Cry of the City Richard Conte is in Mme. Rose’s “Swedish massage & reducing” parlor, getting his chicken choked. Well, he’s getting choked like a chicken, anyway. Hope Emerson is doing the choking, her mighty hands clamped around his neck in one of the key scenes in Cry of the City (48), Robert Siodmak’s onyx ode to Italian-American New York City in the days when elevated trains still crisscrossed lower Manhattan. Emerson is playing one Rose Given, an old-school therapeutic masseuse the size of a voting booth. We first see her in silhouette, a gigantic ink spot spreading in the darkness, backlit and walking toward us, toward Conte, whose wounded-killer-on-the-lam has been sent to her parlor for sanctuary… he thinks. Emerson’s got other ideas. She wants a cut of the loot Conte’s headed for, and she woman-handles him until he gives in. At six-foot-two and 230 pounds, she dwarfs the five-foot-eight Conte; she could snap his neck like a twig. And yet… there’s an incredible eroticism to the scene. Something tender in the touch of this ungainly, outsized woman, her profile a Picasso masterpiece. She kneads him; he spends the night. In the morning, at breakfast, Emerson eats with her mouth open while Conte looks on in disgust. She silently wishes he would kiss her anyway.
Adam’s Rib There were women in prison movies long before John Cromwell’s Caged in 1950, but few if any have been nominated for Academy Awards, before or since. Caged was nominated three times, for its screenplay, Eleanor Parker’s lead role, and Emerson’s unforgettable supporting performance as sadistic prison matron Evelyn Harper, a snarling sicko (“Pile out, you tramps!”) who lives in a cell of her own, adjacent to her charges like a drill sergeant, with a needlework sampler on her concrete wall made by one of her girls: “For Our Dear Matron.” Harper gets what’s coming to her, naturally; did Emerson? She never married, had no kids, never seems to have advertised her sexuality one way or another. Was she queer? Certainly so, in at least some sense of the word, but who cares?
Caged Her noir moment faded quickly, but Emerson was plenty versatile. She made a trio of “women’s Westerns”: Allan Dwan’s Belle Le Grand (51), William Witney’s Westward the Women (51)—as mail-order bride Patience Hawley, straight out of New Bedford, Massachusetts (“It was time to scrape my hull and weigh anchor”)—and George Marshall’s The Guns of Fort Petticoat (57). Frank Tashlin gave her a part in his Jerry Lewis Miracle of Morgan’s Creek remake, Rock-a-Bye Baby (58), but Emerson spent her final years mainly in television, earning an Emmy nomination for her performance as the saloon-keeper Mother on Peter Gunn (58-59) before moving on to The Dennis O’Keefe Show (59-60) as Amelia “Sarge” Sargent, a brassy, silver-blonde live-in housekeeper. The last episode aired May 10, 1960; a month later Hope Emerson, aged 62, was dead of liver failure. She was her own monument, massive enough in form and presence to rival any statue in any town square.
