Some notes on the brief and not particularly furious transit of Tommy Noonan

This post is anoth­er con­tri­bu­tion to the “For the Love of Film (Noir)” Blogathon hos­ted by the Self Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films, who will explain it all and steer you to oth­er, and far more ster­ling, con­tri­bu­tions. To make a dona­tion to the cause, hit the nifty “donate here” icon below. 

“Tommy Noonan” is not a name one reg­u­larly, or per­haps I ought to say “nor­mally,” asso­ci­ates with film noir. Indeed, the name “Tommy Noonan” to which I am spe­cific­ally refer­ring is one that is not much reg­u­larly asso­ci­ated with any­thing these days; drop it and even someone who con­siders him or her­self a cinephile or cinec­ro­phile may well say, “You mean that creepy-looking, freak­ishly tall act­or I see around the East Village all the time?”

And, no. The Noonan to whom I refer achieved his greatest main­stream fame as the bespec­tacled mil­quetoast heir-to-a-fortune Gus, Jr., betrothed to Marilyn Monroe’s Miss Lorelei Lee in Howard Hawks’ 1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. A year later he took a slight detour from schlub­ville to por­tray a wise­crack­ing show­biz sidekick of Judy Garland’s in Cukor’s A Star Is Born, but it would be around slightly more graph­ic vari­ants of the nerd/bombshell con­trast that he would craft, such as it were, the finale of his act­ing career, before dying of a brain tumor in 1968.

As it happened, the bland vacancy of Noonan’s facial fea­tures in Blondes was a product of both prop place­ment (the glasses) and deft act­ing. The half-brother of John Ireland, Noonan was­n’t a bad-looking guy, and among his first Hollywood act­ing roles were film noir turns as know­ing slick­sters. In 1947’s Born To Kill, for instance, he appears uncred­ited as a bell­boy who whiles away his idle hours play­ing cards and get­ting plastered with too-old-to-be-slatternly hotel res­id­ent Audrey Long.

While not exactly an out-and-out sleazeball here, he def­in­itely strikes the view­er as some­thing of a service-economy oppor­tun­ist. And Kill dir­ect­or Robert Wise, or some­body at stu­dio RKO, must have liked Noonan and/or saw some heavy poten­tial in him, because he showed up a couple of years later in Wise’s RKO clas­sic The Set-Up, sport­ing a par­tic­u­larly ridicu­lous suit and lay­ing out a line of icky pat­ter to poor Audrey Totter, who’s wan­der­ing around town won­der­ing what she’s gonna do about seem­ingly doomed box­er hus­band Robert Ryan.

Now there’s a char­ac­ter who sure does­n’t look like he’d let him­self be taken advant­age of even by the likes of Miss Lee. Noonan also played the real-life Western char­ac­ter Charles Ford, broth­er of Jesse James killer Robert, in two films, Sam Fuller’s I Shot Jesse James (and here Noonan’s real-life half-brother Ireland played Robert) and The Return of Jesse James (in which Ireland also appears, but not as Ford, but rather as a Jesse James lookalike; how confusing).

But Noonan’s work oppos­ite Monroe in Blondes was such that it cre­ated some­thing of an arche­type, and in 1955, in Richard Fleischer’s atyp­ic­al but thor­oughly excep­tion­al noir Violent Saturday, he mel­ded mil­quetoast and sleaze to extremely mem­or­able effect. 

What makes Saturday an atyp­ic­al noir has in part to do with the fact that it’s in Cinemascope, and very vivid De Luxe col­or, and that it’s set not in a big city but a mid-size Western min­ing town, Bradenville. Some bad fel­lows, includ­ing Lee Marvin and J. Carrol Naish, are out to rob the loc­al bank. In a sense, the film melds the heist pic­ture with the sick-secrets-of-suburbia melo­drama, and from that hybrid, in fact, the film derives its sense of noir. Noonan is Harry Reeves, the seem­ingly upstand­ing bank man­ager; sure, likes a drink eery now and again, but a thor­oughly okay guy; and mid­way through the pic­ture (whose ninety or so minutes are pretty jam-packed with plot, even by the effi­cient stand­ards of the day and genre) we find out how he really gets his kicks; out “walk­ing” the “dog” (okay, he actu­ally does have a dog), he “lets” him­self be led to the back of the loc­al hotel… 

…where the new nurse in town (Virginia Leith, six years away from her, um, defin­ing role as The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) is stay­ing. The sight of her chan­ging out of her work clothes is just, well, mesmerizing…

Having thus wed nerdy to dirty, Noonan hit upon a poten­tially per­fect per­sona in which to embody the square who squirmed for sexu­al sat­is­fac­tion and/or lib­er­a­tion. Of course a little more sim­u­lated Scotch-drinking was going to help with that. In 1963 Noonan joined one-time 20^th Century Fox sta­blem­ate Jayne Mansfield (yet anoth­er kinda-sorta “next Marilyn Monroe” for that stu­dio, which had also pro­duced Violent Saturday) and he hus­band, proto-Schwarzenegger body­build­er turned film per­former Mickey Hargitay, for the aspiring-to-smuttiness cheapo sex farce Promises, Promises, notori­ous for fea­tur­ing some com­pletely non-diegetic shots of a half-naked Mansfield gyr­at­ing on a bed.

Here Noonan, more anti-cool than ever in over­sized horn-rims, sousedly rumin­ates on Hargitay’s prodi­gious pressing…

…and, suf­fer­ing even more indig­nity than he did in the hands of Monroe, accepts chas­tise­ment from Mansfield.

In 1964, in his first and last dir­ect­ori­al effort, Three Nuts In Search of a Bolt, Noonan played a ver­sion of him­self, an out-of-work act­or who agrees to pose as a psy­cho­ana­lyst. One of his charges was played by Mamie van Doren, anoth­er “next Marilyn” who had nev­er signed with Fox, but had been dis­covered by Howard Hughes, thank you very much.