Dana Andrews, or The Male Mask

IN ONE OF MY NOTEBOOKS from the late 1960s, among disordered notations of dreams and sexual fantasies and barely articulated gothic plot lines, I come upon this passage:

A man stands in a neon hallway at five in the morning. It is Dana Andrews, in a white trench coat, looking at the stairs. He lights a cigarette and thinks the thoughts that make his face that way. A vacant cop whose words are lines of dialogue. An empty trenchcoat—the eyes dead, the body inert—caught in the frame until the reel ends. Vincent Price and Ida Lupino are no longer there to keep him company. He has even lost the photograph of Gene Tierney’s eyes.

There is a hiatus, and then the reverie resumes:

The end of the cigarette. The detective fizzles. Between the office and the alley he becomes a dot. They rip the trench coat from his shoulders. The blonde in silk in the warm room back there flashes an instant against the empty background and then never comes back. He looks down and is already ceasing to exist . . .

Vacant, empty, empty, lost, ceasing to exist. Are the words an attempt to ward off the insistent materiality of the apparition, to take some of the weight off that implacable cop sprung from darkness, that hitchhiker adrift among the worlds, unable either to escape from himself or to stop existing?

How did he get in here, anyway, into a psychic space that elsewhere seems to partake of a late-sixties pipe dream, a bunch of scattered notes toward an album cover for some late-blooming Bay Area band just around the time the psychedelic thing went sour, a spun-sugar paradise of lotus pads and faux bonsai, Krishna framed among vintage matchbox-cover art, a lamaistic abode drawn for Marvel Comics by a scroll painter of the late Ming? Brushing past the wind chimes and coughing slightly at his first whiff of the incense, this incongruous guy barges in with his midnight shadow—a case of seriously bad karma—sleep-deprived, off-kilter, in no mood for discussion.

BUT THAT IMAGINARY SETTING—the sybaritic landscape of an equally imaginary satori—hadn’t I seen that somewhere before? Was it not an adaptation, after all, of Clifton Webb’s luxurious Manhattan apartment in Laura, the paradise of chinoiserie and discreetly eclectic interior decoration appropriate to America’s most literate and acid-tongued columnist, Waldo Lydecker? Indeed, so much began with Laura. I shall never forget the day I first heard Clifton Webb intoning, in voice-over, as the camera glides stealthily through an initially disorienting patch of mirrors and curios: “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.” Otto Preminger’s 1944 suspense film was capable of marking a spectator almost as profoundly as the title character marked everybody around her.

It played often during the 1960s on a double bill with Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, thus bringing together, with a kind of inevitability, two great, nearly twin character roles: Clifton Webb as corrosively witty, ultimately loveless columnist Waldo Lydecker, and George Sanders as corrosively witty, ultimately loveless theater critic Addison de Witt. Just as Dana Andrews in Laura becomes obsessed—through the medium of a pop tune, endlessly repeated, and an oil portrait, endlessly stared at—with someone irretrievably lost, I was drawn through Laura’s tangible elements—voice-over, flashback, title theme, tracking shots, lighting (captured with the brilliant hard-edged focus that distinguished Twentieth Century–Fox movies of that era), sofas, hats, mirrors, clocks, radios, cocktails—into a disturbingly poignant relationship with the vanished 1940s: a time beyond recapture and yet still there to be immersed in, over and over, by means of this very movie.

That opening, with its implication that everything we see is somehow part of the memory of Clifton Webb, becomes even more disorienting with the belated realization that Laura does not in fact turn out to be narrated by Webb—indeed could not possibly have been, since he does not outlive its final frame. His voice guides us just far enough to admit Dana Andrews, as police lieutenant Mark McPherson, into the apartment: “Another of those detectives came to see me. . . . I could see him through the half-open door.”

Dana Andrews is at the outset a figure in Clifton Webb’s gaze, or more exactly a stooge for Webb’s monologue: opaque where Webb is transparent, heavy where Webb is delicate, blunt where Webb is serpentine. The wonder was that this was to be a Hollywood movie filtered through the consciousness of a man who would sit typing in the bathtub and say, to a hard-bitten homicide cop, “Hand me my robe, please,” or, witheringly, when interrogated about a factual contradiction in one of his columns: “Are the processes of the creative mind now under the jurisdiction of the police?”

As Andrews plays with one of those tiny puzzles whose object is to roll ball bearings into little holes, Webb asks: “Something you confiscated in a raid on a kindergarten?” To which Andrews rejoins, in a first indication of where the real advantage lies: “It takes a lot of control. Would you like to try it?”

Andrews has walked into a den of civilized predators, the realm of bitchy sophistication where Clifton Webb and Judith Anderson and Vincent Price, united by their style of sexual ambivalence and vengeful competitiveness, snarl over the elegant spoils: vases, armoires, classical concerts, tiny Italian restaurants in the Village, and above all the vivacious young girl, Gene Tierney’s Laura Hunt—a natural, a diamond in the rough—whose blood might have kept them alive if only she had not been dead since before the movie began.

In this context Dana Andrews exists so that there might be one person who is not one of these exquisite vampires, a working-class guy who chews gum, speaks his lines with a cigarette jammed in the middle of his mouth, and says things like: “A dame in Washington Heights got a fox fur out of me once.” An intruder in the realm of nuance, he submits to mockery only to emerge more effectively in the final règlement de compte.

Yet of course he’s no different from anyone else, a point underscored visually when Webb, Price, and Andrews walk in single file into Laura’s apartment; they look as if they are about to go into a soft-shoe number, “The Three Guys Shuffle” or something of the kind. He has entered this world to investigate her death, and what he learns of in flashback after flashback (each triggered by an upsurge of that diabolically haunting title theme) is her mesmerizing effect on everybody whose path she crossed. It is the narrative itself, its elegant windings and recursions, that takes him over.

He falls in love with the murdered Laura. The emotion must have been gathering force while he sat there listening to all the anecdotes about her singularly penetrating charm, hearing David Raksin’s title theme over and over. Soon he’s taken up residence in the apartment, living with her things, listening to her records (or rather record, since she evidently has only that one melody in her collection), virtually becoming the person whose absence it’s his job to resolve.

In the dead center of the movie, at its witching hour, he sits up all night looking at her picture, smoking cigarettes, pouring himself one drink after another. Amour fou, from a beefy cop yet. This necrophiliac plot turn gives Andrews an aura of perversity that no amount of subsequent narrative back-pedaling (the fact, for instance, that she really has been alive all along) can ever quite remove. It is what everyone remembers from Laura, and Laura is what everyone remembers from Dana Andrews’s career. Unless they remember The Best Years of Our Lives; but there Dana Andrews is only a part—a perfectly attuned and fitting part—of something vastly larger: America, the war, small-town life, marriage and suffering and class difference. Laura by contrast sets up house at point zero: it gives us an enactment of the birth of an obsession rare for its tact and understatement. No histrionics, just immobility and silent invasion.

Later—and here the movie starts to become just another movie—he will win Laura away from them, take her back to her roots. He will show them how fatally, from the beginning, they have mistaken his stiffness for lack of perception. Likewise they misread the slow burn, the apparently inexpressive eyes taking it all in, registering every shade of contempt: that torpor, somehow reptilian, in his reaction time. A Mississippian drawl pulled up short to yield his characteristic clipped yet somnolent tone, a sound that threatens to spill over but doesn’t, and that in later years—in his ravaged performances in Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps and Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon and Allan Dwan’s Enchanted Island—merges with the drinker’s ill-disguised slur. By the end of the sixties, Andrews would resurface in public-service spots about the dangers of alcoholism. All these figures—the trim young detective of Laura, the up-all-night journalist of While the City Sleeps, the painfully serious actor As Himself—existed simultaneously, multiple incarnations of a self whose prime characteristic was the eerie suggestion of a lack of self.

HE EXISTS INITIALLY as object: coat and hat as essence. He cuts a figure—not the most graceful of figures perhaps, but one that directors find ways to use. And what directors: a parade of auteurs find in him a fetish ideal for their purposes: Otto Preminger (five times), Fritz Lang (twice), Jacques Tourneur (three times), Jean Renoir, Elia Kazan, William Wyler, William Wellman, Mark Robson (three times), Lewis Milestone (four times), and finally even the old pioneer Allan Dwan, in the Mexican shambles of Enchanted Island. What do they see in him?

First of all, a certain solidity of stance. He is a center of gravity. The face stirs slowly if at all. And shadows fall well on him: he was made to star in some heavy forties drama: The Uninflected, with suitably Central European lighting and a score by Miklos Rozsa. One of the actors who came to the fore while the older male stars (Stewart, Gable) were sidelined by World War II, Andrews never quite achieves the kind of magical screen personality—the transfigured ordinary—that evokes a loving response from fans. He manages briefly, however, to stand in for something like The Average Guy, never more seamlessly than in The Best Years of Our Lives. A no-nonsense lack of theatricality, coupled with a hint of emotional pain repressed through long practice, shows up when seen from the right angle as flawed but reliable—reliable precisely because he is just as flawed as anybody else. (The most idealized version of Dana Andrews is the philosophical, pipe-smoking, oddly pacifistic hero of the Jacques Tourneur western Canyon Passage.) Seen from the wrong angle, he is a little too real for comfort: evasive, self-doubting, resentful, capable of irrational bursts of anger and long grudges.

Most of the time he is out of place, sometimes (as in The Ox-Bow Incident) fatally so. If he’s in a place he wants to get away from it, if he’s on the road he wants to stop traveling. He can’t seem to manage it either way: he is his own context. Stuck with his mere presence in the world—his irredeemable materiality—he almost chokes on it. If he drinks, it is not for champagne highs or bubbly merriment; not even for any rowdy, roustabout venting of beer-hall energy; he takes the whiskey straight down to core level, where he’s permanently grounded anyway. This is what smoking and drinking look like when they aren’t fun anymore. In later days, hung over, irritable, ill at ease in his body, it’s as if he had finally become the characters he had merely mimed at first. He is now, in eternity, that drifter getting off the bus in Fallen Angel, the late-night traveler whose air of terminal weariness is accented by what would be a sneer of discontent if only he was motivated enough to let it rip.

THIS IS POST-HEROIC MAN, no matter how convincingly he may have played warriors in Crash Dive, The North Star, The Purple Heart, A Wing and a Prayer, and A Walk in the Sun. Those roles prepared audiences to see him as the returning GI, the unwanted war hero subsiding into a dead-end soda-jerking job and a failed quickie marriage in The Best Years of Our Lives; prepared them to confront all the discomfort of the Korean War as it intruded into a prematurely complacent postwar existence in I Want You. “I have no appetite for power,” he says in While the City Sleeps, and you believe him.

His haplessness lends an air of eerie believability to The Fearmakers, a very odd anti-Communist programmer directed by Jacques Tourneur. Andrews’s chronically punchy demeanor—here the result of Red brainwashing—gives him a sympathetic fragility as he tries to make sense of a world in which a slick public-relations firm (run by such unlikely types as Dick Foran and Mel Tormé) is really a front for a Moscow-directed campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament.

He constantly risks being mistaken for some other male actor: he could almost have been Glenn Ford; might have dreamed of being Robert Mitchum; at moments, under sufficiently noirish lighting, could pass for John Payne or Zachary Scott (though lacking the Machiavellian guile of either) or his own kid brother, Steve Forrest. Average guy, average bully, average two-bit grifter, who can crack wise as well as the next guy even though he essentially lacks humor, who has little more to offer in the way of worldly wisdom than the resigned grimace of a tough egg: someone fated for an unglamorous unhappiness, with something like a whine at the edge of his tough-guy delivery, for all the good it does him: “Aw, what’s the use.” He’s smarter than he looks or acts, but why would he bother giving a demonstration? He talks as if it took a little too much effort, every word forced reluctantly beyond the perimeter of a bitter silence. Knowing the score has never given him any advantage. An object lesson: Quitters never win. “A guy might as well give up.” Born to sit up disconsolate in an all-night diner—“Why was I born?”—or simply change the radio when that song begins to play, turn to gum jingles, light another cigarette. Defeated but not conned. Don’t try any of that preacher stuff on him. He’ll be the first to catch on that the cop is really the killer.

He is neither good guy nor bad guy, just guy. The Man Without Qualities, in fact, or at any rate with no distinguishing characteristic but a maleness of which he seems weary as well. This thing of being a man that he has to drag around, the ponderous accoutrements of male being: this body that must carry the weight of Dana Andrews through the world, and his coat and his hat too, and the extra pack of cigarettes for later.

When he surrenders to passion, it will be with the rough futility of the thwarted date rape in Preminger’s underrated noir soap opera Daisy Kenyon. This is one of Andrews’s most fascinating performances: equal measures of suaveness and shamefacedness add up to a corporate lawyer suppressing his nobler instincts, aggressive and lovelorn, an amazingly jagged and unresolved portrait of someone who lives along the seam lines, comfortable on neither side.

When the bitterness shows through, it is acrid and unforgettable, as in another performance for Preminger: the violent detective of Where the Sidewalk Ends, a characterization that elaborates on the violence that could be glimpsed in embryonic form in Laura’s Mark McPherson. In late films like Hot Rods to Hell and Crack in the World, the bitterness will become almost unbearable, the rage of an impotent aging man—ineffectual commander, overprotective father, cuckolded husband—who wants simply to annihilate the youthful competition. Or is it the bitterness of finding himself in such wretched films? Does he rage at the dialogue, the scenario, the wooden direction that cannot lend his presence the noble dimensions that a Preminger or Tourneur could create with a mere trick of light, a shift of angle? We see him now—a final cruelty to which age condemns him—in the washed-out, head-on immobility of low-budget TV-style framing.

The paradox of the movie actor is that in some sense he is part of the decor. “Dana Andrews”: a shape intended to provide evidence of a certain angle and intensity of light, a weight for bearing up clothes, a gait whose function is to give the camera something to track, a voice for making audible the lines of dialogue: mass in movement, acted on by equipment.

We have not really seen him, only what registers. Where in all these frames is the preacher’s son from Don’t, Mississippi, one of thirteen children, who was dragged from place to place in Texas in the wake of his father’s roving career as an evangelist, the usher who took his vocational inspiration from Douglas Fairbanks and from H. B. Warner as Christ in King of Kings, who figured he could do it just as well as those movie actors, and who by the time he became a leading actor had already suffered the early death of his first wife? As for his own voice speaking of himself, we have only a few scattered observations. “You can’t get rid of your own personality,” he told an interviewer. “It’s going to come through, no matter what you’re doing.” And again, in passing: “It’s not difficult for me to hide emotion, since I’ve always hidden it in my personal life.”

O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors,

edited by Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson;

New York: Pantheon Books, 1999