#two alone

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Two Alone

Chapter One: The Storm

The rain beat against the window as the last light of day faded. The clouds had been dark and low all day, and finally, toward evening, unleashed a violent storm. A melancholic wind howled around the white cottage, and the green shutters tugged against their battered locks as the tempest buffeted them with no hint of mercy.

But the walls were solid and sturdy, and inside, the sounds of the storm were muffled, replaced instead with the peaceful crackle of the fire in its grate. The light was dim, as the only other source was a lamp set on the table across the room. Papers were scattered across the modest oak surface. Some of them were in stacks, others spread out. All of them were covered with words, written in a sure, flourishing script. Some of these were crumpled on the floor, some were folded between the pages of a dictionary, serving to hold places in it. And more were being added to the piles.

A woman sat at the table, her feet tucked up under her in a way that could not have been a comfortable position to hold for very long. Hers were the stacks of papers, hers was the handwriting on them, and hers was the house. She had bought it with her own money, accomplished by the selling of her first novel. 

She was an authoress, and the townspeople looked askance at her for it.

Another dip in the inkwell, another toss of her braid over her shoulder, another scratch of her quill, and her name was signed boldly on the last page of her new manuscript.

Corabella Mueller.

When she first began writing she had considered using a pen name--Rowena sounded gloriously dramatic--but after some consideration, she had defiantly signed her own name and decided that if the town was to bring her to the stake for this deviation from customs, they'd have no doubts about who they were burning.

The quill was laid to rest in its case, having been carefully drained free of ink. Corabella gathered up a particular stack of papers and laid them in a long, flat box, sighing.

There's the last one.

She stood, wincing as her feet came back to life. Dratted things. She could stand on them all day, why couldn't they handle being sat on?

A rumble, followed by an unforgiving crack, sounded close outside, and Corabella shivered. Her house was sturdy, it was true, but this was a storm the likes of which she hadn't seen in a long time.

Another rumble reached her ears, and suddenly she realized that it wasn't a rumble at all, it was someone pounding on the front door. 

Grabbing her lantern and her dagger-like letter opener for safety, Corabella hurried into her slippers and made for the foyer. It wasn't far away (the house was modestly sized), but in the space between her parlor and the door she had time to work up all sorts of scenarios, few of which were pleasant. 

The pounding continued, but it stopped suddenly, and Corabella fought with the locks. The sight which met her eyes upon opening the door was--

Black. Solid, absolute darkness which flung rain in her face and soaked her through in an instant. Gasping for breath, she snatched the lantern out of harm's way and went to slam the door shut. But a cry of pain stopped her, and she looked down.

And there was a person, collapsed on the doorstep. 

"Gracious!" Corabella gasped, and nearly set the house on fire with the way she flung the lantern and letter opener onto a table in order to get this person into the house.

"What on earth," she began, dragging the soaking wet stranger into the foyer and forcing the door shut with all her strength.

The stranger lay panting on the rug, making no move to get up.

"I'm sorry--I'm getting water all over your floors," she said, for it was a she.

And she was also a foreigner, for her accent was strange. But Corabella had no more time to meditate on that--there were more important things to worry about.

"Are you hurt?" she asked, bending down and helping her guest to her feet.

"No, not if you don't count being soaked a-and having a few bruises from falling on the step," the stranger said, forcing a smile. 

"Gracious! Here, take that wet coat off before you catch your death of pneumonia. Come in the parlor and get warm by the fire. You poor thing! I'll make some tea."

And the stranger was ushered in, given soup as well as tea, and sat in the chair, her jaw clamped stubbornly shut to keep her teeth from chattering.

Corabella thought, as she pulled up another chair, that the stranger looked rather small, buried in a heap of blankets. She was gazing into the fire and shaking slightly, judging by the quivering of the dark curl that was defiantly getting in her face. Her eyes were dazed, and dark circles ringed them. 

"Are you alright now?" Corabella asked. "Is there anything else I can-- oh dear--"

The stranger had started to cry. 

"Oh dear," she repeated. "Please don't-- it's really alright, you don't have to-- here, take this," and she held out a handkerchief edged with a modest trimming of lace.

"Thank you," the girl managed to respond. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to cry, it's just that, oh dear," and her tears increased. She sounded rather young, and again that strange accent marked itself out in Corabella's mind. 

The only option seemed to be letting the visitor cry, and so the young mistress of the house did that very thing, sitting anxiously in her chair and trying not to stare.

"You mustn't try to go out again in this weather," she began as the storm sitting in her armchair lessened somewhat. "I have some extra rooms, you're welcome to stay. Would you like that?"

The girl sniffed and looked at Corabella over the edge of her blanket with fresh tears brimming. Her eyes were very blue.

"I don't want to be a bother," she began, but her host cut her off.

"Nonsense, it's just myself here, and you won't be bothering anyone. I'll go up and make sure you have candles and enough blankets, and you can borrow a gown to sleep in. Drink some more of your tea."

She made her way upstairs and unlocked one of the rooms, fluffing up the pillows and pulling heavier quilts out of the wardrobe. It took her a few minutes to get the room to a satisfactory state, and she hurried back downstairs into the parlor.

"Everything is ready," she said cheerfully. "If you'll just follow me upstairs-- oh."

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.

I'm back with the next chapter of Two Alone!

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