence to a tacked-on “dream ending” brought Harrison’s Universal
career to a strange but certainly not dream end.
Tim Snelson, lecturer in media history at University of East
Anglia. He has a forthcoming monograph tilted Phantom Ladies: Hollywood
Horror and the Home Front published with Rutgers University Press to be
published in October 2014.
