The Smirking Revenant: Bury Me Dead as Screwball Comedy
Detours, episode 13
The Smirking Revenant: Bury Me Dead as Screwball Noir
Stephen Broomer, November 15, 2024
In “Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir,” Raymond Durgnat argues that film noir is not a genre but a style that exists at the centre of overlapping themes. This approach makes other genres susceptible to a noir influence: the gothic mystery, the horror movie, the romantic drama, all of these genres are present in the classic period of noir, a continuum they share with the gritty urban thrillers and detective stories that foreground the style. The world-weary voice of noir could modulate through these genres. The severity of noir, the deathly serious threats and warnings of hardboiled dialogue, the spectres of death and taboo desires that run through the style are vulnerable to parody. The adaptability of that hardboiled tone made it capable of absorbing, or being lampooned by, the light, fast-talkin’ escapism of the screwball comedy, a style that preceded it in the Hollywood dream factory.
In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses the 1947 Bernard Vorhaus noir-comedy Bury Me Dead in relation to the overlapping tropes of the screwball comedy and the film noir, a comparison that underscores the parallels and divergences of the genres.
SCRIPT:
In “Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir,” Raymond Durgnat argues that film noir is not a genre but a style that exists at the centre of overlapping themes. This approach makes other genres susceptible to a noir influence: the gothic mystery, the horror movie, the romantic drama, all of these genres are present in the classic period of noir, a continuum they share with the gritty urban thrillers and detective stories that foreground the style. The world-weary voice of noir could modulate through these genres. The severity of noir, the deathly serious threats and warnings of hardboiled dialogue, the spectres of death and taboo desires that run through the style are vulnerable to parody. The adaptability of that hardboiled tone made it capable of absorbing, or being lampooned by, the light, fast-talkin’ escapism of the screwball comedy, a style that preceded it in the Hollywood dream factory.
Barbara Carlin, a living revenant, observes her own funeral. She stands veiled and at a distance from the scene, but as she narrates, the camera gazes up from the grave itself, panning at that low angle to capture a rogue’s gallery of suspects. The narrator’s ghostly act of witness will soon be resolved: despite the mordant disguise and haunted narration, she is not the undead, but the intended victim of an attempted murder. The body in the grave is not hers, but one that was mistaken for her own, and she intends to expose her would-be assailant, and, if only incidentally, to identify and avenge her double. She will explore her relationships with the central figures in her life over the course of her story: impetuous sister Rusty; estranged husband Rod; casanova prizefighter George, her devoted servants. She elects to trust family lawyer Michael Dunn with the news of her return and he becomes her confidante and partner in uncovering the identity of the killer. In a series of flashbacks, femme fatale Helen Lawrence is introduced: it is she who has been buried in Barbara Carlin’s place. An evolving flashback structure leaps from person to person: the recollections of the central characters, eavesdropping servants, and revelations of the dead woman’s own schemes, are told by a motley crew of witnesses. Bury Me Dead is a curious variation on established themes of film noir: it deals with the veil between life and death; it is about doubles and criminal schemes and mistaken identity; it is a mystery cloaked in shadows full of bruised relationships, broken trust and unstable personalities.
Bury Me Dead mixes light comedy, intrigue, moody set pieces, and an ominous, haunted tone. That tone is often contradicted by an insistent, talky wit of the kind that defined 1930s screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey and Bringing Up Baby. Bury Me Dead is a film of shifting modalities. Screwball exchanges, comic threats, fainting punchlines, all keep company with a series of broken-hearted exchanges, the shattered and seemingly irreparable relationships of the estranged sisters, the various lovers and spouses caught in this web of interpersonal cruelties and accusations. The schemes of this narrative, which revolve around theft and murder and infidelity, are often grave in treatment, offered in moodily lit rooms and intently whispered suggestions. The flashbacks give the film a melodramatic structure to establish the love affairs and jealousies of the ruling class. Like Otto Preminger’s Laura, Bury Me Dead is a film about the boundaries between the living and the dead. Barbara Carlin is alive, but her tour of the suspects is like the visitation of a ghost to their survivors. Some of her suspects react with rage, others with pleased surprise. The comic tone of the film’s snappy dialogue and pratfalls overshadows this grim thread, for Barbara Carlin is a witty commentator, and the world that she occupies is somewhere between the shadow-drenched streets of film noir and the elastic, resilient world of the screwball comedy.
Wes D. Gehring argues that the screwball comedy represents a reversal of the gender roles of noir: of the eccentric characters that populate the screwball comedy, the women are often empowered and clever, as they hunt hapless, dim-witted men; the screwball comedy allows women to be playfully predatory and its outcomes tend to be happy ones. By comparison, the world of noir is often a world of male violence, imposed on or inspired by women, and when women exercise agency in that world, it is often the scheming, violent agency of the femme fatale—a picture of womanhood that suits a world of violent, macho competition. Gehring points to the shared tropes of the screwball comedy and the film noir, that both feature “manipulative women, moldable men, suppressed sexuality, an anti-heroic worldview.” He goes on to note their overlapping eras as further evidence of the peer exchange of these genres, that they arise from the same conditions, pushing in opposite directions: in the face of the Great Depression, the screwball comedy tends towards optimism; under the clouds of the Second World War, the film noir tends towards pessimism. Further to this, Thomas Renzi has argued that the caustic wit of the screwball comedy is a gentler manifestation of the despondent cynicism of film noir. Both the screwball comedy and the film noir often trade in the ironies of American life—where freedom is expensive, where individualism is always at odds with social judgment, where the buffoonery of the ruling class so often reveals that nobody is behind the wheel, that the emperor has no clothes.
Bury Me Dead begins suddenly, in media res, a barn ablaze, spectators sorting out that Barbara Carlin must be burning inside. In both visual style and dramatic tone it is far from comic: the barn is seen collapsing from outside and from within, and once Carlin’s estranged husband Rod collects himself, vulturous paparazzi are already on hand to take his picture. Even as the film takes a lighter tone in the next scene, as Carlin directs her hired driver to her own funeral, it has begun in the shadows. Those shadows are under the direction of legendary cinematographer John Alton, whose work grew to be strongly affiliated with film noir. Alton’s work here drifts between high-key screwball set pieces, and the murky, moody interiors of the revenant’s investigation. Alton casts intense and unnatural proliferations of shadows, as demonstrated in this scene, in which Rusty confesses to her manipulation of Rod, the figures moving through the room from an area of even, high-key lighting to the moodier foreground. Along the way they traipse through stylized multidirectional shadows. A scene of similar contrast finds Carlin, Rod and lawyer Michael observing from a darkened room the arrival of the prizefighter through Venetian blinds that shred the figures in a style that would become a cliché of noir: what they observe through those blinds are the high-key, unromantic, utilitarian arrival of a character at a location in bright daylight. From flashback to present tense, from scene to scene, the stylistic shifts allow the bright and resilient world of screwball to dominate, for the staging of suspicion and paranoia happens within a framework of pleasure and joy.
There is a stylistic transformation in the film’s final act in which the romantic shadows of noir emerge to dominate the screwball elements. And it begins with this shot, in which deep focus makes the corners of a vast room threatening, with doorframes and windows shadow-drenched, all seen in the reflection of Barbara Carlin’s vanity. Soon the lights will go out, and though they’ll come back on, this marks the beginning of the film’s climax. The noir style takes hold for this final act, but not without digressions. Barbara Carlin is stalked through her darkened manse by lawyer Michael Dunn, revealed to be the killer, and the tension of their confrontation is interrupted repeatedly by scenes of the police and a comically frustrated Rod slowly preparing a rescue. The diabolical evil of Michael Dunn—staging accidents, suicides, fires—is done away with, as he’s shot by police and the scene lights up, giving way to a grand reunion, in this case, a sweetly comic reconciliation of the family. All shadows are brushed away in the happy ending of the screwball comedy.
