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 EDITED BY MURRAY POMERANCE

A Family Affair
cinema calls home
A Family Affair
A Family Affair
cinema calls home

EDITED BY MURRAY POMERANCE

WALLFLOWER
LONDON & NEW YORK
 First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Wallflower Press
6 Market Place, London W1W 8AF
www.wallflowerpress.co.uk

Copyright © Murray Pomerance 2008

The moral right of Murray Pomerance to be identified as the editor of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transported in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owners
and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN
978-1-905674-55-8 (pbk)
978-1-905674-56-5 (hbk)

Book design by Elsa Mathern

Printed and bound in Poland; produced by Polskabook

 Contents

Acknowledgements _ vii
List of Illustrations ix
Notes on Contributors xiii

Introduction: Family Affairs 1

MURRAY POMERANCE

Family, Genre, Auteur

1 House of Strangers: The Family in Film Noir 13

WHEELER WINSTON DIXON

Everybody Sing: Family, Community and the Representation of Social Harmony

in the Hollywood Musical 29
JAMES BUHLER

Is It a Wonderful Life?: Families and Laughter in American Film Comedies 45

ANDREW HORTON

‘Mother Needs You’: Kevin Costner’s Open Range and the Melodramatics
of the American Western 63
WALTER METZ

D. W. Griffith, Families and the Origins of American Narrative Cinema 77

JENNIFER M. BEAN

Blood is Thicker than Water: The Family in Hitchcock 91

WILLIAM ROTHMAN

‘How Do I Love Thee?’: Theatricality, Desire and the Family Melodrama 107
LUCY FISCHER

Politics, Family, Society

8 Family, Frontier and the Destruction of the Social Order 121
CHRISTOPHER SHARRETT
9 How Some Things Never Change: Britney, the Joy of Pepsi and
the Familial Gaze 135
STEVEN ALAN CARR

10 The Corruption of the Family and the Disease of Whiteness in / Walked

with a Zombie 149
GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER

11 Short Cuts to Gosford Park: The Family in Robert Altman 161

GLENN MAN

12 Practically Perfect People: Postfeminism, Masculinity and Male Parenting

in Contemporary Cinema 175
YVONNE TASKER

13 Hostages and Houseguests: Class and Family in the New Screen Gothic 189
JAMES MORRISON

Troubles, Dreams, Family

14 Very Far from Heaven: Todd Haynes’ Cinematic Family 205

MARCIA LANDY

15 Queers and Families in Film: From Problems to Parents 223

HARRY M. BENSHOFF

16 Adapting the Family to Murder: Mildred Pierce 235

MARY BETH HARALOVICH

17 Playing House: Screen Teens and the Dreamworld of Suburbia 249

NATHAN HOLMES

18 Big Daddies and the Hollywood Myth of Family Capitalism 265

JERRY MOSHER

19 Wedding Bells Ring, Storks Are Expected, the Rumours Aren't True,
Divorce is the Only Answer: Stardom and Fan-Magazine Family Life
in 1950s Hollywood 277
ADRIENNE L. McLEAN

20 The Look of Love: Cinema and the Dramaturgy of Kinship 293

MURRAY POMERANCE

Bibliography 304
Index 318
 Acknowledgements

No collection of this diversity and range can be assembled without the staunch
collaboration of the contributors, each of whom deserves a very special thanks
for their exceptional work here. Some editors are playful, some are demanding: |
am both. | hope the experience of working with me has had its pleasures, but the
pleasures in working with these writers have certainly been mine. In addition, |
wish to thank Frances Gateward (Urbana), Nathan Holmes (Chicago), E. Ann Kap-
lan (New York), David Kerr (Toronto), Nay Laywine (Toronto), Mia Mask (Brooklyn),
Peter Murphy (Toronto), Jay Wolofsky (Toronto) and Carla Cassidy, Dean of Arts,
Ryerson University (Toronto) for their kind support. | am also indebted to Ron and
Howard Mandelbaum and their engaging staff at PhotoFest (New York).
This book was born in a conversation | had with Yoram Allon, editorial director
at Wallflower Press, over six years ago. He has since become what all great edito-
rial directors truly are, a writer's sweet friend; his inspiration and contribution were
complex and spontaneous, but involved more than anything offering me a licence
to be free in the construction of a book that would be dear to my heart. For the
opportunity, and the continual good-natured assistance along the way, my sincere
thanks.
My own family, Nellie Perret and Ariel Pomerance, could not have been more
important or more generous in their contributions to this volume. Those who re-
main at a distance from the act of editing anthologies have little idea of the value
for an editor of his family mates’ patience and continual encouragement, and Nellie
and Ariel have been unstinting, and also witty, which has made it a delight to work
on this. Family is memory, of course. | remember with love my parents, Michael
and Sadie (Shub) Pomerance, and the world they gave me to learn in, which in-
cluded, always excitingly, the movies.
Finally, my gratitude to colleagues at Wallflower Press who have put their love
and attention into fashioning A Family Affair. Gavin Bradshaw, Jacqueline Downs
and Elsa Mathern.

Toronto
May 2008
 List of Illustrations

Chapter 1
Gino Monetti (Edward G. Robinson, left) tyrannises his entire family, save Max (Ri-
chard Conte), who is Gino's clear favourite. Max tries to save his father from impris-
onment, but his brother foils him and he is soon the favourite son no more. House
of Strangers (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Twentieth Century Fox, 1949). Courtesy Jerry
Ohlinger’s Movie Materials Store.

Chapter 2
Banks family harmony: ‘Let's go fly a kite!’ Glynis Johns and David Tomlinson (rear)
with Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber in Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, Walt
Disney Productions, 1964). Digital frame enlargement.

Chapter 3
Love isn't so funny ...or is it? ‘I’ve not been lucky’, says Loretta Castorini (Cher,
left) and Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage) replies, ‘| don't care about luck’, in Moon-
struck (Norman Jewison, MGM, 1987). Digital frame enlargement.

Chapter 4
Family is defined through land use in the classical American western. Charley Waite
(Kevin Costner, left) and Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) surveying the free land in
Open Range (Kevin Costner, Touchstone, 2003). Digital frame enlargement.

Chapter 5
In An Unseen Enemy (D. W. Griffith, Biograph, 1912), the orphaned sisters’ confine-
ment in an enclosed ‘space’ is rearticulated by the repetitious use of a confining
frame, a medium-close shot view of the girls’ physical immobility and expressions
of terror; this recurs fifteen times in the cutting sequence that relays their brother's
race back home to the rescue. Lillian Gish is at left, her sister Dorothy at right. Dig-
ital frame enlargement.
Chapter 6
Within the bosom of the ‘typical American family’. Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten,
centre) and Young Charlie (Teresa Wright) with Henry Travers (left), Edna May Wo-
nacott, and Charles Bates (far right) in Shadow ofa Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, Skir-
ball/Universal, 1943). Digital frame enlargement.

Chapter 7
The Prodigal Mother (Barbara Stanwyck, left) at table with her husband (Richard
Carlson), two daughters (Lori Nelson and Marcia Henderson), and housekeeper
(Lotte Stein) in Al! | Desire (Douglas Sirk, Universal International, 1953). Courtesy
Photo-Fest New York.

Chapter 8
The Free Spirit and the Feminine Old World: Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix, standing),
Sabra Cravat (Irene Dunne, left), and Felice Venable (Nance O'Neil, right) in Cimar-
ron (Wesley Ruggles, RKO, 1931). Digital frame enlargement.

Chapter 9
From top left, reading across: Conformist individualism — Britney Spears doffs her
Pepsi uniform, revealing an individualist wardrobe that better conforms to the dic-
tates of gendered expectations; in the double-bind of female looking, female desire
is limited to a poor counterfeit emulation of Spears’ performance, with Spears invit-
ing viewers to laugh along and look away from the sham version of her perform-
ance; a low-angle camera shot mimics intercourse amid the visual logic of Pepsi
ejaculate and the horny abstinence of Dole, who as presidential candidate once
railed against the mainstreaming of deviancy, and then became spokesperson for
Viagra; edited sequences visually putting African Americans in their place, either
as a step-dancing janitor, or at the margins of the frame where they can be easily
cropped out in subsequent shots.

Chapter 10
As Betsy (Frances Dee) looks on from her bed in the middle of the night, Carre-
four (Darby Jones) heads off to bring Jessica Holland back to the voodoo camp in
| Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, RKO, 1943). Courtesy Jerry Ohlinger’s
Movie Materials Store.

Chapter 11
Mrs Croft (Eileen Atkins, left) and Mrs Wilson (Helen Mirren) in a rare Altman mo-
ment of emotional openness and catharsis that results in sibling reconciliation in
the midst of family tragedy, separation and revenge. Gosford Park (Robert Altman,
Capitol Films, 2001). Digital frame enlargement.
Chapter 12
In Daddy Day Care (Steve Carr, Revolution, 2003), Charlie (Eddie Murphy) initially
has no interest in caring for his son (Khamani Griffin, left), seeming to regard parent-
ing as a demeaning task. Here, his wife Kim (Regina King) demands the keys to
their Mercedes, signalling her appropriation of the public signs of masculine suc-
cess that Charlie mourns. Digital frame enlargement.

Chapter 13
A new conception of the middle-class home as privatised fortress. Firewall (Richard
Loncraine, Warner Bros., 2006). Digital frame enlargement.

Chapter 14
Under pressure at work, Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid, right) has been told to take
some time off, and his wife Cathy (Julianne Moore) thinks it might be the best thing
for the both of them. Frank's real ‘problem’, that threatens to destroy his family, is
something else altogether. The darkness reveals underlying and increasingly erupt-
ing tensions, in Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, Alliance Atlantis, 2003). Digital
frame enlargement.

Chapter 15
In Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, Paramount, 2005), stark visual design and almost
chiaroscuro lighting are used to delineate the cold emptiness of Jack’s boyhood
home as his parents (Roberta Maxwell, Peter McRobbie) refuse to let Ennis (Heath
Ledger, centre) fulfil Jack's last wishes: to have his ashes spread on Brokeback
Mountain. Digital frame enlargement.

Chapter 16
In James M. Cain's novel, when Mildred Pierce walks in on Veda and Monte, Veda
is naked in Monte’s bed. In the film (Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros., 1945), Mildred is
treated to a different surprise (Zachary Scott and Ann Blyth). Digital frame enlarge-
ment.

Chapter 17
Home is reduced to real estate when we confront the physical presence of the
past. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) after his travel through time to the suburbs in
Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, Amblin/Universal, 1985). Digital frame en-
largement.

Chapter 18
The end of an era: dying southern patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt (Bur! lves) towers over
his sycophantic son Gooper (Jack Carson) in Richard Brooks's film adaptation of Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof (MGM, 1958). Collection Jerry Mosher.

xi
Chapter 19
Two-page spread from Movie Secrets magazine, August 1956, of an article purport-
edly written by Charlton Heston in the form of a letter to his son. The image on
the left is labelled ‘Chuck as Moses’, and on the right the caption informs us that
Fraser Heston (‘Fray’) ‘surprised Lydia and Chuck by arriving after eleven years of
their very happy married life, making them happier’. In the letter, Chuck explains
that ‘Every man wants to have a son — not that he doesn't welcome daughters
when they come along. But a son is his chance at immortality.’ Copyright 1956 by
Sterling Group, Inc.

Chapter 20
Bonnie Grape (Darlene Cates) protecting her spratty baby Arnie (Leonardo DiCap-
rio), an eighteen-year-old with the mind and impulse control of a child of ten, who
drools and likes to climb the town radio tower. Amy Grape (Laura Harrington) looks
on. What's Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse Hallstrom, Paramount, 1993). Digital frame
enlargement.
 Notes on Contributors

JENNIFER M. BEAN is Director of Cinema Studies and Associate Professor of

Cinema Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington-Seat-
tle. She is co-editor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (2002) and author of the
forthcoming The Play in the Machine: Gender, Genre and the Cinema of Modernity.
She is currently editing a collection on the origins of American film stardom.

HARRY M. BENSHOFF is Associate Professor of Radio, TV, and Film at the Uni-
versity of North Texas. He is the author of Monsters in the Closet: Homosexu-
ality and the Horror Film (1997) and co-author of America on Film: Representing
Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies (2004). Most recently he co-edited
Queer Cinema: The Film Reader (2004) and co-authored Queer Images: A History
of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (2006).

JAMES BUHLER is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He

is co-editor of Music and Cinema (2000). Besides his work on music and sound
in film, he has published on the music of Gustav Mahler and the musical writings
of Theodor VW. Adorno. He is currently working on a monograph covering auditory
culture of early American cinema.

STEVEN ALAN CARR is Associate Professor of Communication at Indiana Uni-

versity-Purdue University Fort Wayne. He is the author of Hollywood and Anti-
Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War Two (2001). His present project,
which explores the response of the American film industry to the growing public
awareness of the Holocaust, received an award from the National Endowment for
the Humanities in 2002.

WHEELER WINSTON DIXON is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film

Studies, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Series Editor
for the State University of New York Press's ‘Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video’, and,
with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and
Video. His recent books include Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, co-edited

xiii
with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (2002), Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of
Destruction in American Cinema (2003), Straight: Constructions of Heterosexuality
in the Cinema (2003), Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (2005),
Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (2006), Film Talk: Directors at
Work (2007) and A Short History of Film, written with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster,
(2008). He is editor of Film and Television After 9/11 (2004) and American Cinema
of the 1940s: Themes and Variations (2006). On April 11-12, 2003, Dixon was hon-
oured with a retrospective of his films at The Museum of Modern Art in New York,
and his films were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum, in both
print and original format.

LUCY FISCHER is Distinguished Professor of Film Studies and English at the Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh where she serves as Director of the Film Studies Programme.
She is the author of Jacques Tati (1983), Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and
Women’s Cinema (1989), Imitation of Life (1991), Cinematernity: Film, Mother
hood, Genre (1996), Sunrise (1998) and Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema and
the Female Form (2003), and the co-editor (with Marcia Landy) of Stars: The Film
Reader (2004). Forthcoming is her edited volume, American Cinema of the 1920s:
Themes and Variations. She has published extensively on issues of film history,
theory and criticism in such journals as Screen, Sight and Sound, Camera Obscura,
Wide Angle, Cinema Journal and Journal of Film and Video, among others, and has
held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Carnegie Museum
of Art. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Art Critics
Fellowship as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for
University Professors. She is a former President of the Society for Cinema and
Media Studies.

GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER teaches film studies, women’s studies and cul-
tural studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Her most recent books are Class Passing: Performing Social Mobility in Film and
Popular Culture (2005) and A Short History of Film, written with Wheeler Winston
Dixon (2008). Her monograph Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Construc-
tions in Moving Images (2003) was named as an Outstanding Title in the Humani-
ties for 2004 by Choice. Her other published works include Captive Bodies: Post-
colonial Subjectivity in Cinema (1999), Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette and
Performance (2000), Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader (2002; co-edited with
Wheeler Winston Dixon) and /dentity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman
(2003). She is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, with
Wheeler Winston Dixon.

MARY BETH HARALOVICH is Professor in the School of Media Arts at the Uni-
versity of Arizona in Tucson where she teaches film and television history and di-

xiv
rects the Media Arts Internship Programme. Her recent film history essays include:
‘1950: Movies and Landscapes’ in American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and
Variations (2005), ‘Marlene Dietrich is Blonde Venus: Advertising Dietrich in Seven
Markets’, in Dietrich Icon (2006), the reprint of ‘All that Heaven Allows: Color, Nar-
rative Space, and Melodrama’ in Color: The Film Reader (2006) and the forthcoming
‘Flirting with Hetero Diversity: Film Promotion of A Free Soul (1931)', in Hetero. She
is co-editor (with Lauren Rabinovitz) of Television, History, and American Culture:
Feminist Critical Essays (1999).

NATHAN HOLMES is a student in the Cinema and Media Studies doctoral pro-
gramme at the University of Chicago. He has written on heist films and has pub-
lished in CineAction on the pleasures of The Big Sleep.

ANDREW HORTON is the Jeanne H. Smith Professor of Film and Video Studies
at the University of Oklahoma, an award-winning screenwriter, and the author of
eighteen books on film, screenwriting and cultural studies including Writing the
Character-Centered Screenplay (1994, 1999), The Films of Theo Angelopoulos
(1997), Laughing Out Loud: Writing the Comedy-Centered Screenplay (2000), Hen-
ry Bumstead and the World of Hollywood Art Direction (2003) and Screenwriting
for a Global Market (2004). His films include Something In Between (1983) and The
Dark Side of the Sun (1989); in pre-production is Route 66.

MARCIA LANDY is Distinguished Professor of English/Film Studies with a sec-

ondary appointment in the Department of French and Italian Languages and Litera-
tures at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include Fascism in Film: The
Italian Commercial Cinema, 1929-1943 (1986), Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film
and Television Melodrama (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930-1960
(1991), Film, Politics, and Gramsci (1996; with Amy Villarejo), Cinematic Uses of
the Past (1996), The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality and Spectacle in Italian
Cinema 1929-1943 (1998), Stardom Italian Style (1998), /talian Film (2000), The His-
torical Film: History and Memory in Cinema (2001), Stars: The Film Reader (2004,
co-edited with Lucy Fischer) and Monty Python's Flying Circus (2005).

GLENN MAN is Professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is

the author of Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance, 1967-1976 (1994) and
his publications include articles on Hollywood and its genres — The Godfather films,
Thelma & Louise, the South Seas film, the bio-pic, American films of the 1970s
— and on film adaptations of David Copperfield, The Third Man and The French
Lieutenant’s Woman.

ADRIENNE L. McLEAN is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Texas at

Dallas. She is the author of Being Rita Hayworth: Labour, Identity, and Hollywood

XV
Stardom (2004) and Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative
Cinema (2008), and co-editor (with David Cook) of Headline Hollywood: A Century
of Film Scandal (2001). She is co-editor of the ‘Star Decades’ series at Rutgers
University Press.

WALTER METZ is interim department head and Associate Professor in the Depart-
ment of Media and Theatre Arts at Montana State University-Bozeman, where he
teaches the history, theory and criticism of film, theatre and television. In 2003-04,
he was a Fulbright lecturer at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American
Studies at the Free University in Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Engaging Film
Criticism: Film History and Contemporary American Cinema (2004) and Bewitched
(2007).

JAMES MORRISON is the author of a memoir, Broken Fever (2001), a novel, The
Lost Girl (2007), and several books on film, most recently Roman Polanski (2007),
and, as editor, Ali That Heaven Allows: The Cinema of Todd Haynes (2007). He
teaches film, literature and creative writing at Claremont McKenna College.

JERRY MOSHER is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Electronic

Arts at California State University, Long Beach. He has published essays in the
anthologies Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (2001), The End of
Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties (2001), Where the Boys Are:
Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth (2005) and From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays
on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2006).

MURRAY POMERANCE is Professor of Sociology at Ryerson University. He is the

author of Magia d’Amore (1999), An Eye for Hitchcock (2004), Johnny Depp Starts
Here (2005), Savage Time (2005) and The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experi-
ence Beyond Narrative and Theory (2008), the editor of Enfant Terrible!: Jerry Lewis
in American Film (2002), American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations
(2005), Cinema and Modernity (2006) and City That Never Sleeps: New York and
the Filmic Imagination (2007), and the co-editor of Where the Boys Are: Cinemas
of Masculinity and Youth (2005; with Frances Gateward) and From Hobbits to Hol-
lywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings (2006; with Ernest Mathijs),
among other volumes. He has contributed to Film Quarterly, Quarterly Review of
Film and Video, The Paris Review, New Directions, The Kenyon Review, Chelsea,
The New Review of Literature and Descant.

WILLIAM ROTHMAN is Professor of Motion Pictures at the University of Miami

School of Communication. His books include Hitchcock — The Murderous Gaze
(1982), The ‘I’ of the Camera (1988, 2004), Documentary Film Classics (1997) and
Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed (2000). He is the editor of Cavell on Film (2005)

Xvi
and Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch
(2008).

CHRISTOPHER SHARRETT is Professor of Communication and Film Studies at

Seton Hall University. He is the author of The Rifleman (2005), and editor of Crisis
Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film (1993) and Mytholo-
gies of Violence in Postmodern Media (1999), and co-editor (with Barry Keith Grant)
of Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (2004). His work has appeared in
Cinema Journal, Cineaste, Film International, Senses of Cinema, Postscript, Cine-
action, Kino Eye, Framework, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and numerous
anthologies, including The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (1996),
The New American Cinema (1998), Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1998), Car
Crash Culture (2002), Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers (2002), BAD: Infamy, Dark-
ness, Evil, and Slime on Screen (2004) and Cinema and Modernity (2006). He is
currently writing a book on the politics of the neoconservative Hollywood cinema.

YVONNE TASKER is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of

East Anglia. She has published widely on questions of gender, sexuality and popular
culture. Most recently she has co-edited (with Diane Negra) /nterrogating Postfemi-
nism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (2007).

xvii
 A family affair was not subject to investigation ...
it concerned nobody; anyone might conduct a family
affair in broad daylight while all the world looked on.

Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

 Introduction: Family Affairs
MURRAY POMERANCE

In The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T (1953), a film that is nothing if not strange from start
to finish, dictatorial and comically malevolent Dr Terwilliker (Hans Conreid) has as-
sembled five hundred cowed little boys to play in unison on his gargantuan signi-
form piano. ‘What a lovely family we will be!’ he coos, marching around in a fuchsia
tuxedo while the kids scramble to find their seats. That this film was written by Dr
Seuss is perhaps a clue to invocation of the familial bond: his productions, onscreen
and in print, had to address conventional socialisation in politically acceptable, if
creative and bizarre, ways. But in this film the family is smashed and tortured. Our
little protagonist Bartholomew Collins’ (Tommy Rettig) mother (Mary Healy) enters
his protracted dream — which is the main body of the film — as a stentorian monster
who will neither help nor love him; he adopts as a ‘father’ the happy-go-lucky and
relatively unimaginative plumber who is his mother's (rather eccentric) friend (Peter
Lind Hayes), and the omnipresent and always demanding (if not utterly demented)
Dr Terwilliker has nothing on his mind but causing little boys to give their fingers
over to him. Bartholomew bounces around with a five-finger beanie perched on
his head, trying to make everything right in this Seussian world where the ladders
all climb to nowhere, the rooms all cant off in lime green and magenta at angles
reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), and nothing will assuage Dr T but
obedience and correct fingerwork. Why, indeed, in such an utterly fascinating and
self-sufficient world, invoke family at all?
The family is a cultural dream obsession to which we return and return. The felt
home of our music and our torture, birthplace of pleasure and wonder, it is at once a
mechanism and a phantasmagoria, just as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T shows. Family
is our womb, and also, as R. D. Laing pointed out acerbically, our reality:

We, our family, and our family’s families, our school, our church, our town, our
state and our country, our television and cups and saucers and display cabinet,
and our Aunt Jessie, are real: and true; we can trust each other: and we have a
full life. The world comes to our town; and if we sometimes do wrong: we do
our best. We don't wish any evil on anyone. We are. And those to whom we
do not exist, do not exist, and, if we can help it, shall not exist.

INTRODUCTION 1
 ... what are we defending ourselves against? Nothing? Oh no! The danger, the
menace, the enemy, Them, are very real ... we must destroy them before they
destroy us before we destroy them before they destroy us ... which is where
we are at the moment ... We need not worry that the kill ratio between Them
and Us will get too high. There are always more where they came from. From
inside Us. (1970: 25-6)

Thus, the family is our rationale, our licence. The family is our logic, our repository,
our sacred fire and source of light; and also, of course, the origin of a darkness we
project outside of it.
In the conservative America of the 1950s and 1960s, a culture mirrored — and
represented with unthinking faithfulness — by conservative Hollywood, family rep-
resents the first bulwark against the entropic forces of anarchy and revolution that
might threaten the newly secured hegemony of the postwar state. The family,
after all, is a tiny factory in which ideological commitment, unquestioning devotion
to both capitalism and the wage economy, and attachment to ideals of identity pat-
terning, belief, attitude and existential purpose are systematically reproduced in the
name of those principles — individualism, freedom, progress, Divine architecture —
on the basis of which the ruling class secures Its position; and this, generation after
generation after generation. As Ninos, the old man in Barcelona's Parque Commu-
nal, says in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975):

I've seen so many of them grow up. Other people look at the children and they
all imagine a new world, but me, when | watch them, | just see the same old
tragedy begin all over again. They can't get away from us. It’s boring.

If in the family we learn to imagine and shape the world, there we also learn to
obey our elders and those in authority — a lesson far more important than the mere
acceptance of our vulnerability to power; since although power dominates it domi-
nates brutally, and obedience to authority is achieved only by a voluntary act of
acquiescence. Thus it is that our obedience is extended over a territory even power
cannot reach. It is in the family that we learn which propositions to take seriously
as truth, which to chuckle at as deviant or lighthearted. And it is in the family that
we learn an overriding lesson that outreaches all others: to eagerly make families.
What better panacea, then, to heal us from the wounds of arrogance and weak-
ness that are inflicted in Dr Terwilliker’s bitter domain than a family that can keep
us ‘together’, bring ‘nurture’, provide ‘warmth’ and, more generally, offer salvation
and see us through?
Just as the family is paramount as a social institution in our world, so in cinema
itis today, and has always been, a central feature of screen depiction (and of screen
narration, either implied or expressly stated). To consider some of the very earliest
films: the Lumiéres' Le Repas de bébé (c. 1895) — not even quite a ‘film’ yet — is,

2 A FAMILY AFFAIR
above all, a ‘charming family scene’, with mother and father gently protecting the
adorable infant, whose ingestion — its rhythm, its choreography, its materiel — is
being supervised, shaped, formed as a regularity; The Great Train Robbery (1903)
depends for its emotional thrust upon the loving and dutiful bond between a girl
and her father, as does The Lonedale Operator (1911); The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
revolves around the disruption of an affiancement; The Arab (1915) and the sheik
films of the 1920s do likewise; in The Last Laugh (1924), a man's employment
relations come into conflict with his family relations, first, to his agony, then, to his
great relief; in Stella Dallas (1937), a woman selflessly disappears from her daugh-
ter’s life in order that the daughter may have an opportunity to shed the heavy
baggage of the mother's class identity and perhaps make a decent way for herself:
the self-sacrificing mother returns in the woe-filled Mildred Pierce (1945): in It’s a
Wonderful Life (1946), God intervenes to keep a decent smalltown family intact
when economic forces threaten to dissolve it; in Rebel Without aCause (1955), the
middle-class family is a site of disease and corruption; the twin protagonists of Easy
Rider (1969) reconstitute a kind of primal, global family by bonding in powerfully
intimate but transitory moments with strangers as they travel across the country,
nicely anticipating a definition of ‘family’ that would surface in a 1998 episode of
the television programme, South Park: ‘Family isn't about whose blood you have.
It's about who you care about’; Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969) also reflects
this sentiment, suggesting bluntly that monogamous sexual relations need not be
seen as the only structural foundation of family; Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) explores
the thesis that the maternal bond is not the only imaginable structural foundation
of adult/child relations in the family; My Own Private Idaho (1991) explicitly treats
the homosexual family in relation to conventional bourgeois heterosexist relations;
in the recent Harry Potter films, youngsters are shaped and tutored by a mix of
good and bad ‘parents’, their education a kind of cultural banquet the consumption
of which leads to adulthood, and their emotional bonds to these elders, especially
Harry's to Prof. Dumbledore (and young Daniel Radcliffe’s to old Richard Harris in
the early films) can be read as a form of familiarisation, a substitute parenting that
brings love, trust, fidelity, courage, even moments of ebullient joy; through a simi-
lar process of ‘adoption’, Johnny Depp took Vincent Price as ‘father’ while shoot-
ing Edward Scissorhands (1990), Jerry Lewis for Arizona Dream (1993), Marlon
Brando on Don Juan DeMarco (1995) and The Brave (1997), Al Pacino as ‘brother’
on Donnie Brasco (1995), Hunter S. Thompson as some sort of ‘uncle’ for Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Keith Richards first as a model for, then as the literal
progenitor of, Cap'n Jack Sparrow (2005; 2007) (see Pomerance 2005a).
This listing barely scratches the surface of films in which the constitution or dis-
ruption of family is structurally central. In every genre, signal films revolve around
family as a problem. For a taste of family in comedy, consider the fraternal bond
underpinning the Marx Brothers films; or the merry-go-round of engagement and
incipient marriage that spins in Vincente Minnelli’s The Long, Long Trailer (1954); or

INTRODUCTION 3
the familial casting of a grotesque joke, the multivariate repetition of which forms
the content of The Aristocrats (2005); or the pitfalls that await the meeting of in-
laws in Meet the Parents (2000) and its sequel Meet the Fockers (2004); or the
incongruity of brotherhood between Danny De Vito and Arnold Schwarzenegger
in Twins (1988). In crime films, we can examine the warm, sometimes too warm,
families of The Godfather (1972, 1974, 1990), Goodfellas (1990), Mickey Blue Eyes
(1999), Donnie Brasco, and a legion of other possibilities. We can look to the cen-
trality of family in historical epics — the circus troupe as ‘family’ in The Greatest
Show on Earth (1952), the orphaning and adoption of Moses in The Ten Commana-
ments (1956), Judah Ben-Hur’s relation to his mother and sister in Ben-Hur (1959).
Disaster films always implicate some tortured family bonds: the recent Poseidon
(2006) involves Kurt Russell’s concerns about his daughter's love life; in Volcano
(1997), Tommy Lee Jones has similar concerns about his daughter. Ersatz but in-
tensified ‘family’ relations are instantaneously formed in closed-space disaster or
horror scenarios, from Airplane! (1980) through A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
to Scream 3 (2000). In horror, further, it is specifically the deep-seated emotional
bonds of family that are tortured: Psycho (1960) about a mother and a son; Bunny
Lake is Missing (1965) and The Ring (2002) about a mother and a daughter, and
so on and on into the darkest of darknesses. Film noir, westerns and melodramas
are simply unthinkable except in terms of family relationships and their vulnerabili-
ties — imagine trying to discuss Double Indemnity (1944) or Detour (1945) without
referring to family damage, or Red River (1948), Shane (1953) and The Searchers
(1956) without referring to family destruction, or All That Heaven Allows (1955)
without referring to family secrets. Science fiction very frequently plays with mon-
strous transformations of family or with alien threats to it: The War of the Worlds
(1953) and War of the Worlds (2005) both notably spin out this format, along with
Things to Come (1936), Invaders from Mars (1953), Lost in Space (1998), and many
other films. In Men in Black (1997), the alien family is a recurring motif. In the Star
Wars films (1977-2005), family relations are at the origin of the principal characters’
lines of motivation. In the Star Trek films (1979-2002) and television series (1966
onward), the various crews of the Enterprise and other dominant spacecraft/lo-
cales constitute de facto families, with parental captains, sibling bonds and rivalries
among the featured subordinates, and continual confrontations with the generally
indiscernible world ‘outside’. We can find families in war films — either explicit, as
in Since You Went
Away (1944) or implied through the platoon: Bataan (1943), Pork
Chop Hill (1959), The Great Escape (1963). And family relations always gird the
masculine violence in boxing movies: Body and Soul (1947), with John Garfield's
bond to his mother; The Set-Up (1949), in which Robert Ryan's need to fight jeop-
ardises his marriage to Audrey Totter; Requiem for aHeavyweight (1962), with An-
thony Quinn's hopeless love for Julie Harris; Cinderella Man (2005), where Russell
Crowe's fighting puts his entire family on the line. The heist film often focuses on
family: Peter O'Toole invading Audrey Hepburn’s relationship with her father, Hugh

4 A FAMILY AFFAIR
Griffith, in How to Steal a Million (1966), or the family complications of Richard
Conte as a centrepiece of Lewis Milestone's Ocean's 77 (1960): and the spy film
often goes to pains to negate it (Richard Burton's tender and raw affection for Claire
Bloom, but refusal of bonding, in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1964).
On the timeline of American cinema between 1903 and the early twenty-first
century run a numberless pack of films involving love (Gone With the Wind (1939),
Casablanca (1942), Now, Voyager (1942), The Clock (1944)) and marriage (Sunrise
(1927), Notorious (1946), Father of the Bride (1950)), parenting (The Courtship of
Eddie's Father (1963)), the prolongation of family bonds into old age (On Golden
Pond (1981), Until the End of the World (1991)), the rebellion involved as children
break away from parents (Wall Street (1987)), sibling rivalries (Gosford Park (2005)),
extended families (The Wizard of Oz (1939)), the discovery of hitherto undisclosed
family relations (or ‘family relations’) among characters who had taken themselves
to be strangers to one another (Great Expectations (1946)), perversions of ‘nor-
mal’ love bonds among family members or of forms of ‘normal’ family love (Candy
(1968), Chinatown (1974)), inter-racial and inter-ethnic families (Guess Who's Com-
ing to Dinner (1967)), as well as ersatz families of all kinds, including the Dead
End Kids of the 1930s, Fagin and his family of pickpockets in the several versions
of Oliver Twist (1916, 1922, 1933, 1948...), the familial girl band of Some Like It
Hot (1959), and the family of Israeli assassins killing and dining together in Ste-
ven Spielberg's Munich (2005). Families have been framed as derivative of culture
and its dictates (Moonstruck (1987), Le Grand voyage (2004]), Goodfellas), and as
the product of the most arbitrary mechanical operations (A./. Artificial Intelligence
(2001)). As is implicit in these pages, families in film appear centrally not only in all
genres but in both indep productions and studio-controlled productions, seriously
and for fun, seen critically and taken utterly for granted. Because in virtually every
film family makes some sort of appearance, marginal or central, stated or implied,
it is unthinkable to treat the subject adequately here or in any single volume, but
we can sketch some of the more interesting lines of approach and suggest some
fascinating films and filmic moments to watch.
However, in at least three significant ways the family is important to Hollywood
film quite beyond Its presence as a narrative construct, although it is principally the
family as narrative construct that will interest.the contributors to this volume. First,
as Danae Clark elucidates, part of the problem solved by the studio system in gen-
eral was regulating labour, both in terms of minimising demands (for compensation,
perquisites and working conditions) made by employees (onscreen and off-) and
for producing what Talcott Parsons once called ‘latent pattern maintenance’ — that
structured and enduring set of forces members of a social system yield to in re-
maining attached and committed to organisational projects. For example, while the
seven-year contract did legally bind actors to studio films, after the DeHavilland de-
cision of 1943 it was no longer the case that suspensions meted out to actors who
refused parts could be added to their contract time. Some structural process was

INTRODUCTION 5
necessary to keep people from loosing their bonds, when the contract was insuf-
ficient. The family, Clark notes, was a central myth invoked by the studio as a way
of ‘binding’ employees together, this in the face of the egregious and extremely
discernable differences between stars, character players, extras, carpenters, pub-
licity agents, directors, writers, and so on. To be recalcitrant, to be resistant, to be
demanding, to be petulant, to have memory problems on set, to neglect moral
self-regulation in one’s private life (in an arena where reporters were everywhere
looking for stories that would pay their rent) — all of this was to fail in one’s ‘family’
obligation. The studio, after all, was enveloping, embracing, protective, ‘nourish-
ing’, encouraging and, it must be stressed, reliably all of these, in an era of, first,
economic uncertainty and class division (the 1930s), then, world war (the 1940s),
then, military-industrial build-up in the face of pervading and invisible threat (the
1950s and beyond). The studio was a family that would cherish its employees and
do everything to make their lives amenable and pleasant — or at least keep them
busy — if they would but commit themselves to It heart and soul.
Secondly, in the age of the classical cinema, Hollywood motion pictures of-
ten involved in their production the labour of actual families, sometimes dynasties,
and this arrangement has continued. Filmmaking, after all, depends on personnel
who possess complex (and historical) knowledge and who can therefore commu-
nicate with one another in a terse intensivity: if you have grown up with film, in a
filmmaking family, you have advantages, even just linguistic ones. One need but
think of the Fairbankses (Douglas, Mary Pickford and Douglas Jr), Carradines (John,
David, Keith and Robert), Bridgeses (Lloyd, Jeff and Beau), Fondas (Henry, Peter
and Jane), Baldwins (Alec, Adam, Billy, Daniel), or Culkins (Macauley, Kieran, Rory
and their aunt Bonnie Bedelia), the Beerys (Wallace and Noah), the Keaches (Stacy
and James), the Barrymores (Lionel, John, Ethel, Drew), the Beattys (Warren and
Shirley MacLaine), the Hickmans (Darryl and Dwayne), Olivia DeHavilland and Joan
Fontaine, the Redgraves (Michael, Rachel [Kempson], Vanessa, Lynn, Corin, and Na-
tasha and Joely Richardson), the Alberts (Edward, Eddie and Edward Jr.), Catherine
Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac, or the Howards (Trevor and Leslie) onscreen; the
Westmores in the studio make-up rooms; the Selznicks (David and Myron) and the
Mayers (Louis B. and Irene) upstairs; the Scotts (Ridley and Tony), the Wachowskis
(Andy and Larry), the Hugheses (Albert and Allen), the Gershwins (George and Ira)
behind the camera; the omnipresent Coppolas (Carmine composing, Francis and
Sofia directing, Talia Shire and Nic Cage acting), and so on. In many cases the
power to green light a production resided around a family dinner table, this entirely
neglecting the countless circumstances in which a film or film career resulted from
a chance encounter between members of the same family: Wes Craven's teenage
daughter saw Johnny Depp acting on 27 Jump Street and demanded that her father
cast him in A Nightmare on Elm Street; the rest is history.
But there is a third, less mechanical, sense in which family plays a role in Hol-
lywood, and that is the far more nebulous, yet powerful, ‘family feeling’ that can

6 A FAMILY AFFAIR
develop on a set between people working together for long hours day after day
on the same intricate project. The cast and crew of a film become something of a
‘family’ during production at least in the sense that emotions flow freely within the
bounded space members share and in the sense that sacrifice and continual adap-
tation are required of everyone in order that the vital compromises can be achieved
that the project requires. Executive Producer Herbert Coleman and Director Alfred
Hitchcock had an avuncular relationship with Christopher Olsen on The Man Who
Knew Too Much (1956); Olsen slid into the routine of clipping their cigars. The
sense of family taking over an entire set is beautifully evoked in Francois Truffaut's
Day for Night (1973), a film about exactly such a production where the cast, the
technical and script workers and the producers fall into a rhapsodic and private bub-
ble of familial devotion. A very similar sense is given in Lost in La Mancha (2002) by
Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, a description of the ordeals endured by Terry Gilliam
and his crew/family while they attempted to film a version of Don Quixote in the
face of a patriarchal illness.
However, given that the rhetoric of the happy family is useful in film produc-
tion, in studio/actor relations and in publicity, and given that family relations can be
helpful for those who wish to break into the movie business, and given that a kind
of family warmth takes over on many actual film productions, we may still usefully
wonder, what is onscreen family for? The patrons in the movie theatre have left
home in order to be there, after all, and this in many senses beyond the simple fact
that aside from movie moguls very few people have screening facilities inside their
family domiciles. Most of us walk away from the family philosophically, leaving our
roots and our connections behind us — at least in a dream of independence — and
orienting ourselves to the screen as though we had no socialisation under our belt,
no history of family interaction, no heredity, no expectant relations eager to watch
our every move (see Arlen 1977). Then, in the glimmering darkness, what do we
see in our newfound liberty magnified in silver or in the radiant saturations of Tech-
nicolor but imitations of the family life we had apparently escaped. Certainly, in
seeing representation in film of so fundamental a social institution, such elemental
relationships, we not only enter the realm of drama (because drama is all a story of
the family wound, whether in tragedy or comedy) but also return to ourselves in a
way that makes for recognition and self-knowledge, and therefore a sense of ulti-
mate truth. To see families is in some sense to look in the mirror, and in accepting
this ‘thing of darkness’ that glows in the glass do we not obtain a key for seeing,
knowing, accepting and understanding a whole world?
To the extent that cinema is a tool of the state, it can also operate as an instruc-
tion manual. The family as site of ideological production functions ideally, in other
words, when its shape and systematic operation are both stringently controlled
and bounded; there would otherwise be — as in precapitalist times there were — far
too many eccentric forms of the family to guarantee conformity and predictabil-
ity of behaviour. Consumption, reproduction, aggression — these habits need to

INTRODUCTION 7
be organised to maximise return on expenditure in our multinational postcapitalist
world. Whether it is played for sentiment or for catharsis, for laughter or for mys-
tification, the screen family is inevitably drawn as a glowing paragon to behold, an
image to which we can in some way aspire. If we cannot inhabit a great aristocratic
estate (as Ralph Richardson does in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the
Apes (1984)), then at least we can artfully arrange flowers (as Mery! Streep does
in The Hours (2002)); if we do not possess an operatic capacity for passion (The
Godfather), at least we can blow off steam after a beer on a street corner, or learn
how to say artfully, ‘Fuggedaboudit’. Screen families, then, are relentlessly peda-
gogical, teaching us how to pose, think, behave, acquire, imagine, remember, fear
and anticipate as members of families in real life. In Saturday Night Fever (1977),
Tony Manero’s (John Travolta) experience of the nightclub ‘teaches’ him behaviour
that his mother (Julie Bovasso) does not approve of; a similar moral panic infects
many parents, who fear their children will ‘learn’ from film what children apparently
should not know, for instance how, like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Basketball Diaries
(1995), to stow shotguns beneath one's trenchcoat in high school.
Also, since we are deeply committed to family life in the West, using it as a
mode of education and warehousing, a mode of defence and strategising — indeed,
a sanctity - we also seem prone to the belief that family is the natural state of hu-
mankind: all persons emerge from families and recombine into families; the family
is the essential human form; the parent/child bond is the preeminent social relation;
the family is the temple of privacy even as it is simultaneously the agora itself, the
battleground where economic and emotional forces play out to exhaustion. In light
of this belief, the screen family becomes a portrait of humankind at its most essen-
tial, natural and spontaneous. For the family is never taken onscreen to be a product
itself, a concoction with specific benefits to those in power; it is taken instead to
spring automatically out of human passion and confidence, quite as though persons
who adored and trusted one another couldn't imagine any other way to be than
seeking, making, sharing — and ultimately living and struggling in — a family. The
Lords of The Philadelphia Story (1940), the Flintstones, the Tenenbaums, Indiana
Jones and his dotty dad ... they all just materialised that way. Thus, apparently, the
family is not shaped and cultured in order to work out a certain form repetitively
and predictably; it sprouts like a flower. (Hollywood works as though Engels’ The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State had never been written, does
not exist.)
From various Critical perspectives and scholarly backgrounds, the authors in this
volume bring their own passions to the consideration of family onscreen. To begin,
a number of authors consider family in the context of film genre and the cinematic
auteur. Wheeler Winston Dixon gives an account of the family in film noir, noting
various ways in which the darkness of noir is used as a rupturing force in family life.
James Buhler surveys the family in Hollywood musicals, where courtship ending in
marriage is a staple narrative focus but the representation of family, especially chil-

8 A FAMILY AFFAIR
dren, is very often held back. Andrew Horton examines ‘cross-generational’ families
in American film comedy, where conflicts in value and attitude are demonstrated
within families made up of characters who don’t understand one another. Walter
Metz analyses the family in the western, especially the 1950s Cold War variant and
the way that in post-9/11 westerns a linkage between geopolitical security concerns
and domestic morality is reenacted through the expression of land use. Jennifer M.
Bean frames a complex questioning of the ‘paternity’ of D. W. Griffith in the history
of American narrative film, including a discussion of the metaphorical and ideologi-
cal values that we associate with the middle-class family. William Rothman consid-
ers the Hitchcockian family: the notable absence of family plots, for example, even
in Family Plot (1976); the frequent protagonists being typically single and childless;
and the striking incidences of married life ‘viewed darkly’. And Lucy Fischer writes
about the family in melodrama, especially the Sirkian family as exemplified in Al/
| Desire (1953), a film in which the conflicted family life of an actress is brought
to light.
There follows a group of essays centring on discussions of family in the con-
text of political and social relations. Christopher Sharrett presents quite another
look at the family in the American western, focusing on the way family, commu-
nity and heterosexual relations, ‘while often subversive’, seem systematically to
evince rightist or nihilist positions quite as often as progressive ones; he gives
special attention to the importance of Brokeback Mountain (2005). Steven Alan Carr
examines the presentation of family in a Britney Spears Pepsi commercial from
2001, in which the text ‘privileges and subordinates a complex array of ideologies’
about family, turning its viewers into one massive family that uses a ‘familial gaze’
to establish ‘family values’. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster shows how the trope of
voodoo is used in | Walked With a Zombie (1943) to provide a ‘devastating critique
of whiteness and colonialism’ in which colonials are ‘enslaved in their own familial
dysfunctionality’. Glenn Man's interest is the family in late Robert Altman films;
for this scholar, what is central in Altman's work is a persistent problematisation
of women’s independence and power. Yvonne Tasker considers male parenting
as framed in contemporary film; this subject is often presented independently of
concerns about nurturing, and in such films traditional formulations of gender are
too often secured, with women’s work in childcare devalued or disattended. James
Morrison examines a recent spate of ‘family invasion’ films, where the family is in
a ‘post-crisis’ state, portrayed entirely outside ideology; as a social institution, the
postmodern family is shown as ‘doing just fine, or would be, if it were not con-
stantly beset by forces from without’.
Finally, the screen family is a repeating locus of troubles and dreams. Marcia
Landy examines the family in several of the films of Todd Haynes, showing how
his films ‘have confronted viewers with disturbing scenes of the middle-class fam-
ily’. For Landy, family functions in these films as a ‘killing field, a site of “perver-
sion”’. Harry M. Benshoff examines a group of recent films that use queer theory

INTRODUCTION 9
to ‘suggest challenges to the structure of the traditional nuclear family’. If queers
still figure in mainstream cinema as ‘problem people’, homophobia itself is com-
ing to be figured as the problem in more and more independent films. Mary Beth
Haralovich studies the tensions and fissures in the family structure portrayed in
Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce, paying close attention to the specific alterations
made as the film was adapted from James M. Cain's novel (1941) in a moral climate
where concern had to be directed at the characteristics of a female protagonist.
Nathan Holmes is interested in the relationship between family and suburbia on-
screen, giving close attention to Rebe! Without a Cause and Over the Edge (1979).
The former film provides a pretext for ‘legitimating teenage extroversion’ during a
historical period where moral panic about adolescents had been invoked nationally;
the latter, omitting the ‘reversion to family’ of Rebe/ Without a Cause, presents a
situation where ‘kids stick together, not families’. Jerry Mosher studies the fat-cat
patriarchal figure, linking Louis B. Mayer and the Burl lves performance in Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof (1958); in both types of case, we see representatives of an ‘elite
group of men and institutions whose values and system of production were on the
verge of extinction’. Adrienne L. McLean gives a meticulous reading of fan maga-
zine discourse to examine the way family values and family relations were used in
the 1950s as part of the Hollywood publicity apparatus to establish the personae of
screen luminaries: magazines went to great trouble to ‘make stars appear to recon-
cile the competing demands of their careers and those of a married and family life
centred on devotion to home and children’. And to conclude, Murray Pomerance
gives a typology of dramatised family types, concentrating on What's Eating Gilbert
Grape (1993) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), among other films, in order to
examine the relationship between constructed appearance and family relations in
screen presentation.
While reading this book, you will discover that —- even though flat, papery and
conceptual — it constitutes something of a ‘family’ itself, with voices disparate and
energetic, passionate and convicted, argumentative and agreeable, mellowed like
aged wine and fresh on the street. Our hope is that these essays, looking at family
in different kinds of films from different kinds of theoretical and analytical view-
points, will bring light to a subject that is endlessly fascinating, endlessly obscure;
will challenge and provoke; will open doorways for new thoughts; and, like the films
they are about, will happily entertain. And one thing more: perhaps the reader in
moving through these pages will hear a voice in the head responding, a voice with
questions or comments or observations or shards of thought about cinema, and will
in that way begin to participate in the kind of analysis that is happening here, begin
to — dare | say it? — join the family.

10 A FAMILY AFFAIR
Family, Genre, Auteur
 House of Strangers: The Family in Film Noir
WHEELER WINSTON DIXON

| will focus here on films in which the darkness of noir is seen as a force of rup-
ture within family life, dealing first with Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s superb drama of a
spectacularly dysfunctional Italian American family, House of Strangers (1949). But
as Leo Tolstoy put it in Anna Karenina (1873-77), ‘Happy families are all alike; every
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’; thus, this chapter also explores the
unique desperation of family life as depicted in such films as John Brahm, André
De Toth and Lewis Milestone’s Guest in the House (1944), in which Anne Baxter
destroys the family that adopts her out of a sense of charity; and Jean Renoir's The
Woman on the Beach (1947), in which an alcoholic impressionist painter, blinded
by his wife in a domestic battle, struggles against the bottle, her chronic infidelities
and his own homicidal rage. Further, Sam Wood's King’s Row (1942) rips the lid off
smalltown American life, while simultaneously exposing the manners of polite soci-
ety as a sham; John M. Stahl’s superb Technicolor noir Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
presents a psychopath who destroys her own life and those around her through
her implacable jealousy; and Brahm’s The Locket (1946) shows a young woman's
kleptomania leading three suitors to their deaths.

Strange Illusions of the Noir Family

Was the image of home and hearth a lie from the start? Traditional romance films
end with the ideal heterotopic couple living ‘happily ever after’; family noir films
show the viewer the real ‘ever after’. Frank Capra’s sentimental Christmas film /t’s
a Wonderful Life (1946) captures our attention most during the scenes of the town
of Bedford Falls in social collapse, as the result of George Bailey’s (James Stew-
art) attempted suicide. It seems that the structure of smalltown America needs
constant verification in order to survive; pull out a peg, and the entire edifice col-
lapses. In Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion (1945), also known as Out ofthe Night,
Paul Cartwright (Jimmy Lydon), the wealthy son of an important California family,
is haunted by a dream that his deceased father, Lieutenant Governor Albert Cart-
wright, has been replaced in his mother’s affections by an impostor. In a modern-

THE FAMILY IN FILM NOIR 13

day variation on Hamlet, the dream intimates that Paul's father has been murdered,
and that Paul must avenge his death.
The villain is the suave Brett Curtis (Warren Williams, in one of his last roles), a
psychopathic sex killer who courts Paul’s mother, Virginia (Sally Eilers), with a view
towards marriage and eventual control of the estate. Ostensibly a friend of the
sinister Professor Muhlbach (Charles Arnt), ‘Curtis’ is actually Claude Barrington, a
criminal well known to Paul’s late father as an exceptionally clever and dangerous
man. Everyone seems fooled by Barrington’s masquerade as ‘Curtis’, especially
Paul's sister, Dorothy (Jayne Hazard); and Paul’s only ally is his friend Dr Vincent
(Regis Toomey), the family’s physician. Paul’s father communicates from beyond
the grave through a series of letters written before his death, delivered to Paul on
a regular basis, that warn him of the potential danger to Paul’s mother and sister.
Only at the end of the film, when Curtis tries to rape Dorothy, is the killer's real na-
ture unmasked and the sanctity of the home preserved. Strange I//usion was made
for Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) in a mere six days on a budget of less
than $40,000, beginning production on 10 October and ending on 16 October 1944
(Silver & Ward 1992: 266). Despite the film's tight budget and schedule, Ulmer
brings both grace and style to its complex narrative, giving Paul Cartwright’s privi-
leged world a genuine sense of substance and splendour. But as a tale of family,
the film is eerie: this comforting nuclear family, after all, includes both the living and
the dead in constant communication. And what looks like family is the horrid mask
of crime and death.
Lewis Milestone’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), on the other hand,
is an ‘A’ noir that documents Martha Ivers’ (Barbara Stanwyck) tyrannical control of
an entire midwestern town through the local factory that she inherited as a child.
As with Paul Cartwright, Martha is a child of wealth and power, but in Milestone’s
film her unyielding hold on those around her has corrupted her completely. She
believes that her money can buy her anything, whether it be the love of old flame
Sam Masterson (Van Heflin), who drifts into town on a whim, or that of her putative
husband, the weak and ineffectual District Attorney Walter O'Neil (Kirk Douglas),
whom Martha despises. When Sam’‘s old affections for Martha are aroused, Mar-
tha’s husband is understandably annoyed and attempts to have him driven out of
town through the machinations of femme fatale Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott).
However, Sam realises that what is really keeping Martha and Walter together
is a shared secret of murder — the true source of Martha's vast inheritance. In the
film’s harrowing conclusion, both Martha and Walter, fearing exposure, kill them-
selves, leaving Sam and Toni to flee lverstown without a backward glance. Money,
power, influence — everything has a price, and Martha’s life has been a charade that
she and her husband can no longer maintain. Behind the surface, all is rotten. The
sleekness of Milestone’'s mise-en-scéne, coupled with the dark interiors of Mar-
tha’s palatial yet claustrophobic mansion, do nothing to persuade us that Martha
has made a good bargain in trading murder for instant wealth. What is repressed

14 A FAMILY AFFAIR
will inevitably be exposed in a rupture of violence — in this case, violence that des-
troys Martha's unstable, artificial domestic milieu.
Perhaps the most corrosive portrayal of postwar family life is House of Stran-
gers. Here, Italian American old-style patriarch Gino Monetti (Edward G. Robin-
son) dominates his sons and his banking business with an autocratic and despotic
vengeance. Forcing his sons to dine at the family table while he blasts opera from a
wind-up Victrola, Gino tyrannises his entire family, save Max (Richard Conte), who
is Gino's clear favourite. But, as with Martha Ivers, there is a flaw in Gino's empire.
He has been making unsecured loans and charging usurious rates in violation of
the banking laws, and at length his crime is discovered. Gino goes on trial for fraud,
and his sons Joe (Luther Adler) and Pietro (Paul Valentine) do nothing to help him;
indeed, they are now in control of the bank and loot and are eager to see Gino
destroyed, both personally and professionally. Max, who is a lawyer, tries to save
Gino by attempting to bribe a juror at Gino’s trial. But when Joe finds out about it,
he gleefully turns Max over to the police: Max is the favourite son no more. De-
spite Max's machinations, Gino is acquitted, but Max gets seven years in the state
penitentiary. Released, he returns home to find that Gino has died and his brothers
are in full control of the bank. This sets the stage for a final confrontation that pits
brother against brother, as old scores are settled and old wounds are opened, one
last time.
In a bravura performance, Robinson takes to the role of Gino with his cus-
tomary gusto, making him a monster of theatricality and old-world malice. Conte’s
Max is the dutiful son who will do anything to help his father, but his role remains
rather colourless, despite its centrality to the film's narrative. But Joe Monetti, as
played by the heavy-lidded Luther Adler, is the film’s real centre; a seething mass
of hatred and pomposity, coiled and waiting to strike out at all who would oppose
him. What is most clear in House of Strangers is that these people who are bound
by nothing but blood ties have, as the title implies, literally nothing in common.
Gino has never tried to understand his sons, nor does he try now; he sees himself
clearly and simply as the naturally indomitable force that holds the family together.
But in the Monetti household, there is no togetherness; this is simply a place in
which a group of people, related by blood, live, scheme and seek to dominate and/
or destroy each other. As an example of old-world values clashing with postwar
American society, House of Strangers demonstrates that families serve primarily
as the repositories of secrets, lies, ambitions and long-held grievances. There is no
sense of family here, at least not in the romantic sense implied by, for example,
the conclusion of /t’s a Wonderful Life, in which all the woes and anxieties of the
Bailey family are salved by the warmth of a Christmas celebration. Further, House
of Strangers suggests that the Monetti household is much more representative of
postwar American family life than most viewers or critics would care to admit. As
with The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, it also suggests that no great fortune exists
without a great crime, in the past or the present.

THE FAMILY IN FILM NOIR 15

 Finally, House of Strangers suggests that one can never escape the conse-
quences of his actions within the family; and that, indeed, with the passing of time
sins of the past become more vulnerable to exposure rather than receding into the
mists of unrecorded memory. Gino's domination of his family, like Martha's domina-
tion of her factory town, is counterfeit from the start, destined to end in collapse.
When we first see Gino at the beginning of House of Strangers, lording it over his
wife and sons at the dinner table, we get the impression that his reign will continue
unopposed throughout the film, that even if trouble emerges, Gino will remain a
force to be reckoned with. But when his bank fails — and with it his corrupt schemes
—his authority collapses, paving the way for his even more brutally corrupt son, Joe,
to take his place. After Gino's death, it is as if he never existed, so complete is his
erasure from the ‘family’s’ memory.
Guest in the House is another kind of noir, in which the corrosive force is nei-
ther greed nor lust for money and power but madness and possessive jealousy.
Evelyn Heath (Anne Baxter, in a portrait of exquisite treachery) is brought to the
seaside house of the rich Proctor family to recuperate after a nervous breakdown.
Soon, she sets her sights on Douglas Proctor (Ralph Bellamy), who is happily mar-
ried to Ann (Ruth Warrick). But happiness is a relative word to Evelyn, who im-
mediately begins an effective and insidious campaign to replace Ann in Douglas's
affections, with apparent success. As Guest in the House unfolds, Evelyn's malice
and deceitfulness take a decisive toll on the entire household, while she herself
remains the serene centre of the storm she has created. The film's tag line neatly
summarises the narrative’s inexorable trajectory: ‘No girl has ever been called more
names! That's Evelyn ... the guest ... who manages to throw her pretty shadow
around where any man near must see it — and when it comes to a man she grants
no rights to anyone but herself!’ As in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and House
of Strangers, we see a family that is no match for the forces that seek to destroy
it, living in a home the domestic tranquility and genteel, well-appointed face of
which can easily be torn down. Werner Janssen's appropriately ominous music,
coupled with Lee Garmes’ moody cinematography and Nicolai Remisoff's baroque
production design combine to create a vision of the summer house by the sea as
the ineluctable domain of madness; a home waiting to be torn asunder by Evelyn's
invading intellect. Director John Brahm was certainly no stranger to this psychologi-
cal territory.
In many ways, Guest in the House can be seen as a parable of the last days
of World War Two, when social changes (women in the work place, rising divorce
rates and skyrocketing inflation) were threatening the stability of the traditional fam-
ily unit. Yet, too, as with many of his other films, Brahm was ahead of his time,
reminding us with this little-known work that once invited, a guest may easily over-
stay her or his welcome, with disastrous results; in this respect, Guestin the House
can be seen as a confirmation of the Isolationist doctrine that preceded World War
Two. Whatever is happening in Europe is none of our affair; let's keep this war away

16 A FAMILY AFFAIR
from us at all costs; let's not go over and help other people with their problems,
and let's certainly not invite the wrong other people to join us in our homes over
here. Evelyn is a force that cannot be denied, and until the Proctors finally realise
that their home front is in danger of imminent collapse, she operates unchecked by
normal social rules, eating away like a parasite at the values they have always held
dear. Only a last-minute intervention stops her relentless campaign of destruction,
leaving the family members shaken, and arguably scarred for life. Will they be as
welcoming to the next stranger who comes to call?

Renoir's American Family: The Woman on the Beach

Jean Renoir’s American masterpiece, The Woman on the Beach, is easily the best
Hollywood work by the director of such classic films as Rules of the Game (1939)
and Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932). When Renoir fled France with the advent
of the Nazi onslaught, he initially landed at 20th Century Fox, where he directed the
torrid melodrama Swamp Water (1941), shot on location in Georgia. The film failed
to click at the box office, and Renoir left Fox for Universal, where he began work
on a Deanna Durbin musical. But after a few weeks he walked off the film, upset
with Universal's factory production methods, and landed at RKO, where he was
able to direct the noirish French resistance drama This Land is Mine (1943), starring
Charles Laughton as a meek schoolmaster. The film was marred by a stagebound,
Hollywood ‘studio’ look, in contrast to Renoir’s best, more naturalistic films.
Departing RKO, Renoir made a brief propaganda short, Sa/ute to France (1944),
before creating The Southerner (1945) and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946),
both independent productions with modest budgets and shooting schedules. His
American odyssey was coming to an end when he returned to RKO for his last
Hollywood film, the brutally vicious The Woman on the Beach, which effectively
ended his ties with the American film industry. At RKO, Renoir had struck up an
acquaintance with the producer Val Lewton, farnous for his series of atmospheric
and intelligent horror films in the 1940s. He admired Lewton’s method of produc-
ing masterful films, such as Jacques Tourneur’s | Walked With a Zombie (1943), on
short schedules. Now, he proposed to shoot a film in the same manner.
Still, the scenario and production of The Woman on the Beach bothered him, if
only because it was unlike any other film he had ever attempted. As he noted at the
time, ‘| wanted to try and tell a love story based purely on physical attraction, a story
in which emotions played no part ... In all my previous films | had tried to depict the
bonds uniting the individual to his background ... | had proclaimed the consoling
truth that the world is one; and now | was embarked on a study of persons whose
sole idea was to close the door on the absolutely concrete phenomenon which
we Call life’ (in Bergan 1992: 261). This, of course, is the very essence of noir, and
whatever his misgivings, Renoir embraced this new emotional terrain with his cus-
tomary skill and insight.

THE FAMILY IN FILM NOIR 17

 The Woman on the Beach tells the tale of Tod Butler (Charles Bickford), an
extremely successful American artist whose career has been cut short by an ac-
cident in which he was deprived of his eyesight. His wife, Peggy (Joan Bennett),
loves and hates Tod in equal measure, but remains bound to him because it was
she who blinded him during a lover's quarrel. The two live in a seaside cottage
near a US Coast Guard base, in a state of perpetual disharmony; Tod keeps his
paintings locked up in a closet — his only link to the past — while Peggy wants to
sell the paintings and move to New York, seeking the fast life the two once shared
when Tod could see. Into this uneasy marriage comes Lieutenant Scott Burnett
(Robert Ryan), a young officer who has recently survived a torpedo attack and is
now recovering from his physical wounds, while remaining mentally unbalanced.
Peggy immediately seduces Scott, much to the displeasure of Scott's fiancée, Eve
Geddes (Nan Leslie).
Scott becomes obsessed with ‘freeing’ Peggy from Tod, who he believes is not
really blind but rather manipulating Peggy so that she will stay with him out of guilt.
In an attempt to prove his theory, Scott creates a series of cruel tests for Tod, in
one instance standing by while Tod walks off a cliff. Convinced at last that Tod really
is blind, yet unable to free himself from Peggy's grip, Scott battles Tod for Peggy's
affections. The film culminates in an astounding scene in which Tod sets his house
and paintings on fire in a desperate attempt to free himself of his past life. As the
house explodes in flames, Tod renounces his past ways and tells Peggy to go with
Scott. But Peggy chooses to stay with Tod, who now intends to pursue a career as
a writer. Scott returns to Eve, and domestic tranquility.
Summing up his Hollywood period, Renoir commented: ‘Although | don’t re-
gret my American films, | know for a fact they don't even come close to any ideal |
have for my work ... they represent seven years of unrealised works and unrealised
hopes. And seven years of deceptions too’ (in Bergan 1992: 264). But even if this
is so, The Woman on the Beach is still a remarkable film, the only noir that Renoir
ever made and — along with Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 masterpiece Contempt— one
of the most economical and relentless examinations of a marriage in collapse ever
filmed. As Tod, Bickford gives the most nuanced performance of his career, at once
tender and dangerous, while Robert Ryan brings an intensity to the role of Scott
that is both haunting and achingly realistic. Joan Bennett's foredoomed femme
fatale is essentially a reprise of her role in Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945), but
in The Woman on the Beach she seems more tragic and human than in Lang's
much colder moral universe. At 71 minutes, the film has little time to waste, and
is harrowingly compact. Not available on DVD or VHS, or even in 16mm rental
format, The Woman on the Beach is Renoir's one true American masterpiece, into
which he distilled all his disdain for the Hollywood studio system and American
culture.

18 A FAMILY AFFAIR
 The Midwest Family Cut Open: King’s Row

Sam Wood's King's Row is another matter altogether, although it, too, looks behind
the scenes of domestic life and finds a great deal to abhor. The film began life as a
wildly successful popular novel by Henry Bellamann, published in 1940, and soon
the studios were engaged in a fierce battle for the rights to the book. But filming
King’s Row would be difficult. This muckraking novel of turn-of-the-century Ameri-
cana featured insanity, murder, gratuitous amputations, homosexuality, premarital
sex, Suicide and incest — not exactly material that Joseph Breen would find easy
to work with at the Production Code Administration. Warner Bros. finally secured
the rights to Bellamann’s novel, but then wondered how on earth they were going
to adapt it to the screen. When he was originally assigned the project, associate
producer Wolfgang Reinhardt wrote to Warner Bros. production chief Hal Wallis in
dismay on 3 July 1940:

| prefer not to kid myself or you regarding the enormous difficulties that [a film
version] of this best seller will undoubtedly offer ... the hero finding out that his
girl has been carrying on incestuous relations with her father, a sadistic doctor
who amputates legs and disfigures people wilfully, a host of moronic or other-
wise mentally diseased characters, the background of a lunatic asylum, people
dying from cancer, suicides — these are the principal elements of the story ... in
my opinion the making of a screenplay would amount to starting from scratch.
(In Behimer 1985: 135)

Indeed, Joseph Breen wrote to Jack Warner on 22 April 1941 saying that the entire
undertaking of filming King’s Row was inherently suspect:

Before this picture will be approved under the provision of the Production Code,
all illicit sex will have to be entirely removed; the characterization of Cassandra
will have to be definitely changed; the mercy killing will have to be deleted ...
[and] the suggestion that Dr Gordon's nefarious practices are prompted by a
kind of sadism will have to be completely removed from the story ... to attempt
to translate such a story to the screen, even though it be re-written to conform
to the provisions of the Production Code, is, in our judgement, a very question-
able undertaking from the standpoint of the good and welfare of the industry.
(In Behlmer 1985: 136-7; emphasis in original)

Nevertheless, Warner Bros. pressed ahead, with significant changes in the novel's
plot line, and much suggestion, rather then direct explication, of other narrative
points in the original text.
In King’s Row, Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings) is an idealistic young man
studying to become a psychiatrist. His best friend, Drake McHugh (Ronald Reagan),

THE FAMILY IN FILM NOIR 19

is the town hellraiser, always in trouble of one sort or another, and a perennial la-
dies’ man. Cassandra ‘Cassie’ Tower (Betty Field) is the daughter of Dr Alexander
Q. Tower (Claude Rains), who serves as Parris’s first teacher; Parris falls in love with
Cassie, but before the relationship can progress, Cassie begins exhibiting symp-
toms of an insanity inherited from her mother. Parris and Cassie have sex, Cassie
becomes pregnant, and in a rage Dr Tower kills both Cassie and himself. Most of
this is suggested, not shown. As critic Tim Dirks notes, in the novel Dr Tower's
motivation was even more sinister:

Cassie was afflicted with nymphomania, not insanity. Dr Tower's diary re-
vealed that the warped doctor had eliminated his wife and then committed
incest with his daughter in order to study its psychological effects. He then
killed Cassie when she threatened to leave him and go to Parris. (2003b)

As Breen made clear, King’s Row’s original Source material would never have made
it past the censor's office in 1942, so this element, and others in the story, were
significantly revised in Casey Robinson's still-daring screenplay. In a second main
narrative strand, Drake, who has been living handsomely from an inheritance, sud-
denly finds himself bankrupt and involved with two women, Randy Monaghan (Ann
Sheridan at her no-nonsense best) and Louise Gordon (Nancy Coleman), the daugh-
ter of Dr Henry Gordon (Charles Coburn), a sadistic local doctor who specialises in
performing operations without anaesthesia. Unfortunately for Drake, when he is
injured in an accident at work he is taken to Dr Gordon's clinic for surgery. Know-
ing of Drake's relationship with his daughter Louise, Dr Gordon amputates both
of Drake's legs as an act of revenge. After the operation, Drake looks down at his
mutilated body and utters the film's most famous line, ‘Where's the rest of me?’,
which would eventually become the title of Ronald Reagan's 1965 autobiography.
Generally a competent but unmemorable actor, Reagan gives the performance
of his career here. Sam Wood's utilitarian direction concentrates on the perform-
ances of the actors, but the film is given a paranoid, claustrophobic air by the alco-
holic, gifted set designer William Cameron Menzies. Wood, a lifelong Republican,
can hardly have been in sympathy with the novel's intent; indeed, he kept falling
behind in production because of a laboured, slow pace, and seemed more inter-
ested in Robert Cummings’ portrayal of Parris than any other element of the film.
King’s Row was released to solid business and respectable reviews, but will prob-
ably never be embraced as an American classic; even watered down at Breen’s be-
hest, it is a stinging indictment of American society. Love provokes not happiness
but revenge; medicine disfigures rather than heals; paranoia lies beneath the most
civilised surfaces.
Indeed, as a dystopian vision of the dark underside of midwestern smalltown
life, King’s Row has never been equalled. Gorgeously photographed by James
Wong Howe, with a sweepingly romantic score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, King’s

20 A FAMILY AFFAIR
Row remains in the memory as a vision of puritan Hell, unrelieved by any ray of
light. At the end, Parris, as a budding psychiatrist, offers his chum Drake words of
consolation that are sufficient to bring the amputee out of his self-pity and renew
his interest in life. But, even as Parris recites the lines of the poem ‘Invictus’ to
Drake in an attempt to make him whole again, in spirit if not in body, and Drake
reunites with Randy to plan their future together, King’s Row remains an unstint-
ing indictment of the ignorance, insularity and small-mindedness of midwestern
America, as true today as when it was written and subsequently filmed. The film
demonstrates that the spirit of noir is not located only in the big city, but also per-
meates the rural village. Men and women scheme to gain power, wealth and social
prominence, and the local authorities consider themselves bound to give not only
legal, but also moral, guidance to all their constituents whether they wish it or not.
King’s Row is that rarest of films, a social commentary made by a major studio,
which critiques the very society it so accurately documents.

Domesticity Under Attack: The Phantom Speaks

A deeply disturbing family noir from the 1940s, John English’s The Phantom
Speaks (1945), also holds a claim on the viewer's memory long after the last image
has faded from the screen. In this brief (69-minute) low-budget film from Republic
Pictures, gangster Harvey Bogardus (Tom Powers) murders a man whom he sus-
pects of fooling around with his wife, and is summarily condemned to death in the
electric chair. His case attracts the attention of psychic researcher Dr Paul Renwick
(Stanley Ridges), a widower with one daughter, who visits Bogardus on the eve of
his execution with a startling proposal. Having studied Bogardus’s ruthless crimi-
nal career, Renwick is convinced that Bogardus possesses a uniquely powerful
mind and might be able to reach beyond the veil of death through the efforts of a
sympathetic medium. As Renwick outlines his plan, Bogardus becomes convinced
that Renwick can, perhaps, effect such a return from the dead, and agrees to par-
ticipate. As he is led into the death chamber, Bogardus makes a final statement to
the assembled members of the press, stating simply, ‘OK, so | killed a rat. He got
what was coming to him. And | know some others that'll get the same thing. I’m
not through yet, hear me? Not yet!’
The execution is carried out, and Bogardus is declared legally dead. Renwick
immediately returns to his home, where his daughter Joan (Lynne Roberts) awaits
him. Brushing her aside, he rushes to his study, and in an attempt to contact Bogar-
dus begins a gruelling regimen of repeated séances which, at length, prove suc-
cessful. Yet the rematerialised Bogardus is far from whole. ‘There are some things
| can't do without you,’ he tells Renwick. ‘I’ve got hands but | can’t pick up anything
with ‘em. I’ve got legs but | can’t walk around on ‘em. These eyes — all | can see is
you, Renwick. But I’ve got a miliiind.’ Renwick is flushed with his success. ‘That's a
fact I've sought all my life to prove! That a spirit from the dead could take posses-

THE FAMILY IN FILM NOIR 2)

sion of the living. If we can conduct a successful experiment along those lines, we
can prove that there’s no such thing as insanity. It’s a case of a spirit from the be-
yond crowding out the mind and spirit of the living.’ Rejoins Bogardus: ‘Wanna try
it, Doctor?...’ (see Weaver 1993). Renwick agrees to submit himself to Bogardus’s
will, and in a chilling sequence accomplished entirely through a series of increas-
ingly tight intercut close-ups, Bogardus gradually takes possession of Renwick's
mind. While Renwick has a more or less scientific interest, Bogardus has only one
objective: revenge. Using Renwick’s body, Bogardus’s reanimated spirit systemati-
cally tracks down and brutally murders all those responsible for his conviction and
execution. Renwick’s daughter, who is in love with reporter Matt Fraser (Richard
Arlen), is kept in the dark by her father, who now alternates between his own per-
sonality and that of Bogardus.
As the days pass, Bogardus assumes almost complete control of Renwick,
materialising in the doctor's study with steely malevolence, commanding the doctor
to do his bidding. Supremely confident of his mastery of Renwick, Bogardus taunts
him: ‘No, Doc, you're not losing your mind. But then again, maybe you are crazy.
But what does it matter? I’m here now, and that’s all that counts. And we have
work to do.’ In the film’s final minutes, Bogardus sends Renwick out to murder the
District Attorney who spearheaded the case against him, but Renwick is prevented
from carrying out the mission by the last-minute intervention of his daughter and
the police. Coming to his senses as he is captured, Renwick is momentarily freed of
Bogardus’s malign influence, and looks at his daughter with an expression of amaze-
ment and fear. ‘Joan!’ he cries out. ‘What's going on? What am | doing here?’
But in the film’s astounding finale there is no trial for Renwick, no suggestion of
an insanity defence and no reprieve from society. From the scene of his final cap-
ture, the film dissolves immediately to the same death chamber where Bogardus
met his end, but this time it is Renwick who is condemned. Although the others
never suspect this, we know that it is really Bogardus’s reanimated spirit that is
being executed. As he is led to the electric chair, Renwick stops for a moment and
in Bogardus's voice addresses the assembled company of witnesses, speaking the
exact same words Bogardus used before his execution: ‘OK, so | killed a rat. He got
what was coming to him. And | know some others that'll get the same thing. I'm
not through yet, hear me? Not yet!’
Thus it is clear that Bogardus will return yet again from the dead, to take over
the life and body of another victim, his lust for murder apparently insatiable.
Throughout the film, much is made of the home that Bogardus destroys
through his supernatural machinations. Dr Renwick's house is a warm, welcoming
place, filled with flowers and music, and the romance between his daughter Joan
and Matt Fraser affords him a sense of satisfaction that his life and Joan’s will pro-
ceed to a happy end. Joan's attempts to help her father are repeatedly underscored
by the film's narrative, but as he falls deeper under Bogardus's spell, the succession
of breakfast trays and thoughtfully prepared sandwiches she brings to her father

22 A FAMILY AFFAIR
are turned away with increasing coldness. It is his insatiable curiosity that ultimately
brings about Renwick’s horrific end; his work overpowers the domestic sphere until
there is no room left for human companionship. As Bogardus becomes increasingly
powerful, the others in Renwick’s life are shut out, and he becomes a slave to not
only Bogardus but also the work he had sought to carry out.
The Phantom Speaks thus offers a truly despairing vision of American small-
town family life in the mid-1940s. Although Renwick is a respected member of his
community, when he shuts himself off from their care they make no attempt to
break through the hold Bogardus has on him, and consign him to death for murders
he did not truly commit. Nor is there any interest in an explanation, or in the exist-
ence of mitigating factors; Renwick must die — yet his death will not truly protect
society. The domestic sphere is continually under attack, and even those whom
society respects the most may become the servants of those who would seek to
destroy it.

Colourful Blackness: Leave Her to Heaven

In the justly famous Leave Her to Heaven, psychotically possessive Ellen Ber-
ent (Gene Tierney) falls in love with novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde), even
though she is engaged to attorney Russell Quinton (Vincent Price). Spiriting Richard
away to her lavish family ranch in the desert, Ellen impulsively announces that
they are betrothed. When Russell arrives, Ellen coldly sends him away. After their
marriage, Richard begins to notice that Ellen is too attentive, fixing his breakfast,
making his bed, watching him type his new novel — never leaving him a moment's
peace. Anyone who intrudes on their relationship is ruthlessly eliminated.
When Richard's paralysed young brother Danny (Darryl Hickman) threatens to
monopolise Richard's time and attention, Ellen lures him out into a deep lake and
lets him drown. When she becomes pregnant, Ellen is repulsed by the idea that her
unborn baby will soon have a claim on Richard's affections, so she throws herself
down a flight of stairs and successfully induces a miscarriage. When Richard finally
realises what a monster Ellen is, it is too late. In drifting away from Ellen, he has
fallen in love with her cousin, Ruth Berent (Jeanne Crain). To respond, Elien com-
mits suicide, knowing she can never regain Richard's love; but she frames Ruth for
her ‘murder’. Only a last-minute courtroom manoeuvre by Richard keeps Ruth out
of the gas chamber. After he spends a short stint in prison (for not reporting Ellen’s
infamous deeds to the authorities earlier), Richard and Ruth are reunited at his Ver-
mont hunting lodge, Back of the Moon. The entire story is told in flashback — that
time-honoured structural tradition of noir — by family friend Glen Robie (Ray Collins),
who has witnessed the tragedy from first to last.
In contrast to the other films discussed in this essay, Leave Her to Heaven is
shot in gorgeous Technicolor by the gifted Leon Shamroy, with a sumptuous and
suitably ominous symphonic musical score by Alfred Newman. The sets, by Lyle

THE FAMILY IN FILM NOIR 23

Wheeler and Maurice Ransford, are worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, which in
many ways Leave Her to Heaven resembles; ornate, carefully colour-coordinated
and ostentatiously lavish. Perhaps the most shocking scene is Danny's death in
the quiet lake at Back of the Moon. With great cunning, Ellen has been taking him
for therapeutic swimming lessons for several weeks, building up his trust in her as
well as his confidence in himself as a recovering victim of paralysis. Danny bravely
asserts that he can swim to shore, but Ellen, clad in appropriately dark sunglasses,
knows that he has gone out too far, and impassively watches him drown as he
pathetically screams for her assistance. The brutality and cruelty of this sequence —
unaccompanied by any music — in such a bucolic setting is deeply distressing, and
made even more disturbing by Ellen’s ‘desperate’ attempts to rescue the drowning
Danny at a point when she is secure in the knowledge that he is beyond help.
Worse still, Ellen's pathology is no secret to her mother (Mary Philips), who
tells Richard, ‘There’s nothing wrong with Ellen ... it’s just that she loves too much
. it makes an outsider of everyone else ... you must be patient with her ... she
loved her father too much.’ This is the father whom, we discover late in the film,
Ellen drove to suicide with her unceasing demands for his attention and her impos-
sibly high expectations. As Ruth tells Ellen during a final, angry confrontation, ‘With
your love you wrecked your mother’s life, with your love you pressed your father to
death, with your love you've made a shadow out of Richard.’
What Ellen fears most is the loss of identity that her marriage will bring, a loss
of self that matrimony anticipates in the very act of the wedding ceremony itself.
Richard and Ellen’s marriage is not real, can never be real, because Ellen, a product
of postwar American culture, seeks a life for herself above all other considerations
and refuses to be subsumed in any relationship. Yet, unable to declare her true
intentions because of the social conventions of the period, Ellen must continually
lie about her relationships, about her actions and, eventually, even about the man-
ner of her death. As she commits suicide with a lethal dose of poison, she leaves
evidence to frame Ruth for the crime, so that Richard and Ruth will be prevented
from marrying (and, the narrative implies, having children).

The Home in Peril: The Locket and Other Films

But nothing can quite prepare the viewer for the experience of watching John
Brahm's The Locket, famous for its ‘flashback within a flashback within a flash-
back’ structure, perhaps the most convoluted narrative in the history of noir. The
plot itself is relatively simple: Nancy (Laraine Day) is a kleptomaniac, driven to steal
anything that strikes her fancy (the original title of the film was What Nancy Want-
ed). Nancy's compulsion springs from a childhood incident, in which she is given a
locket as a birthday gift from the daughter of her mother's employer. The employer,
cruel Mrs Willis (Katherine Emery), objects and takes the locket back. Later, the
object goes missing and Mrs Willis acts on the assumption that Nancy has stolen it

24 A FAMILY AFFAIR
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 Fig. 43.
There are several small holes in the head, through which a portion of the gas of the exploded
powder-charge enters, drives forward the balls, and assists in disrupting the case.
Total weight of a round, 11 lbs. 10 oz.
This projectile is painted black.
 Fig. 44.
Shrapnel.—The Frankford Arsenal shrapnel (Fig. 44) weighs 1310/16 lbs. Exclusive of filling it consists
of three parts, viz., head (d), body (a), and base (b). The head is made of cast iron, bored and threaded
to receive the fuze, and contains a powder-chamber which is lacquered to prevent danger of premature
ignition by friction. The body is made of lap-welded wrought-iron or low-steel tubing, and is weakened
for fracture by circular and longitudinal grooves on the inside. It contains 162 hardened lead balls, ½
inch in diameter, which are assembled in circular layers and held in position by cast-iron separators,
which increase the effect of explosion by furnishing additional fragments. The base is made of cast iron
threaded to screw into the cylindrical case, and is so formed as to provide a support for the copper
band to prevent deformation of the case at this point from shock of discharge, c is the rotating band.
This projectile is painted, body black, head vermilion.
Total weight, ready for firing 13 lbs. 10 oz.
Total number of balls and individual pieces 201
Bursting-charge 3 ounces

SHRAPNEL MADE BY AMERICAN PROJECTILE CO.

(Fig. 45.)
 Fig. 45.
The entire case is of wrought steel electrically welded together so as to form a complete hardened
wrought-steel case without joint. The powder-chamber is formed in the base by a hard wrought-steel
diaphragm (d) supported by a cast-iron spider, and connected through the centre of the shell (axially) to
the fuze-opening by a cast-iron tube. It is smooth-finished, and either tinned or lacquered. The shell
contains 170 bullets (34 to the pound) packed in circular layers, and they are held firmly in position by a
resin matrix. The bullets are introduced through a hole at c.
The exterior is painted as follows: body from the band forward, to include three fifths of head, black;
remaining part of head, and part of body in rear of band, vermilion. The band is of copper.
Total weight of projectile complete 13½ pounds
Total number of balls and individual pieces 228
Weight of bursting-charge 3 ounces

The Frankford Arsenal combination fuze is used. This fuze weighs 17½ ounces; but if made of
aluminum it will weigh only 7¾ oz. For field-artillery guns it is graduated from 1 to 15 seconds, the
graduations being based upon the time of burning in flight. Each entire second is marked by a through-
hole in the cone-cover, and each of these spaces is sub-divided into six equal spaces by holes nearly
through the cover, which for the 3.2-inch gun will correspond to the following distances, viz.: 70 yards
at 1000 yards range; 55 yards at 2000 yards range; 48 yards at 3000 yards range; 42 yards at 4000
yards range.
 The following table gives the mean of five shots in each group:
Seconds. Range.
2 883 yards
3 1401 "
5 1966 "
6 2433 "
8 3037 "
9 3461 "
12 4225 "

The Frankford Arsenal Combination Fuze, 15 Seconds, Model 1894, for Shrapnel of Field-guns.

This is a time and percussion fuze (Fig. 46). It weighs 17½ oz. The time element is contained in the
front part of the bronze body (a) of the fuze, and the percussion element in the rear part. The time-
plunger (b) has five lugs (k) which hold the plunger in position above the firmly fixed steel firing-pin (c)
after the safety-pin has been withdrawn; these lugs are broken by the shock of discharge. The safety-
pin (j) passes through a hole in the upper part of the plunger, and it and the lugs are protected by the
brass cap which is pierced to allow the insertion of the safety-pin.

Fig. 46.
 By this arrangement the plunger and its lugs are entirely protected from any blow that may be
received on the nose of the fuze. The priming composition is contained in the base of the plunger (at i),
and is protected by a disk of tinfoil.
The compressed powder-ring (q) is held in a groove in the body of the fuze by a brass ring, and four
holes (p) permit the flame from the composition (i) to ignite it.
The cone (d), made of an alloy, is held in place by a brass clamping-nut (h) and two brass pins (l). A
lip (m) on the base of the cone fits into a corresponding groove in the fuze-body and prevents the
premature ignition of the powder (o) in the fuze-chamber.
A groove in the cone contains the time-train (e), which communicates through a brass tube (n) with
the powder in the fuze-chamber (o).
The brass cone-cover (f) is pierced with holes numbered from 1 to 15. The holes lie immediately over
the time-train and correspond to seconds of graduation. The spaces between consecutive holes are sub-
divided into six parts, and countersunk at the points of division so that the fuze may be cut to sixths of
a second of burning.
A brass pin projects from the body of the fuze and fits into a slot in the cone-cover; it fixes the latter
in position and, together with the brass cup on top, also serves to hold the cover in place.
The flame from the powder in the fuze-chamber communicates with the bursting-charge of the shell
through the grooved surfaces of the primer, plunger-sleeve, and bottom closing-screw.
The opening into the fuze-chamber through which the charge is put is closed by the screw. A conical
hole in the fuze-body immediately opposite this screw permits the insertion of a steel pin for the
purpose of screwing the fuze into the shell.
The percussion element consists of a brass primer (t) having three vents through which the flame
may pass from the composition to the powder in the fuze-chamber.
On the side towards the firing-pin the composition is covered first with a tinfoil cup and then with a
copper restraining-disk, which is separated from it .04 of an inch both for safety and to prevent the
firing-pin pressing against the composition during flight. On its opposite side the primer is covered with
a tinfoil ring and a paper disk.
The bottom of the fuze is covered first by a paper and then by a tinfoil disk.
The primer, plunger-sleeve, and bottom closing-screw have their sides grooved longitudinally (r, r, r)
to allow the flame from the powder in the fuze-chamber to pass to the bursting-charge of the projectile.
With the exception of this difference in the plunger-sleeve the plunger is the same as the one in the
Frankford Arsenal base percussion-fuze "C," model 1894.

TO USE THE TIME-FUZE.

Pierce the time-train cone at right angles to the axis and through the division in the cover
corresponding to the desired number of seconds. Then remove the safety-pin before inserting the
projectile in the bore of the piece.
A fuze-cutter is issued by the Ordnance Department for use with the fuze.

The Frankford Arsenal Base Percussion-fuze "C," Model 1894, for Field-gun Shell.
Fig. 47.
 Fig. 48.
This fuze weighs 4.88 ounces and consists of a brass body (a) which contains the complete plunger.
The head of the body is closed by a brass cap-screw (b) which contains a brass primer (d) that is filled
with the composition (m); and the cap-screw is closed by a brass closing-screw (c). c and d have holes
through them, as indicated, for the passage of the flame from the primer to the bursting-charge of the
projectile. The head is covered by disks of paper and tinfoil.
The face of the composition (m) nearest the plunger is covered by a disk of tinfoil (e) and a copper
restraining-disk (f).
The Plunger consists of a steel firing-pin (i), firmly fixed in a brass igniter plunger-spindle (h), and
this spindle fits in a brass igniter plunger-sleeve (g) which has a groove (t′) on its lower interior surface.
A split brass safety-ring (i), which holds the igniter plunger-sleeve in the safety position, is slipped over
the lower end of the spindle, and then the spindle-sleeve, containing two grooves (s and t), is slipped
on and firmly secured by spreading the lower end of the spindle.
The inclination of the groove (s) determines the resistance of the safety-ring, which, in this fuze, has
the minimum and maximum limits of 142 and 160 lbs. respectively. (It was formerly 15 lbs.)
When the piece is discharged the plunger-sleeve overcomes the resistance of the safety-ring and
carries it to the rear; the diameter of the ring is slightly increased during its passage along the spindle,
and when in the proper position for so doing it fits partly in both grooves (t and t′), binding sleeve and
spindle firmly together. The point of the firing-pin now projects beyond the plunger-sleeve and the fuze
is armed. When the projectile strikes, the complete plunger is thrown forward, the point of the firing-pin
pierces the restraining-disk and ignites the composition.
Fig. 47 shows the position of the parts before the piece is discharged, and Fig. 48 during the flight of
the projectile.
 RANGE TABLE FOR 3.2 INCH B. L. RIFLE.

Shrapnel, 13.5 pounds

Muzzle velocity, 1685 ft.-sec

Sight
Variations. Fuze Scale. Change Fal
Elevation.
in
Time of Variation Height
Range.
Differs Range, Deflection, Flight. Divisions at in of Burst,
1 minute Incl
Angle. from 1 minute 1 division which to cut range. Angle.
[5] elevation 1 ya
Shell. elevation. hor. scale. time-fuze. 1
subdiv.
yards. deg. min. min. yards. feet. seconds. units. sixths. yards. feet. deg. min. y
500 0 13 1 14 4.4 .97 0 4 80 .4 0 37
600 0 20 1 13 5.2 1.18 1 0 78 0 46
700 0 27 1 12 6.1 1.40 1 1 75 0 56
800 0 35 1 12 7.0 1.63 1 3 73 1 6
900 0 43 1 12 7.8 1.87 1 4 71 1 19
1000 0 52 1 11 8.7 2.11 2 0 67 .9 1 32
1100 1 2 2 11 9.6 2.36 2 1 67 1 45
1200 1 12 3 11 10.4 2.62 2 3 67 2 1
1300 1 22 3 10 11.3 2.89 2 5 62 2 17
1400 1 33 5 10 12.2 3.16 3 0 62 2 34
1500 1 44 6 9 13.0 3.44 3 2 58 1.3 2 52
1600 1 55 6 9 13.9 3.73 3 4 58 3 11
1700 2 7 7 9 14.8 4.02 3 5 58 3 30
1800 2 19 8 8 15.7 4.32 4 1 55 3 50
1900 2 32 9 8 16.5 4.62 4 3 55 4 12
2000 2 45 10 7 17.4 4.93 4 5 52 1.7 4 34
2100 2 59 11 7 18.3 5.25 5 1 52 4 57
2200 3 13 11 7 19.1 5.57 5 2 52 5 21
2300 3 28 12 7 20.0 5.90 5 4 50 5 45
2400 3 43 13 7 20.9 6.23 6 0 50 6 11
2500 3 58 14 6 21.7 6.56 6 2 49 2.2 6 38
2600 4 14 16 6 22.6 6.90 6 4 49 7 5
2700 4 29 17 6 23.5 7.24 7 0 49 7 34
2800 4 44 17 6 24.4 7.58 7 2 49 8 4
2900 5 1 19 6 25.2 7.92 7 4 49 8 35
3000 5 18 20 6 26.1 8.26 8 1 48 2.6 9 7
3100 5 35 21 6 27.0 8.61 8 3 48 9 39
3200 5 52 22 6 27.8 8.96 8 5 48 10 12
3300 6 9 23 5 28.7 9.32 9 1 47 10 46
3400 6 28 25 5 29.6 9.68 9 3 47 11 21
3500 6 47 26 5 30.5 10.04 9 5 45 3.0 11 56
3600 7 6 27 5 31.3 10.41 10 1 45 12 32
3700 7 25 28 5 32.2 10.78 10 4 45 13 9
3800 7 45 30 5 33.1 11.16 11 0 44 13 48
3900 8 5 32 5 33.9 11.54 11 2 44 14 28
4000 8 25 33 5 34.8 11.92 11 5 44 3.5 15 8
4100 8 44 33 5 35.7 12.30 12 1 44 15 49
4200 9 3 33 5 36.5 12.68 12 3 44 16 31
4300 9 24 34 5 37.4 13.06 12 5 43 17 14
4400 9 44 34 5 38.3 13.45 13 2 43 17 58
4500 10 5 34 5 39.2 13.84 18 4 43 3.9 18 43

RANGE TABLE FOR 3.2-INCH B. L. RIFLE.

Shell, 13.5 pounds

Jump: 20′ at 1°. 30′ at 10°
Muzzle velocity, 1685 ft.-sec

Variations. Fall.
Time of Terminal
Range. Site Elevation Range, Deflection, Flight.
Inclination Velocity.
1 minute 1 division Angle.
1 yard in--
elevation. hor. scale.
yards. degrees. minutes. yards. feet. seconds. deg. min. yards. f. s.
500 0 12 14 4.4 0.96 0 36 95 1450
600 0 19 13 5.2 1.17 0 45 76 1408
700 0 26 12 6.1 1.39 0 54 64 1366
800 0 34 12 7.0 1.61 1 5 53 1326
900 0 42 12 7.8 1.84 1 16 45 1287
1000 0 51 11 8.7 2.07 1 28 39 1250
1100 1 -- 11 9.6 2.32 1 41 34 1215
1200 1 9 11 10.4 2.57 1 55 30 1182
1300 1 18 10 11.3 2.82 2 9 27 1151
1400 1 28 10 12.2 3.09 2 25 24 1121
1500 1 38 10 13.0 3.36 2 41 21 1094
1600 1 49 10 13.9 3.64 2 59 19 1070
1700 2 -- 9 14.8 3.92 3 17 17 1048
1800 2 11 9 15.7 4.21 3 36 16 1029
1900 2 23 9 16.5 4.50 3 56 15 1011
2000 2 35 8 17.4 4.80 4 17 13 994
2100 2 48 8 18.3 5.10 4 38 12 979
2200 3 2 8 19.1 5.41 5 -- 11 964
2300 3 16 7 20.0 5.72 5 23 11 949
2400 3 30 7 20.9 6.04 5 47 10 935
2500 3 44 7 21.7 6.36 6 11 9 923
2600 3 58 7 22.6 6.69 6 37 9 912
2700 4 12 7 23.5 7.02 7 3 8 901
2800 4 27 7 24.4 7.35 7 30 8 891
2900 4 42 7 25.2 7.68 7 58 7 881
3000 4 58 6 26.1 8.01 8 27 7 871
3100 5 14 6 27.0 8.35 8 56 6 861
3200 5 30 6 27.8 8.69 9 26 6 851
3300 5 46 6 28.7 9.03 9 57 6 841
3400 6 3 6 29.6 9.37 10 29 5 832
3500 6 21 6 30.5 9.71 11 1 5 823
3600 6 39 6 31.3 10.06 11 34 5 814
3700 6 57 6 32.2 10.41 12 8 5 806
3800 7 15 5 33.1 10.77 12 43 4 798
3900 7 33 5 33.9 11.13 13 18 4 790
4000 7 52 5 34.8 11.50 13 54 4 782
4100 8 11 5 35.7 11.87 14 31 4 774
4200 8 30 5 36.5 12.25 15 9 4 766
4300 8 50 5 37.4 12.63 15 47 4 758
4400 9 10 5 38.3 13.02 16 26 3 750
4500 9 31 5 39.2 13.42 17 5 3 743
 CHAPTER III.
3.6-inch Rifle, etc. 3.6-inch Mortar, etc. Weights and Dimensions of Foreign Artillery.

3.6.-INCH B. L. RIFLE, MODEL 1891 (REVISED).

Material steel
Total length 7.79 feet
Calibre 3.6 inches
Weight 1181 pounds
Grooves 26
Twist of rifling 1 turn in 50 to
1 turn in 25 calibers
Axis of trunnions above ground 3.56 feet
Powder-chamber cylindrical
Vent axial
Preponderance 31 pounds
Muzzle velocity 1550 ft.-sec.
Maximum range for shrapnel 7420 yards

Fig. 49.
This gun is similar in construction to the 3.2-inch (revised November 11, 1892).
Nomenclature.—ab, locking-shoulder and recess; c, conical gas-check seat; d, cylindrical powder-
chamber; e, connecting slope for seat of rotary band; f, slope from no lands to maximum lands.

SIGHTS.

Similar to those of 3.2-inch gun.

AMMUNITION AND FUZES.

The ammunition differs only in weight and dimensions from that described for the 3.2-inch gun.
Fuzes are the same.
Powder-charge 4.1875 pounds U. F. sphero-hex.
Weight of shell, filled 20 pounds
Bursting-charge, shell 14½ ounces
Weight of shrapnel, complete 20 pounds
Bursting-charge, shrapnel 4 ounces
Total number of balls 218
 Total number of individual pieces 280

CARRIAGES, LIMBERS, CAISSONS, COMBINED BATTERY-WAGON AND FORGE, ARTILLERY-WAGON.

The carriage for this gun weighs 1300 pounds. The first 25 carriages were made with the double-
screw elevating device, and the second 25 with the first form of lazy-tongs, and were intended for the
3.2-inch gun. They have been changed for 3.6-inch guns by cutting out the upper-front transom under
the trunnion beds leaving only enough metal on each side to hold the eyebolts of the forked radial bar
for the elevating device, and cap squares with eyebolts have been substituted for the old cap squares
with chin and eyebolts. The double-screw elevating device on the 25 carriages now having them are
retained; but all others will have a form of lazy-tongs, operated by bevel gears and a crank handle at
the side, like that of the double screw; otherwise the carriage is similar to that of the 3.2-inch gun
already described. The limber-chests will probably be fitted for 36 rounds of ammunition; which is the
only difference between limbers, caissons, etc., used with 3.2-inch and 3.6-inch guns.

HARNESS, ETC.

See page 150 et seq.

3.6-INCH B. L. RIFLE.

Shrapnel, 20 lbs
Muzzle velocity, 1550 ft.-sec
c=1.03
Log C=.17559

Elevation. Fuze-scale. Change

Deflection,
Range, Time in Height
1 Division Variations of Burst,
Range. Differs 1 minute Horizontal of
in Range, 1 Minute
Angle. from elevation. Scale. Flight. Divisions.
1 Sub- Elevation.
Shell.
div.
Yards. Degrees. Minutes. Minutes. Yards. Feet. Seconds. Units. Sixths. Yards. Feet. D
500 18 0 12 4.4 1.04 1 5 75 .4
600 26 0 12 5.2 1.27 1 1 73
700 34 1 11 6.1 1.50 1 2 71
800 44 1 10 7.0 1.74 1 4 68
900 54 2 10 7.8 1.98 1 5 67
1000 1 04 3 10 8.7 2.24 2 0 65 .9
1100 1 14 3 9 9.6 2.50 2 2 64
1200 1 24 2 9 10.4 2.76 2 4 62
1300 1 34 2 8 11.3 3.03 2 5 60
1400 1 46 3 8 12.2 3.31 3 1 59
1500 1 58 4 8 13.0 3.60 3 3 58 1.3
1600 2 10 4 8 13.9 3.88 3 4 57
1700 2 22 4 8 14.8 4.17 4 0 56
1800 2 36 7 7 15.7 4.45 4 2 55
1900 2 49 7 7 16.5 4.76 4 3 55
 2000 3 03 8 7 17.4 5.06 4 5 54 1.7
2100 3 16 9 7 18.3 5.38 5 1 53
2200 3 31 10 7 19.1 5.69 5 3 52
2300 3 46 10 7 20.0 6.00 5 5 52
2400 4 01 10 7 20.9 6.31 6 0 51
2500 4 16 11 6 21.7 6.63 6 2 50 2.3
2600 4 32 12 6 22.6 6.96 6 4 50
2700 4 49 13 6 23.5 7.28 7 0 49
2800 5 06 14 6 24.4 7.61 7 2 48
2900 5 24 16 6 25.2 7.95 7 4 48
3000 5 41 16 6 26.1 8.28 8 0 48 2.6
3100 5 59 17 6 27.0 8.62 8 2 47
3200 6 18 19 5 27.8 8.97 8 4 47
3300 6 37 20 5 28.7 9.31 9 1 46
3400 6 56 21 5 29.6 9.64 9 3 45
3500 7 16 22 5 30.5 9.98 9 5 44 3.0
3600 7 37 24 5 31.3 10.31 10 1 44
3700 7 58 26 5 32.2 10.69 10 3 44
3800 8 19 27 5 33.1 11.04 10 5 43
3900 8 41 28 4 33.9 11.35 11 1 43
4000 9 02 29 4 34.8 11.70 11 3 42 3.6
4100 9 24 30 4 35.7 12.08 11 5 42
4200 9 46 32 4 36.5 12 42 12 1 41
4300 10 10 34 4 37.4 12.81 12 3 41
4400 10 33 37 4 38.3 13.16 13 0 41
4500 10 58 41 4 39.2 13.57 13 2 40 4.0

RANGE TABLE FOR 3.6-INCH B. L. R.

Shell, 20 lbs
Muzzle velocity, 1550 ft. sec
c =.93
Bursting-charge, 14½ oz
Log C =.21996

Variations. Fall.
Deflection, Time Terminal
Range. Elevation. Range, of
1 Division Inclination Velocity.
1 Minute Angle.
on Horizontal Flight. 1 Yard in--
Elevation.
Scale
Yards. ° ′#8242; Yards. Feet. Sec. ° ′ Yards. Ft.-sec.
500 18 12 4.4 1.08 41 84 1364
600 26 11 5.2 1.25 51 67 1329
700 35 11 6.1 1.48 1 02 55 1296
800 43 11 7.0 1.72 1 13 47 1263
900 52 10 7.8 1.96 1 25 40 1233
1000 1 01 9 8.7 2.20 1 38 35 1203
1100 1 11 9 9.6 2.45 1 52 31 1175
1200 1 22 9 10.4 2.70 2 06 27 1149
1300 1 32 9 11.3 2.96 2 21 24 1123
1400 1 43 8 12.2 3.24 2 37 22 1098
1500 1 54 8 13.0 3.52 2 53 20 1079
1600 2 06 8 13.9 3.80 3 11 18 1060
1700 2 18 8 14.8 4.08 3 29 16 1042
1800 2 29 8 15.7 4.37 3 48 15 1026
1900 2 42 8 16.5 4.66 4 07 14 1011
2000 2 55 7 17.4 4.96 4 27 13 997
2100 3 07 7 18.3 5.26 4 48 12 984
2200 3 21 7 19.1 5.56 5 09 11 971
2300 3 36 7 20.0 5.87 5 30 10 959
2400 3 51 7 20.9 6.18 5 52 9.5 947
2500 4 05 6 21.7 6.49 6 15 9 935
2600 4 20 6 22.6 6.80 6 38 8.5 924
2700 4 36 6 23.5 7.11 7 02 8 913
2800 4 52 6 24.4 7.43 7 27 7.5 903
2900 5 08 6 25.2 7.75 7 53 7 892
3000 5 25 6 26.1 8.08 8 20 7 882
3100 5 42 6 27.0 8.40 8 47 6.5 872
3200 5 59 6 27.8 8.72 9 15 6 863
3300 6 17 6 28.7 9.05 9 44 6 854
3400 6 35 5 29.6 9.38 10 13 5.5 845
3500 6 54 5 30.5 9.72 10 43 5 836
3600 7 13 5 31.3 10.06 11 14 5 827
3700 7 32 5 32.2 10.40 11 45 5 819
3800 7 52 5 33.1 10.74 12 16 4.5 811
3900 8 13 5 33.9 11.08 12 47 4.5 803
4000 8 33 5 34.8 11.42 13 25 4 796
4100 8 54 5 35.7 11.77 14 01 4 788
4200 9 14 5 36.5 12.11 14 37 4 781
4300 9 36 5 37.4 12.44 15 13 3.5 774
4400 9 56 5 38.3 12.76 15 50 3.5 768
4500 10 17 5 39.2 13.08 16 27 3 762

3.6-INCH B L FIELD-MORTAR, MODEL 1890. (REVISED NOV. 11, 1892.)

 Fig. 50.
Metal steel
Total length 2.05 feet
Calibre 3.6 inches
Weight 245 pounds
Grooves 20
Twist of rifling 1 in 40 to
1 in 25 cal.
Powder-chamber cylindrical
Vent axial
Muzzle velocity 650 ft.-sec.
Maximum range 3450 yards
It consists of a single piece of steel, the trunnions being forged solid with the piece.

Fig. 51.
The breech mechanism, Fig. 51, is generally similar to that of the field-guns, except that the Freyre
obturator is used, and in the locking arrangement the lever-handle is replaced by a bolt (a) which is
turned by hand. This bolt operates the locking-stud on the left side of the block, and its handle bears
also a vent-shield (f,) which keeps the vent closed until the breech is locked.

THE CARRIAGE FOR 3.6-INCH B. L. MORTAR.

Fig. 52.
This carriage, Fig. 52, is of cast steel and in one piece, and consists of a frame complete with
transoms and soles.
It is 39½ inches long and weighs 275 pounds. The axis of the trunnions is 14 inches above ground,
and the piece can be fired at any angle between 0 and 60 degrees. At the centre of the front transom is
bolted the elevating-clamp, which embraces an arc bolted to the under side of the mortar. The lever on
the left side of the carriage turns a shaft, which causes the clamp to take hold of the arc when the
elevation has been given.
A pintle-fork is attached at the front end of the carriage, and a ring on the side of either cheek to
which the ends of the restraining rope are fastened.
Nomenclature of 3.6-inch Mortar-carriage.—Carriage-frame; elevating-arc; elevating-arc bolt; elevating-
arc guide-pin; double hook; double-hook pin; double-hook bracket; double-hook bracket-pin; cap-
square; cap-square keys; cap-square chain eye-pin; pintle-fork; pintle-fork bolt; elevating-arc jaws;
shaft for jaws; lever for shaft; bushing for shaft; nut for shaft; screw for bushing; separator; separator-
bolt and nut; screws for pointing.

PLATFORM FOR 3.6 MORTAR.

Yellow pine or oak. Weight complete, 200 lbs.

 Fig. 53.
This equipment consists of one wooden platform, one cast-iron pintle-block, eight stakes, one
anchor-stake, two handspikes, and one pointing-scale. The platform consists of two side-rails, 3-inch,
into which are framed and bolted eleven deck-planks, the latter secured to each other by dowels. A 4 ×
3-inch piece is bolted to the rear deck-plank by three bolts. Wrought-iron straps, bolted into cross-
pieces, embrace the side-rails. The pintle-block is fastened to the front of the platform by four wrought-
iron bolts. The pintle-fork on the carriage embraces the pintle, forming the centre of motion of the
traversing carriage. The platform is held in position by stakes, two on either side; those in front passing
through square wrought-iron rings attached to eye-pieces bolted to the front end of the platform. A
brass socket, in which works the brass pivot at the end of the pointing-scale, is placed at a suitable
point in the axis of the platform. The anchor-stake, 4 ft. long, is driven in front of the platform. Around
the anchor-stake, and held in position by the two pins passing through the stake, is wound the middle
portion of the restraining rope, the ends of which fasten to the rings in the cheeks of the carriage.
The rope is given five feet slack for recoil.

Fig. 54.
 The Pointing-scale.—This is made of hard wood, graduated on one side, the unit of the scale being
one thousandth of the range, and each division one five hundredth of the range. A brass index-slide
moves with friction along the scale and is clamped by a screw when regulated. For reference-marks a
brass screw is placed at the end of each cheek of the carriage, and the scale is so arranged that it can
be applied to either cheek. The carriage admits of a motion around its pintle of about 15° on either side
of the axis of the platform.

THE GUNNER'S QUADRANT.

Fig. 55.
Used in giving elevation. The arc is 45°, but by applying different sides an elevation of 90° can be
given. The least reading is one minute, which is given by the setting of a sliding level on a slightly
curved arm.
The setting to any given degree is made by moving the arm by hand, which is done by pressing back
the head of the arm to release it from engagement with the notches on the interior of the arc, then
moving the arm to the required position and allowing the spring to react.

AMMUNITION.

The full charge of powder is 16 ounces, sphero-hex. (U. F.). The projectiles are those used with the
3.6 gun and have already been described.
The charges, required to cover all ranges from 400 to 3350 yards with angles of elevation between
15 and 45 degrees, are four in number. These charges are made up of three cartridges containing 4, 6,
10, and 16 ounces respectively.
The Fuze for Shrapnel is the Frankford Arsenal point-combination fuze, model 1894, burning 28
seconds and weighing 19.75 ounces. The time-train of this fuze is arranged to be cut at intervals of 1/5
second.
 The Fuze for Shell is fuze M, model 1894. It is identical in construction with fuze C (see page 102),
except that a portion of the plunger-spindle is reduced in diameter to lessen the friction of the spring-
ring in arming on account of reduced charges. It is distinguished from the C fuze by two grooves across
the flat of the base. This fuze is designated for separate transportation, to be assembled with the
projectile at or near the firing-ground, and is not to be transported fixed in the projectile.

RANGE TABLE FOR 3.6-INCH B. L. MORTAR.

Common Shell (Cast Iron)

Shell, filled and fuzed, 20 lbs
Bursting-charge, 14.5 oz

Charge and Time Fall.

Terminal
Initial Range. Elevation. of Inclination, Velocity.
Velocity. Flight. Angle.
1 Ft. in--
Yards. Deg. Min. Sec. Deg. Min. Feet. Ft.-sec.
400 15 27 4.76 16 00 3.5 266.5
4 ounces; 500 20 04 5.92 21 06 2.6 264.3
277.5 ft.-sec. 600 25 44 7.45 27 06 2.0 262.3
700 33 25 9.43 34 59 1.4 259.5
750 45 00 12.00 46 40 0.9 266.5
Angles > 45°. 700 55 08 13.91 56 52 0.6 271.2
600 14 04 5.36 14 47 3.7 336.0
700 16 48 6.38 17 48 3.1 332.9
800 19 48 7.45 20 56 2.6 329.7
6 ounces; 8.63
900 23 10 24 37 2.2 327.0
357.5 ft.-sec.
1000 27 16 10.00 29 05 1.8 325.0
1100 32 27 11.67 34 42 1.4 322.9
1200 45 00 15.32 47 48 0.9 324.9
1100 56 13 17.97 58 55 0.6 329.8
Angles > 45°
1000 61 20 18.96 63 50 0.5 331.5
1100 14 10 7.32 15 17 3.7 439.4
1200 15 45 8.10 17 06 3.3 435.0
1300 17 24 8.91 19 02 2.9 430.7
1400 19 07 9.74 21 02 2.6 427.2
1500 20 59 10.63 23 14 2.3 424.1
10 ounces; 11.57
1600 23 00 25 32 2.2 420.8
492.0 ft.-sec.
1700 25 13 12.59 28 07 1.9 418.0
1800 27 44 13.72 31 01 1.7 415.5
1900 30 46 15.03 34 31 1.5 413.3
2000 34 41 16.67 38 58 1.2 412.5
2100 45 00 20.63 49 52 0.8 417.6
Angles > 45° 2000 52 52 23.16 57 41 0.6 423.8
1900 56 45 24.29 61 22 0.5 427.7
 1800 59 50 25.11 64 10 0.5 431.0
2000 15 29 10.53 17 44 3.1 537.9
2100 16 30 11.18 19 02 2.9 532.9
2200 17 33 11.85 20 21 2.7 528.4
2300 18 39 12.54 21 44 2.5 524.3
2400 19 49 13.26 23 14 2.3 519.8
2500 21 02 14.00 24 46 2.2 516.1
2600 22 19 14.78 26 22 2.0 512.9
16 ounces; 15.61
2700 23 43 28 11 1.9 509.4
660.0 ft.-sec.
2800 25 12 16.49 30 02 1.7 506.2
2900 26 49 17.42 32 08 1.6 503.8
3000 28 38 18.45 34 18 1.5 501.7
3100 30 38 19.60 36 49 1.3 500.2
3200 33 21 21.02 40 00 1.2 499.2
3300 36 43 22.78 43 51 1.0 501.0
3363 45 00 26.75 52 42 0.8 510.4
3300 48 59 28.47 56 43 0.7 516.2
3200 52 40 29.99 60 10 0.6 523.3
Angles > 45° 3100 55 22 31.01 62 35 0.5 529.1
3000 57 25 31.73 64 24 0.5 532.6
2900 59 19 32.37 66 34 0.4 547.7

RANGE TABLE FOR 3.6-INCH B. L. MORTAR.

Shrapnel, filled and fuzed, 20 lbs

Bursting-charge, 4 oz
Number of balls, 218
Weight of each ball, 171 grains

Charge Fuze-scale. Fall.

Time
and Variations Terminal
Range. Elevation. of Inclination, Velocity.
Initial Divisions. in Burst, Angle.
Flight. 1 Foot in--
Velocity. 1 Sub-div.
Yards. ° ′ Sec. Units 5ths Yards. ° ′#8242; Feet. Ft.-sec.
400 15 29 4.76 4 2 18 16 06 3.5 265.2
4 ounces; 5.95 5 4
500 20 21 17 21 10 2.6 262.4
277.5 ft.-sec.
600 26 03 7.50 7 1 17 27 15 2.0 260.3
700 34 27 9.61 9 1 17 36 01 1.4 258.3
6 ounces; 600 14 08 5.38 5 1 22 14 55 3.8 333.8
357.5 ft.-sec. 700 17 01 6.41 6 1 22 17 57 3.1 330.0
800 20 08 7.52 7 2 22 21 20 2.6 326.9
900 23 34 8.73 8 3 22 25 09 2.1 324.4
1000 27 34 10.07 9 4 21 29 35 1.8 322.2
1100 33 01 11.82 11 3 21 35 30 1.4 320.1
 1000 12 43 6.62 6 2 29 13 49 4.1 439.0
1100 14 19 7.38 7 1 29 15 36 3.6 434.0
1200 15 56 8.17 8 0 29 17 26 3.2 429.0
1300 17 36 8.99 8 4 28 19 23 2.8 425.1
1400 19 23 9.85 9 3 28 21 23 2.5 421.2
10 ounces;
1500 21 19 10.75 10 3 28 23 46 2.3 417.5
492.0 ft.-sec.
1600 23 26 11.72 11 3 28 26 16 2.0 414.0
1700 25 47 12.77 12 3 27 29 02 1.8 410.8
1800 28 26 13.92 13 4 27 32 08 1.6 407.8
1900 31 41 15.36 15 1 27 35 53 1.4 405.0
2000 36 12 17.22 17 0 27 41 00 1.2 401.3
1900 14 45 10.02 9 4 35 17 01 3.6 532.2
2000 15 46 10.68 10 2 35 18 20 3.2 526.3
2100 16 49 11.35 11 1 35 19 42 2.8 521.2
2200 17 55 12.04 11 4 34 21 07 2.6 516.5
2300 19 05 12.75 12 3 34 22 37 2.4 512.3
2400 20 19 13.50 13 2 34 24 12 2.2 507.4
2500 21 37 14.28 14 0 34 25 52 2.1 503.7
16 ounces;
2600 23 00 15.11 15 0 33 27 38 1.9 500.1
660.0 ft.-sec.
2700 24 29 16.00 15 4 33 29 33 1.8 496.7
2800 26 07 16.94 16 4 33 31 38 1.6 493.6
2900 27 58 17.96 17 4 33 33 58 1.5 491.0
3000 30 05 19.12 19 0 33 36 36 1.3 488.9
3100 32 33 20.46 20 1 33 39 36 1.2 488.1
3200 35 41 22.10 22 0 33 43 18 1.1 487.6
3376 45 00 26.54 26 2 33 53 22 0.7 500.3

FOREIGN FIELD-ARTILLERY.

GERMANY.

There is practically only one gun, viz., the 3.46-inch. The horse-artillery gun, carriage, and limber, are
all lighter than in the field-artillery. Model 1891 weighs 970 lbs. The weights behind the teams are: H. A.
gun, 3996 lbs.; F. A. gun, 4276 lbs.; caisson, 5036 lbs. No cannoneers are carried on the carriages in
horse-artillery. Muzzle velocity, 1400 ft.-sec.
The Common Shell weighs 15½ lbs. (bursting-charge, 6 oz.), and splinters into about 170 pieces. A
proportion of the shells are filled with wet guncotton, having a dry guncotton primer, to be used, as a
rule, against men under cover.
The Shrapnel contains 262 bullets with bursting-charge down the centre, weighs 17.7 lbs., and can
be burst up to 3500 yards range. The number of rounds carried per gun in a battery is 135. The
percussion-shell has been abandoned, and shrapnel, high explosive shell, and canister only are used.
The fuze is a combination time, and percussion-fuze.
There are 20 carriages in a battery—6 guns, 9 caissons, 4 store-wagons, 1 forge-wagon. A battery
carries 9 shovels and 2 pickaxes.
 FRANCE.

The Horse-artillery Gun.—Calibre, 3.14 in.; weight, 8.4 cwt.; muzzle velocity, 1600 ft.-sec.;
shrapnel with 2-oz. bursting-charge in head, 13.8 lbs. Weights behind the teams, including men carried:
gun, 4251 lbs.; caisson, 4424 lbs.
The ammunition per gun with battery is 142 rounds.
The Field-artillery Gun.—Calibre, 3.54 in.; weight, 8.4 cwt.; muzzle velocity, 1500 ft.-sec.; shrapnel
with bursting-charge in head, 19 lbs. Weights behind teams, including the men carried: gun, 5248 lbs.;
caisson, 5404 lbs.
There are 142 rounds of ammunition per gun with battery.
A steel shell filled with 3 lbs. of cresylite is contemplated, of which about 75 will be carried with the
battery.
There are 6 guns, 9 caissons, 1 store, 1 forge, and 1 forge-wagon in a battery.
The field-artillery gun now being introduced has a calibre of 2.95 inches, and fires a projectile
weighing in the vicinity of 12 pounds.

AUSTRIA.

The Horse-artillery Gun.—Calibre, 3.14 in.; weight, 5.9 cwt.; muzzle velocity, 1365 ft.-sec.; ring-
shell, 9½ lbs.; shrapnel, 10.27 lbs. Weights behind the teams: gun, 3440 lbs.; caisson, 4287 lbs.
No detachments are carried on the carriages.
Ammunition carried per gun with battery: ring-shell, 84; shrapnel, 54; canister, 8; incendiary shell, 6;
a total of 152 rounds.
There are 18 carriages in a battery, 6 guns.
The Field-artillery Gun.—Calibre, 3.54 in.; weight, 9.5 cwt., muzzle velocity, 1440 ft.-sec.; ring-
shell, 14.1 lbs.; shrapnel, 15.6 lbs. Weights behind the teams: gun, 5040 lbs.; caisson, 4124 lbs.
Ammunition per gun with battery: ring-shell, 70; shrapnel, 45; canister, 8; incendiary shell, 5; total,
128.
There are 22 carriages in a battery, 8 guns.

RUSSIA.

The Horse-artillery Gun.—Calibre, 3.4 in.; weight, 7 cwt.; muzzle velocity, 1350 ft.-sec.; common
shell, 14 lbs.; shrapnel with bursting-charge in base, 15 lbs. Weights behind the teams: gun, 3635 lbs.;
caisson, 3543 lbs. No cannoneers on carriages.
Ammunition per gun with battery: common shell, 61; shrapnel, 60; canister, 9; total, 130 rounds.
The Light Field-artillery Gun.—Calibre, 3.4 in.; weight, 8.6 cwt.; muzzle velocity, 1450 ft.-sec.;
common shell, 14 lbs.; shrapnel with bursting-charge in base, 15 lbs. Weights behind the teams same
as in horse-artillery.
Ammunition per gun with battery, 150 rounds.
The Heavy Field-artillery Gun.—Calibre, 4.2 in.; weight, 12 cwt.; muzzle velocity, 1223 ft.-sec.;
common shell, 25.9 lbs.; shrapnel, 27.5 lbs. Weights behind the teams, including detachments: gun,
4268 lbs.; caisson, 4686.
Ammunition per gun with battery, 108 rounds.
Horse-batteries consist of 6 guns, field-batteries generally of 8 guns, 24 carriages to each battery of
6 guns. Russia has 5 regiments, 4 batteries each, of field-mortar batteries. Calibre of piece, 6 in.;
weight of shell, 60 lbs. Each battery consists of 6 mortars, 18 carriages, and 6 carts.
 ITALY.

Horse-and Light Field-artillery Gun.—Calibre, 2.75 in.; weight, 5.8 cwt.; muzzle velocity, 1400
ft.-sec.; common shell, 9.4 lbs.; shrapnel with bursting-charge in base, 9.8 lbs. Weights behind the
teams: gun, 3498 lbs.; caisson, 3650 lbs. No detachments are carried.
Ammunition per gun with battery: common shell, 24; shrapnel, 112; canister, 6; total, 142 rounds.
Heavy Field-artillery Gun.—Calibre, 3.5 in.; weight, 9.2 cwt.; muzzle velocity, 1480 ft.-sec.;
common shell, 14.7 lbs.; shrapnel, 15.3 lbs. Weights behind the teams, including detachments carried:
gun, 4268 lbs.; caisson, 4686 lbs.
Ammunition per gun with battery: common shell, 28; shrapnel, 96; canister, 6; total, 130 rounds.
All batteries have 6 guns and 15 carriages, viz., 6 gun-carriages, 6 caissons, 1 forge, 1 baggage-
wagon, 1 forage-wagon.

GREAT BRITAIN.

The 9-pdr. and 13-pdr. M. L. Guns.—Horse and light artillery are being replaced by the 12-pdr. B.
L., the weight behind teams of horse-artillery being a little less than that of field-artillery.
Calibre of 12-pdr. B. L., 3.0 in.; weight of piece, 784 lbs.; muzzle velocity, 1710 ft.-sec.; common shell
and shrapnel, 12½ lbs. Weight behind teams: guns, 3684 lbs.; caissons, 3796 lbs.
Ammunition per gun with battery: common shell, 20; shrapnel, 80; canister, 8; total, 108. Besides
these there are 2 star-shell per gun. All batteries have 6 guns and 19 carriages all told.
 CHAPTER IV.
Wheel. Carriage. Limber. Caisson. Battery-wagon and Forge. Artillery-wagon. Harness.
Water-cart. Revolvers. Hunting-knife.

THE ARCHIBALD WHEEL.

Diameter 57¾ inches.

Width of tire 2¾ "
Weight of wheel 200 lbs.
The nave-box (a) is made of aluminum-bronze. It fits over the axle-arm
(c) and has groove for lubricant, as indicated.
The nave (b) of malleable iron.
The spokes, 16 in number (s), are made of oak or hickory.
 Fig. 56.
The felloes, 8 in number, are made of oak or hickory.
The tire is made of steel, ½ inch thick.
The bolts, clips, linch-pins, and washers are made of metal.
The large nut on outside of nave-box is splined to the box. The linch-
washers have a stud which prevents their turning with the wheel. The inner
extremities of the spokes are put together by a powerful radial pressure,
which subjects them to a stress many times greater than they are likely to
receive.
To Replace a Box and that Portion of the Hub Attached.—Unscrew
and remove front hub-band; take off hub-nuts, and drive out old box.
Replace box, and screw on the front hub-band, replacing hub-nuts.
To Replace a Spoke.—Remove tire and felloe on the injured spoke; take
out only the bolt that passes through the injured spoke; saw off this spoke
as close as possible to the hub and bore or dig out the spoke; drive in the
duplicate spoke as far as possible, and arrange the tenon at the felloe so
that the tire may press the spoke about one eighth of an inch farther into
the hub, and after the tire is on put in the hub-bolt.

THE 3.2-INCH FIELD-GUN CARRIAGE.

NOMENCLATURE.

Wheel (1) consisting of tire; felloes; spokes; nave-box; nave-box flanges;

nave-bolts and nuts.
Linch-pins (5); linch-washers (5); axle (6); shoulder-washers (7); brake-
eyes and straps (8); axle-plates (9); flasks (10); upper front transom (11);
lower front transom (12); middle transom (13); trail-box transoms (14); rear
transom (15); lunette (16); lunette-plate (16); trail-plate (16); trail-handles
(17); cap-squares (18); chin-bolt (19); eye-bolt (20); eye-bolt key (20); eye-
bolt key-chain (20); trail-box (21); trail-box lid (21); trail-box lid-hasp (21);
trail-box turnbuckle (21); sponge-bucket compartment (22); wheel-guard
(23); handspike attachments, front and rear (24); handspike-socket (24);
handspike socket-pin and key (24); handspike (24); handspike-clasps (24);
long sponge-toggle and plate (25); short rammer and sponge attachment
(26); short rammer and sponge-clasps (26); short rammer and sponge-clasp
locking-catches (26); sponge-bucket toggle-hole (27).
Fig. 57.

Fig. 58.
 Axle-seats (3), consisting of seat-plate, guard-rail, guard-rail standard,
guard-rail catch, guard-rail hinge-pin, guard-rail locking-latch.
Bow-brake (2), Fig. 59, consisting of shoe-piece (a), bow-springs (4)
(b), bow-spring nuts and bolts (4) (c), attachment-socket (d), and the
attachment consisting of clevis (e), clevis-bolt and nut (f), locking-lever (g),
locking-bolt and nut (h).

Fig. 59.
The attachment-socket has a rectangular longitudinal mortice in which the
tang of the clevis is placed. This tang has a slot, the lower part of which
ends in a hole having the same diameter as the locking-bolt. The locking-bolt
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