A couple site visits have not panned out, so I’m going to subject you to a close analysis of a scene from William Wyler’s Dead End (Goldwyn, 1937). In an earlier column, I contended there were things you could learn by watching bad movies and tv. The gambit here is that you can learn something from paying attention to a good movie, too. Most of what you learn is that for a movie to be good a tremendous amount of skill across a range of crafts has to converge over and over again. Beyond that obviousness, here’s some thesis to tide you over: however good you might think Dead End is, it’s better.
The background: Dead End was a Broadway hit, with a huge set designed by Norman Bel Geddes, and it was snapped up by Samuel Goldwyn. (Paul Monticone has traced this process, and gathered some fantastic archival images here.) Goldwyn was a prestige independent releasing through United Artists. The talent was all top tier: Humphrey Bogart, Joel McCrae, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor; director William Wyler, screenwriter Lillian Hellman, designer Richard Day to reconstitute the gargantuan set, Alfred Newman to do the score, and, crucially for our purposes, cinematographer Gregg Toland.
The historical hinge: Imagine a deep-focus world where everything in-studio is wire sharp, from your face to infinity. You’ve seen it in Orson Welles’s Kane (1941, Gregg Toland), and maybe William Wyler’s Best Years of Our Lives (1945, Toland again). There are superb uses in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939, Bert Glennon) and Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Stanley Cortez). In Welles’s versions it stayed mixed up with the shorter lenses that were all but necessary to the effect at the time, and so deep focus and fisheye distortion merged. It was always a technique prone to trickery—faked via matte shots or double exposures—and in the 70s it tended to show up in split diopter shots that gave you a sharp foreground and a sharp distance and if you looked hard enough some smudgy column in the middle to hide the split. In the 1940s, new filmstocks, coated lenses, and, yes, optical effects drove the quest for “pan focus” across the industry.
Almost 40 years ago, in Chapter 27 (ulp) of the monumental Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production, 1920–1960, David Bordwell recontextualized the technique—and the technician—to take deep focus poster boy Toland down a peg. Some other cinematographers bristled at Toland’s publicity hounding, and Bordwell wanted to demonstrate both that the push to deep focus was broader than just Toland and that because Toland’s preferred framing of deep space was crowded, it ran into problems. To keep the sightlines open to the deeper planes, Toland’s shots ended up static. This reached its maximum in Kane, the source of much of the pushback.
That doesn’t make a Toland shot less striking, though. In Eisenstein’s lost Bezhin Meadow (1937, Vladimir Nilsen and Eduard Tissé) or Anthony Mann’s Border Incident (1949, John Alton) or John Huston’s Red Badge of Courage (1951, Harold Rosson), looming foreground figures often have the effect of holding the rest of the shot in place. The dynamized stasis comes from inside the frame.
Still from Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1937, Nilsen and Tissé)
Still from Mann’s Border Incident (1949, Alton)
Still from Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951, Rosson)
As for the self-mythologization (“How I Broke the Rules on Citizen Kane” in Popular Photography; or some pages in Life), some of that comes from Toland’s position at an independent production company: he needed to be a little more insistent, a little more of a self-promoter. Every movie was an advertisement for his next gig outside Goldwyn. In this way, he was a forerunner of the modern free-lance craftsperson. “The Toland ‘look’ became famous but also came under considerable criticism within the industry,” (588). (Bordwell is more accommodating about William Cameron Menzies, whom he puts at the center of the professional swirl where expressionism, production design, and VFX meet.)
But Bordwell was also trying to mobilize a way of thinking about depth that would disarticulate staging from focus. Initially, this might seem silly: what is the point of staging action in pronounced depth if the deep stuff (or the foreground stuff) isn’t in focus? And that’s where this scene comes into play. It takes some setting up.
A bit of plot: A key thread in Dead End is the unraveling of Baby Face Martin’s attempts to get back to his roots. On the lam and with a “fixed face” (Humphrey Bogart’s face) he has returned to the old neighborhood to see his mother and get back together with his girl, Francey. The meeting with mom goes disastrously. Marjorie Main repeats, in a strange, ghastly, muted wail, “Just leave us alone….Just stay away and leave us alone and…die.” It is a horrifying thing to hear, so exhausted, so certain of its condemnation. Martin is shook. He needs a drink.
A little while later, Francey (Claire Trevor) makes her way from Brooklyn to East 53rd St. in Manhattan. It’s been eleven years, and she and Marty still have feelings for each other, but she also has a theatrical cough and won’t let him kiss her. Syphilis, of course, and in a stunning shot she pleads with him to really look at her. She steps from the shadow into harsh light and…he sees. But just as the Production Code won’t let her say that she has syphilis, it won’t let anything actuallyvisible mar her face. The lighting has to do all the work.
Francey (Claire Trevor) in shadow
France steps into the harsh light, her sickness “revealed”
Bogart responds by stepping back in horror and scanning downward, finally “recognizing” her dress as a streetwalker’s costume. The camera then pushes in on him, refusing to let him keep his distance. The next time we cut back to him we are even closer and the brickwork on the wall behind is thrown out of focus. He just looms there, eventually lashing out at her. “Why didn’t you starve?” “Why didn’t you?” she snaps back.
Martin (Humphrey Bogart) “sees” the ravages of Francey’s illness…
He steps back and scans downward,
but the camera pushes in. As he accuses Francey, the sharp brick background fades and his head seems to float.
Like Main, Trevor is terrific here—so good she received a supporting actress nomination even though she is only in this one scene. They part ways and Bogart, still unnerved, hustles around the corner to get another drink. That’s where our scene takes place.
The scene: In the first shot Bogart walks by his henchman, Hunk (Allen Jenkins). We pan with him and wait, pushing in on the picture window until Bogart reappears to sit down. The owner, Pascagli (George Humbert), recognizes him and realizes that the last time Bogart was there he objected to the player piano until Hunk kicked it to shut it off. Pascagli theatrically unplugs the thing and the tone momentarily lightens. He then repeats their earlier order to them.
Martin (Bogart) strides quickly past Hunk (Jenkins) and the camera follows his action. Bogart then disappears screen left,,
and reenters, taking a seat at the table in the window.
After Pascagli (Humbert) and Hunk exchange glances, the restaurateur unplugs the player piano,
and reminds the gangsters of their order.
Even though the camera is now inside the restaurant, the space has been coherent. There’s a two-top table that provides a nice, stable axis. There’s a clean 3-shot of Martin, Hunk, and Pascagli—a triangle echoed in the three breadsticks on the table, breadsticks that echo the sprays of dried spaghetti standing tall in carafes in the window. We expect we’ll have medium close-ups of the gangsters shot from the street side of the table. Initially we do. We cut to an over-the-shoulder single of Hunk as Pascagli says he never forgets and order—or a face. Hunk is worried that the restaurateur might realize who Martin is. He looks right down the barrel for an instant before turning his attention.
Hunk listens to the order, distracted, until Pascagli says he never forgets a face.
Hunk, roused, turns across the lens,
to see if Pascagli remembers Martin from days gone by.
The next shot we would expect to be the reverse single of Martin, even if he is wedged between the table and the window sill. But that isn’t what we get at all. Instead, we do an almost Ozu-flip (a “donden”) to a new two-shot of the gangsters in the window, only now we’re looking out toward the street, and Martin adjusts so he’s sitting flush against the table. Hunk, who was just on the right side of the frame is on the left. It breaks the rules, a bit; and it jostles the viewer, a bit. But this is a movie that has been so smart about what it shows us and when that we play along to see where this is going.
The “donden”—an Ozu-style jump across the axis to a new two-shot.
Hunk has been laying out what is bothering Martin: “Twice in one day,” Martin repeats. This is the architectonic of this movie, and also of Freudian trauma, but we’ll hold off on that for a moment. Already Bogart has been rejected by his mother and pushed away his old flame. His foil Dave, played by Joel McCrae, eventually pivots from his upper crust girlfriend who was horrified at the local squalor back to the girl he grew up with, the one who’s been on strike and got walloped by the cops. Doubly wanted vs. doubly rejected. “Twice in one day.” It stings.
Still no close-up of Martin. Instead, we get an over-the-(other)-shoulder shot of Hunk, who tells Martin he should always look forward, not back; his mother had bought a sign that said as much and hung it over the bed. It’s a compressed line. Martin has not only been looking back, but he has been looking back for his mother. Hunk is oblivious that he’s just rubbing it in here. He’s also oblivious to the joke of putting that sign over the bed. The PCA didn’t recognize the implicit primal scene either.
Hunk leans in to explain that Bogart should always look forward.
Back in the two-shot Hunk proposes leaving for St. Louis and another girl, one “as respectable as a whistle…in the right way.” “I bet you there’s WELCOME on the doormat for you there,” he says, offering up another sign, another corrupted domestic ideal that belies her whistle-cleanliness. “Forget about the dames,” Martin says.
The “normal” two-shot.
Finally we get what we think will be the reverse on Martin. But the shot’s wrong. Instead of the complementary over-the-shoulder, it’s just the two-shot shifted left about 40º. Another classical Hollywood rule violation. What gives? Is there a plausible practical explanation, that the unwanted and unheard piano is up against the wall behind Hunk so the camera can’t move any farther left? That, of course, is silly. You can just move the piano or even the wall, the way you jumped the camera in from the street. But also, this is a set not a location. Toland could easily have planned the shots in advance, shifted things around, made it work “right” if he’d wanted to. “But twice in one day,” Martin says, for the second time.
L: A placement for the reverse shot on Martin; R: What we would expect to see
The “awkward” two-shot.
We cut back to the “normal” two-shot and Martin realizes how bad things are. “Forget it,” he says, and Bogart turns away from everything—from the room, from the salt shaker he has been gripping, from the unseen and unheard piano—to look out the window.
The “normal” two-shot again. Bogart turns away from the double rejections and Hunk’s advice.
Back to the awkward two-shot and Bogart’s hand is suddenly at is mouth—he’s thinking, continuity be damned (a). The camera is already on the move, dollying slowly right and panning back left so that the “awkward” two-shot is now a tight two-shot on the same axis as the “normal” one. Martin is lost in thought, staring out the window (b).
(a) The “awkward” two-shot, with Martin’s hand at his mouth.
(b) after the dolly-and-pan, a tight two-shot on the same axis as the “normal” one
Everything outside is out of focus—in 1937 you weren’t going to be able to get deep focus through a window. But as Bordwell notes, there is still plenty of staging in depth out there. Martin is formulating a plan to kidnap a rich kid from the swanky new apartment building down the block. And when he formulates it, Bordwell says, lo and behold someone will push a pram out the door across the street (c). “The woman is too far away to be in focus, and her child is not the target of the scheme, but the fact that she occupies frame center and is the only moving figure in the shot gives her a symbolic salience.” Out of focus, but on point. “Here is the sort of staging in extreme depth, with a significant element in foreground close-up and a thematically important element in a distant plane, that will become familiar in Citizen Kane.”
Yet Bordwell is right and wrong here. What Martin sees when he is looking out the window is a family walking by, left to right, from that new building on the river through the slum, what looks to be a teenage girl in a sailor dress and an adult pair who seem to be her parents (b above). What he sees, in other words, is a precise model of the familial situation he is going to shatter. Earlier the Dead End Kids who have taken his place in the neighborhood gang beat the daylights out of the kid; Martin’s just going to finish the job.
When Bogart turns his attention from the street to explain the plan to Hunk, that’s when the pram appears (c). The carriage isn’t the prompt, it’s the symbol, as Bordwell notes. This is Baby Face Martin, even if he has a new face entirely, and even if that face is as unbabyish as Bogart’s. What Martin’s been up to has been chasing the good old days—his mother, his girl—and getting rejected. He is compensating now, consciously and not—he knows that the money is “something,” but he doesn’t know why he wants to take the boy “farther away.” The set is lining up as Martin’s unconscious as well. Twenty minutes earlier in the movie he went into that building, chasing his mother. He came out of it an orphan. But in his compensatory fantasy, he now comes out of the building as a baby in a carriage, pushed along by someone who cares.
(c) Martin turns to Hunk and the pram appears across the street.
As soon as Martin explains his plan, Hunk leans back, pulling out of the shot entirely, and the camera—Toland’s camera—adjusts slightly right (d). And there it is: the single of Bogart that we haven’t had this whole scene. A flash of his profile before we cut to the over-the-shoulder of Hunk trying to talk him out of it (11). “I come home for something. I didn’t get it. But I’m comin’ out with something. Even if it’s only dough” (12). Back and forth between the nearly frontal shot of Hunk and the profile of Martin, a lopsided exchange that has been justified by that audacious camera move.
(d) The missing reverse of Martin
That move is audacious for at least two reasons. First, it doesn’t quite fit, not just based on the rules of the system, but the edits are jumpy; there’s a dead frame tucked in there somewhere; clearly they—Toland and Wyler—wanted this, wanted it enough to stick with it even if there was a cleaner, smoother, more traditional way to show us how Martin settled on the plot. Second, in my Classical Hollywood history class screening of the film, it jumped out to just about everyone. I called it the “Scorsese shot” and got nods. What makes it a Scorsese shot? I asked. We batted it around and one student offered that it was a way of disclosing Martin’s internal dynamics through apparently unsubjective, external camerawork. I want to follow up on that, because it seems right, but also, isn’t that what classical Hollywood cinema always did? Not quite.
Maybe we see that camera move as getting us access to the confidential conversation, but it feels more like the awkward two-shot was just the camera hanging back, waiting until it could swing toward Bogart’s ear, focalizing the scene through Martin, letting us experience his force of character. Now the odd camera position makes sense: had it been in the expected spot behind Hunk the whole time, it could not have simply slid around to get them both in profile. Had we seen the single of Martin before, we wouldn’t know that this instance was different, that this single was about him, that the whole scene was. (In Hollywood Math and Aftermath I chalked this tendency up to Scorsese’s penchant for a peculiar kind of ostension; I think that goes for Toland, too.)
Hunk leaves to do some reconnaissance, and we jump back outside the restaurant. The camera pans with him as he emerges onto the street and nearly bumps into Dave. They pause and Dave looks into Pascagli’s at Martin, who feels his gaze. Martin looks up in a medium shot, we get the expected reverse of Dave, and Hunk heads up the street as the light in the pool hall comes on. This precise, stagey timing in the exchange of glances sets up the next scene with Dave and his impending girlfriend, Drina (Sylvia Sidney).
Hunk leaves and nearly runs into Dave (Joel McCrae)
Dave stops and looks in the restaurant at Martin.
But pause a moment on that shot of Dave. He is positioned between Martin and the building across the street. “I’m comin’ out with something,” Martin had said; the “something” is the rich boy or the money, ostensibly, but what “came out” of that building was the pram. And now Dave is blocking it. Martin isn’t going to be coming out with anything at all, not the boy, not the money, not with the uncorrupted baby that he wishes he could be again. And certainly not with a mother or a girlfriend. Dave is pure superego popping in between Martin and his desire, thwarting Martin’s attempt to vanquish his properly doubled trauma through mimetic violence. The scene has been staged in depth to drive the plot and manifest its unconscious. Dave’s appearance in just this spot forecloses both, needs to be read as both.
Significant glances: Bordwell’s analysis of deep focus, and of Toland as its very public spokesperson, was set up as a corrective to the ontological, Bazinian reading of the technique. For Bordwell it was never about freedom or realism, it was about branding and over-insistence, and as such it was quickly toned down and assimilated to the cinematographer’s bag of tricks, or, if it remained showy, amounted to a gimmick. “Toland’s densely organized compositions do not, as Bazin argued, make our perception existentially free.” They force our attention to move from place to place.
Yet even Bordwell can’t get away from the notion that in this gimmicky technique, or around it, and in this branded career, or around it, there is something that demands reading. Between foreground and background there is a rhetoric (a tropology). “The Union forever!” young Charles Foster Kane says in the depths while his mother is selling him off to the bank. In Dead End Toland makes use of an astonishing number of setups, a wild proliferation of possibilities. These are occasioned by Richard Day’s gargantuan set, and authorized by his own self-assertions in technique, as Stanley Cavell might have put it. Pronounced deep focus is part of his unparalleled repertoire. There will be more, and more florid, deep focus yet to come for Toland and others. Yet Bordwell is right that its moment passes.
But there will also be more, much more, obliquely motivated camera movement in the decades to come. Here, the movement is built on top of a chain of seemingly inexplicable choices, but the payoff is a glimpse of a radical—for classical Hollywood—gravitational subjectivity. A person emerges whole not just because of a coherence between components such as costume and lighting and framing, as Francey did around the corner, but through an agonistic relationship with a seducible camera. For a character to be psychologically replete in this new cinema, the total system of enframing must be thrown into motion. Martin, in search of his originary fantasy, of that first time with Francey on the roof, where they could be together and be open to the stars, finds only nostalgia’s failure in the realities of sickness and sex work. The camera demanded his reaction then, forced him into a proximity he wanted to escape. Things started to look very weird.
Now, the camera is showily on the move again, but it is drawn to him, testing out the limits of his charisma. Throughout Dead End Bogart pushes us to entertain the idea that Martin is getting a bad rap. We find ourselves siding with the manchild who thinks he only wants to love and be loved—and make some money along the way. And when we side with Martin, something may come along to shake us out of it: Marjorie Main’s malediction; Claire Trevor’s demand; Joel McCrae’s solidity.
I’m not saying that Toland invented modern cinematic subjectivity the way that Cavell contends that Shakespeare and Montaigne invented modern subjectivity as such. (Modern here is sliding all over the place, of course.) But without Toland’s relentless experimentation, his untrammeled multiplication of setups and techniques, the independent showiness that put some of his colleagues off, there is no way this little tracking pan exists, exists to do this form of work in the story. And without Dead End’s balky social-realist-Freudianism, there likely isn’t enough tension between the staging and the shooting—the Bordwell split, reunited—to force Toland’s shot to come to meaning this intensely. Subject and system, here coalescing.
Finally I am not saying that (Baby Face) Martin Scorsese actually got the shot from this movie, even if when he saw it he heard the movie call his name throughout.
Marking beginnings like this is a dangerous game, and not just because it invites Freudian disappointment. Practically, it’s tricky: perhaps Toland tried it out before; perhaps he lifted it from someone else; perhaps it was being invented in parallel across the industry or all around the globe. It will take some archival work to sharpen the claim, and even then it will never be guaranteed. But this shot was so immediately legible to the students in my class, these emerging practitioners shaped by the industry’s tutelary chain, that it feels foundational, feels like a primal scene of invention. For them, this shot is enough.
For me, the shot not only feels foundational, it feels like a rejoinder, an answer to a persistent rejection of reading in the subfield of “media industries studies.” This shot says: The occasion—in the story, yes, but also in the arc of performance, star, and setting—drives the need, the need drives the innovation, the innovation comes to meaning by offering a superior solution to the problems of the moment. And the meaning lies in a lopsided exchange between the uncountably various demands of the system and the fugitive conviction that one has read the scene. Has read the scene enough.
Enough of that? Enough of that.