One of them, “This Gun for Hire,” was the 1942 black-and-white crime drama that propelled the svelte actress to stardom. It’s screening this weekend as part of the annual two-day Noir November series at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier.
Everything else seems to be in dispute, despite the precise details of her death certificate. She had collapsed while visiting friends in Stowe, but it could have been the Adirondacks, or flew north from the Bahamas. Some accounts contend that Lake was admitted to what is now Fletcher Allen Health Care; others put her in Colchester’s Fanny Allen Hospital.
A fourth, and far grimmer, story indicates Lake’s body was smuggled over the border from Quebec by her lover, the cigar-smoking editor of a publication called The Police Gazette. (Right out of central casting, eh?) He reportedly told customs officials she was just sleeping.
In that scenario, the poor woman wound up in Montpelier. This post-mortem relocation was due to a reputed deathbed request that the public not learn her last breath had been drawn in Montreal, which then suffered from a reputation as Sin City.
Noir genre
Sin is rampant in “This Gun for Hire,” in which Lake portrays a nice girl rather than a seductress who nonetheless performs at a Los Angeles night club as a sultry chanteuse doing magic tricks. Her boss is helping a ruthless war profiteer sell a poison-gas formula to the Nazis. This being adapted from a novel by Graham Greene, the existential anti-hero (Alan Ladd) is a paid assassin, but he loves cats and can trace his problems to childhood psychological trauma.
Bleakness pervaded the genre. “Noir was a combination of two elements,” explains Hilary Neroni, a University of Vermont film and television studies professor. “It was derived from hard-boiled fiction, usually with a detective who’s emotionally involved in his case and can therefore figure it out. Also, in a reversal from most movies, we want him to not choose the path of good.”
Choosing bad needed a dark ambiance. “These films are more abstract, with shadows and chiaroscuro,” says Neroni, who will be teaching noir this spring as part of her Development of Motion Pictures From 1930 to 1960 course. “Hollywood was influenced by the German Expressionist movement, which was about loss and feelings of anxiety in the face of urban decay.”
While contemporary filmmakers often attempt to recreate noir, the style remains elusive. Today’s de rigueur explosions and car crashes, plus graphic depictions of sex, allow none of the subtlety that distinguished those earlier films. And maybe it’s too difficult futile to really capture the bygone era’s artificially clipped, clever repartee that was sometimes penned by literary lions.
Notable noir
Altogether, Lake and Ladd were paired in four noirs, the most famous of which was arguably “The Blue Dahlia” — not on the Savoy schedule. Novelist Raymond Chandler, who wrote the screenplay, once referred to her rather unkindly as “Moronica Lake,” but the lady might have had more smarts than he realized. In her self-effacing 1970 ghostwritten memoir, she acknowledged: “I wasn’t a sex symbol. I was a sex zombie.”
Another cool duo with hot chemistry, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, hit the big-time in 1946 with “The Big Sleep,” adapted by author William Faulkner from a Chandler book. This Noir November selection centers on a private eye intrigued by a saucy young heiress.
A short story by Ernest Hemingway became a classic gangster movie, “The Killers” (1946), with Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner and even Ronald Reagan. It’s also on tap in Montpelier, as is “Laura” (1944) is the saga of a cop yearning for a woman whose presumed murder he’s investigating. “Kiss of Death” (1947) — unusual in those days for being shot on location — centers on a New York City ex-con who becomes an informer.
“The Asphalt Jungle” (1950), John Huston’s robbery-gone-wrong thriller, boasts a young Marilyn Monroe. The suspenseful “Rififi” (1955) is about a jewelry heist. And in “Touch of Evil” (1958), director Orson Welles offers a madly inventive foray into Mexico and police corruption.
Real-life drama
No work of the imagination can compare with Veronica Lake’s real-life struggles. A Brooklyn native originally named Constance Frances Marie Ockleman, she attended a parochial school in Montreal until expulsion for rebellious behavior. Her mother later claimed the youngster had been diagnosed a schizophrenic.
In the first of Lake’s four marriages, she was injured while pregnant and gave birth prematurely to a baby who didn’t survive. That topped a long list of miseries: divorces, bankruptcy, estrangement from her three other subsequent children, booze, paranoia (a belief that the FBI was stalking her), and an arrest for being drunk and disorderly.
Lake’s age at the time of her death is variously listed as 50, 53 and 54. Most biographies suggest she was born on Nov. 14, 1919 — which means the princess of peek-a-boo would have just turned 90 — but 1922 is the date on that pesky Vermont death certificate.
The document also appears to support the Queen City’s claim to Lake. She had checked into the hospital’s alcoholism unit under the care of Dr. Warren Beeken, according a 2006 article by Donald Bain. He’s the ghostwriter of her 1970 memoir who later went on to pen the “Murder, She Wrote” TV series.
But Lake’s cry for help came too late. Her liver and kidneys failing, she slipped into a coma. The deceased was taken to St. Johnsbury’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery for cremation.
Either her grown son, the afore-mentioned Montreal lover or Bain made those arrangements, but for reasons unknown, none of them claimed Lake’s remains from the Corbin and Palmer Funeral Home in Burlington until 1976 — a fact recently confirmed by the company. Bain apparently paid $200 for the storage costs. Her ashes were then scattered off the coast of Florida, though some say it was the Virgin Islands.
As a final twist that would befit any work of pulp fiction, three decades later a Catskills antique store displayed a makeshift urn containing at least a portion of Lake’s ashes. A labyrinthine explanation of how they got there failed to confirm whether or not the claim was genuine.
Whatever the case, the proprietor launched a 2004 Lake look-alike contest with males and females in slinky dresses sporting long, blonde wigs. A local baker sold Peek-a-Boo Cookies, as a videotape of “This Gun for Hire” played on a television monitor in the store window.
At the Savoy, it’s a safe bet this noir will be enjoyed in less crassly commercial circumstances.
| Birth: | Nov. 14, 1922 Brooklyn Kings County New York, USA |
| Death: | Jul. 7, 1973 Burlington Chittenden County Vermont, USA |
 Actress. She was born Constance Frances Ockleman in Brooklyn, New York to a seaman father. He died in an explosion on an oil ship when Constance was five. Her mother remarried and the family was constantly on the move living in Canada, New York and Florida. She graduated from high school in Miami. The family moved to California and she was enrolled in the Bliss Hayden School of Acting in Hollywood. Bit parts came almost immediately with RKO Studios. Her trademark was a hairstyle, with one of her eyes always obscured by her blonde hair. The style was so popular with women that those working in defense plants during World War II were accident prone and officials asked her to change. Veronica Lake made films with Paramount during World War II. The studio requested a name change and she became Veronica Lake. Her most noted movies: 'I Wanted Wings, Sullivan's Travels, This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key, I married a Witch, So Proudly We Hail, Blue Dahilia and Stronghold.' She flourished professionally until 1948 when she was dropped by Paramount and then was sued for support payments by her ambitious mother who had prodded her into a movie career starting in elementary school. Divorced twice, she slowly declined as a movie star and her comeback films made in the 60's were failures. Veronica made television appearances and even tried her hand on the stage which was ended by an injury suffered while appearing in a production. Some of her TV appearances: Lux Video Theatre, Goodyear Television Playhouse and Somerset Maugham TV Theatre. She was down on her luck with increasing personal problems. Relatively forgotten, she was found living in an old hotel in Manhattan working as a cocktail waitress and married to a fourth husband a commercial fisherman. She tried another return to movies ' Footsteps in the Snow,' and appeared for the last time in an incredibly bad, low budget film in 1970 'Flesh Feast.' While visiting friends in Burlington, Vermont, she was stricken with hepatitis and taken to a hospital dying penniless at the age of 53. A small memorial service was held at a Manhattan mortuary arranged by a friend who had penned a tell-all autobiography as described by Veronica in 1969. Cremated, her ashes sat on a mortuary shelf in Burlington for three years because of non-payment for services. Finally, her friends paid the bill and her ashes were shipped to Florida where in a brief ceremony, deposited the ashes in the water off Miami as she had requested. (bio by: Donald Greyfield) Cause of death: Hepatitis | |
| Burial: Cremated, Ashes scattered at sea. (?) | |
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