Joan Bennett's Bitter Little World

There are certain actresses who are emblematic of the Hollywood of the 1930s and ‘40s. These are the shining female icons of that glittering place and time: Garbo, Dietrich, Hepburn, Davis, Crawford, Stanwyck.

By contrast, the name Joan Bennett is not widely recognized or remembered today. And that’s a shame, because she was a popular star who was adept at a variety of genres, from comedy to drama.

But it’s her roles in a series of crime dramas of the 1940s that stand out in her career. I would argue that Bennett’s characterizations in these movies very distinctly helped evolve what in the ‘40s was known as “melodrama,” but which today we respectfully call “film noir.” 

After spending the 1930s laboring in cute but undemanding ingénue roles, Bennett dyed her hair jet-black in 1939 for "The Man in the Iron Mask." The effect was revitalizing. The dark hair accentuated her penetrating eyes. Her perfect features and deliciously pouty mouth suddenly took on a harsher, dangerous, world-weary quality.

In several films in the new decade, she became the silken embodiment of a film noir woman: Dangerous yet malleable, conniving yet vulnerable. In the six noir pictures she made throughout the ‘40s, it was as if one of the dangerous brunettes from a cover of a lurid crime magazine had come to life.

In these notable films, which are comments on their era, Bennett captures a sense of displacement, uncertainty, and discomfiture about the present and the future. The world may be spinning, slow and resolute; but it's spinning out of control.

In 1941, Bennett was cast against type in “Man Hunt” as a hard-edged London prostitute who comes to the aid of a marksman out to assassinate Hitler. It was the first of four films she made during the ensuing decade with Austrian director Fritz Lang, who knew how to plumb the darker side of human nature. Lang also seemed to know how to utilize Bennett’s gifts to the optimal effect, and “Man Hunt” would change her career trajectory.

He used her to even greater effect in their next film together, “The Woman in the Window” (1944). A mousey professor (Edward G. Robinson) becomes enamored with a painting of a beautiful woman, which hangs in a store window he passes by. A chance meeting with the painting's subject (Bennett) leads to her jealous lover’s murder and a convoluted cover-up. In this film, Bennett is the seductive spider who lures an unsuspecting victim into her web. She's the pulp magazine cover's duplicitous vixen.

The film was such a sensation that it led immediately to a re-teaming of Bennett and Robinson in Lang’s “Scarlet Street” (1945). Here, Lang takes things to an even seedier level, casting Robinson as a struggling artist who defends a seemingly helpless and sympathetic woman (Bennett), then falls in love with her, and is subsequently exploited by her when she thinks his artwork has made him a rich man. In this film, everyone has an ulterior motive, with something to hide, someone to take advantage of, something to gain, and a lot to lose. At one point, Robinson eagerly paints Bennett's toenails while she lays back on a chaise lounge smirking. She revels in his debasement.

Bennett made just a single film in 1946, which was followed in 1947 by an excellent adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Macomber Affair,” as directed by Hungarian Zoltan Korda. This film, though set in Africa, has all the shading of a film noir. Indeed, she plays a highly unsympathetic woman who is a likely  murderess. Later that year, Bennett returned to straight-up film noir with "The Woman on the Beach." To date, Bennett seemed to give her most vivid performances when she was working with serious European directors; here, she was under the helm of French auteur Jean Renoir, the son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

In this heightened noir, location is switched from the urban setting of Fritz Lang’s films to a beachfront community. Bennett is a frustrated wife married to a blind painter (Charles Bickford). When she meets a Coast Guardsman (Robert Ryan) who’s suffering from PTSD, sparks fly. She's seductive and ruthless in orchestrating the sordid goings-on, as Ryan’s post-war nightmares spiral into potential murder. It's interesting to me that more than one of Bennett's '40s films centers on painting. She's the subject of a portrait in "The Woman in the Window," she seduces an artist in "Scarlet Street," and is married to one in "The Woman on the Beach." In these films, art serves as a catalyst for duplicity and self-destruction.

Bennett’s next film, the same year, was her fourth and final outing with Lang, “Secret Beyond the Door.” He changed the setting from the foreboding urban landscape to an old mansion in the American east. And while Bennett played unsympathetic vixens in their previous films together, here she is a cultured woman of means who suspects her new husband is out to kill her. What’s in the mysterious room he always keeps locked? “Secret” is really less a film noir than an old-dark-house thriller, but there are enough of Lang’s stylistic visual touches to keep it within the genre. And, of course, there’s brunette Bennett, gorgeous even as she faces a growing threat that may or may not be in her mind.

The following year, 1948, Bennett made “Hollow Triumph” (also known as “The Scar”), directed by Hungarian Steve Sekeley (nee István Székely). Paul Henreid plays a crook on the lam with stolen earnings from a notorious gangster’s casino. While hiding out, he realizes he looks exactly like a noted psychiatrist, except for a conspicuous scar on the doctor’s left cheek. To hide in plain sight, Henreid kills the doctor and carves himself a similar scar.

Convoluted entanglements and complications ensue, some of which strain credibility, but I see this film as an unsung noir classic. As the doctor’s secretary and lover, Bennett brings to her characterization a combination of compassion and desolation. She wants to love, she wants to be happy, but the powers that be just can’t help but knock her down, over and over. “It's a bitter little world, full of sad surprises,” she inveighs angrily in a scene near the film's conclusion. It underscores the movie's bleak, somber tone – fitting for a country grappling with the effects of a devastating world war.

From 1945 on, Bennett made a film noir every year until 1949, finishing the decade with “The Reckless Moment,” directed by German filmmaker Max Ophuls (who is better known for his French cult art house films). Here, Ophuls took a stab at a dark thriller with a distinctly American setting. Bennett no longer plays the femme fatale who’s seen too much of the world. Instead, she plays a charming middle-class California wife and mother who suddenly finds herself thrust into the midst of murder and attempted cover-up. 

As the respectable Mrs. Lucia Harper, Bennett doesn’t like her impetuous teenage daughter’s irredeemable boyfriend, and seeks to break up the relationship. When the boyfriend demands money, she refuses. A few days later, she discovers the boyfriend dead in the family’s boathouse. She goes to great lengths to get rid of the body and avoid scandal.

Just when she thinks the coast is clear, she is visited by a strange man (James Mason) who knows about the murder and is out to blackmail her. Mason’s nefarious business partner has in his possession letters from the daughter to the dead boyfriend, and he wants $5,000 in return. 

The film’s plot hinges on Bennett’s desperate attempts to raise the money to protect her daughter – who, we learn, may not have killed the boyfriend in the first place. To make things more complicated, Mason falls in love with Mrs. Harper. 

“The Reckless Moment” is a weird movie, a dark thriller that makes the picture-perfect hometown setting seem threatening. Bennett is convincing playing a woman out of her element largely because of the hard-bitten noir heroines she’d played in her previous films in the '40s.

But by 1950, Hollywood had changed. Film noir as a style had begun to flag. Bennett's jagged edge was smoothed over as she entered a new decade in a new guise: the suburban housewife. As if signaled by the turn of the new year, she was cast in 1950's "Father of the Bride" opposite Spencer Tracy as the comically hapless parents of 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. Bennett is lovely in this film and its 1951 sequel, but the hard-bitten dame of the 1940s – muse to Lang, Renoir, and Ophuls – has been erased.

Speaking of 1951, it was a year that almost ruined Bennett in real and reel life. Her husband, Walter Wanger (who produced “Scarlet Street,” “Secret Beyond the Door” and “The Reckless Moment”) confronted and shot Bennett’s agent, Jennings Lang (no relation to Fritz), over what Wanger thought was an extramarital affair. Lang survived, but the case went to court – and the headlines’ implications weren’t pretty.

Bennett worked in films sporadically in the 1950s, and took only occasional roles in various television series throughout the ‘60s. But in 1966, she was cast as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, matriarch of the troubled Collins clan, in the popular Gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows,” which ran until 1971 and became a colossal cult hit, mostly with young viewers.

Headlining that strange, moody series, the enigmatic Joan Bennett won over new fans – fans who perhaps never realized that she already knew her way around dark shadows.

  

Constance, early '30s

Joan, early '30s

Footnote: When talking pictures arrived in 1929, the new format needed new stars, and Joan Bennett's older sister Constance seemed tailor-made. With her sleek blonde looks and slim lines, Constance shimmered onscreen, personifying the ideal female star of the era. Fast-forward to the end of the '30s, and filmgoers’ tastes had changed. Constance’s career was on the wane. But Joan? She was just revving up.