Out of The Shadows Expanding The Canon of Classic Film Noir (Gene D. Phillips) PDF
Out of The Shadows Expanding The Canon of Classic Film Noir (Gene D. Phillips) PDF
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Phillips, Gene D.
Out of the shadows : expanding the canon of classic film noir / Gene D. Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8189-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8190-7 (ebook)
1. Film noir—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.F54P475 2012
791.43'655—dc23 2011023510
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
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Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Prologue: Overlooked Noir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
vi
F
irst of all, I am grateful to the filmmakers who discussed their
noir films with me in the course of the long period in which I
was engaged in remote preparation for this study. I interviewed
Fritz Lang, George Cukor, and Billy Wilder in Hollywood; Sir Alfred
Hitchcock, John Huston, and Otto Preminger in New York City; and
Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kubrick in London. I also talked with Don
Siegel at the Chicago International Film Festival.
In addition, I would also like to single out the following for their as-
sistance: Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell, who played a supporting role in
Strangers on a Train, for examining an early draft of the material on the
film directed by her father; and Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, who
wrote the screenplay for Cukor’s A Double Life.
Many institutions and individuals provided me with research materi-
als. I would like specifically to single out the following: the staff of the
Film Study Center of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the staff
of the Motion Picture Section of the Library of Congress in Washington;
the staff of the National Film Archive of the Library of the British Film
Institute in London; and the staff of the Department of Special Collec-
tions, the Newberry Research Library in Chicago.
Research materials were also provided by the Paramount Collection
of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences in Hollywood; the Department of Special Collections of the
Research Library of the University of California at Los Angeles; the Billy
Rose Collection of the Theater and Film Collection of the New York
vii
viii
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OVERLOOKED NOIR
F
ilm historians generally agree that the classic period of film noir
lasted roughly from 1940 to 1960. Specifically, film noir was a cycle
in American cinema that first came into prominence during World
War II, peaked in the 1950s, and began to taper off as a definable trend by
1960. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the American screen was riddled
with films that reflected the dark underside of American life, writes An-
drew Dickos. The directors of these films “fashioned this noir landscape
in the city and peopled it with troubled and desperate characters.”¹
Over the years a canon of films from the period has emerged that
film historians consider the standard group of films of the classic noir
cycle, ranging from The Naked City (1948), for example, to The Big Combo
(1955)—movies that clearly depicted the haunted world of film noir. Nev-
ertheless, film noir cannot be kept within the narrow limits of the official
canon of films that have been established by film historians—it is too wide
ranging for that.
As Bernard Dick explains, the elements of film noir “are applicable to
a wide range of plots: the whodunit, the old dark house, the cover-up, the
murderous couple, the murderous lover, and so on.”² Consequently, there
is still a number of neglected movies made during the classic noir period
that need to be reevaluated as noir films. “We all agree that there is a core
set of films in the noir canon,” Mark Conrad states. “But the boundary is
so fuzzy that we disagree about whether a great many others . . . belong
there as well.”³ Accordingly, this book is designed to be a mix of major
ix
noir films like Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and films not often as-
sociated with film noir like Cukor’s A Double Life (1947).
It is generally agreed that Dashiell Hammett invented hard-boiled
detective fiction—which became the basis of film noir—with the novels
and stories he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s. So Hammett is featured in
this book, which includes the films The Maltese Falcon (1941), a recog-
nized noir, and The Glass Key (1942), an overlooked noir. The latter movie
is unfamiliar as far as being considered a classic noir, but it is well known
as one of the crime films of the 1940s in which Alan Ladd and Veronica
Lake costarred (along with This Gun for Hire and The Blue Dahlia). I shall
also treat Song of the Thin Man (1934), the film version of Hammett’s
novel of that name. Although it falls within the period of classic noir, Song
of the Thin Man is a neglected noir.
My book Creatures of the Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fic-
tion, and Film Noir (2000) focused on the noir films made from the hard-
boiled fiction of Raymond Chandler. But Hammett’s career as a writer
of hard-boiled fiction was shorter than Chandler’s. After his fifth novel,
Hammett ceased writing novels in 1934, whereas Chandler continued
writing fiction until 1958. So I cannot devote a whole book to Hammett,
as I did to Chandler. But Hammett is featured in this book, since he was
not focused on in my Chandler book.
In short, I wish to emphasize that my present book on film noir is not
merely a revision of my Chandler book on film noir. (Foster Hirsch and
James Naremore have published revised editions of their noir books.) As a
matter of fact, Chandler appears in this book as the coauthor of the screen-
play for Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951); I do not include any of the
films based on Chandler’s fiction in the present volume. I do include two
films derived from Hammett’s novels, as mentioned already. That Ham-
mett is still very much associated with hard-boiled fiction is verified by Joe
Gores’s novel Spade and Archer, a 2009 spin-off from The Maltese Falcon,
which provides a backstory for Hammett’s celebrated novel.
That some important works have appeared on film noir indicates the
continued interest in the topic over the years. But I am confident that I
am bringing a new twist to the topic by expanding the canon of classic
film noir.
In surveying the previous books on film noir I note that Dickos’s
Street with No Name: A History of Classic Film Noir (2009) sticks to the
“official canon” of film noir movies of the classic period. Dickos also
deals with the French antecedents of American film noir in great detail
(Renoir, etc.); and there is no need to repeat which he has done in this
regard. Books like Foster Hirsch’s The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir
(1981; revised 2009) and James Naremore’s More Than Night: Film
Noir in Its Contexts (1998; revised 2008) present a survey of noir films,
but with in-depth commentary on a few selected films. Mayer and
McDonnell’s Encyclopedia of Film Noir (2007) is likewise a survey of
noir films. It is a reference book with entries arranged in alphabeti-
cal order.
At the other end of the spectrum books like William Hare’s Early
Film Noir (2002) and John Irwin’s Unless the Threat of Death Is behind
Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir (2006) cover only a few major
noir films like Double Indemnity. A series of four volumes edited by Alain
Silver and James Ursini under the title of Film Noir Reader (1996–2003)
are collections of essays by various authors, which are in general more
theoretical than my present study.
In sum, I present an in-depth examination of several key noir films,
some of which are in the canon of noir films of the classic period, like
Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), and some that deserve to be in the canon,
like Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Thus I aim to widen the
scope of the discussion of film noir with some films hitherto not usually
considered as noirs, such as Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).
Still I have avoided the trap of operating on the notion that once
you start looking for noir you see it everywhere. One must be aware that
a film must meet certain standards to be considered among the classic
film noirs. Otherwise one can nominate biker movies and slasher mov-
ies as film noirs—as Wheeler Dixon does in Film Noir and Cinema of
Paranoia (2009).
My book coincides with a resurgence of critical interest in film noir,
and that makes it all the more timely. Among the notable directors
represented in the book are Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, and Stanley
Kubrick, all of whom made superior noir films. During the long period
in which this author was researching this book, he interviewed many of
the important directors represented here, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz
Lang, John Huston, and others. This interview material is a highlight of
the book.
xi
Notes
Any direct quotations in this book that are undocumented are derived from the
author’s personal interviews with the subjects.
xii
1. Andrew Dickos, Street with No Name: A History of Classic Film Noir (Lex-
ington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), xi.
2. Bernard Dick, Anatomy of Film, rev. ed. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
2010), 150.
3. Mark Conrad, “The Meaning and Definition of Noir,” in The Philosophy of
Film Noir, ed. Mark Conrad (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006),
14.
4. Brandon Linden, “Unknown Noir,” Facets Film Studies (Chicago: Facets
Multimedia, 2006), 2.
xiii
w
CITY OF NIGHT:
THE ADVENT OF FILM NOIR
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BLACK MASK BRIGADE: DASHIELL HAMMETT,
HARD-BOILED FICTION, AND FILM NOIR
I
n the annals of detective fiction Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of
the foremost writers of classic British mystery stories. Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes, with his “science of deduction,” could unravel the
threads of a mystery and cleverly arrive at an astonishing solution. Conan
Doyle published the first of his Sherlock Holmes stories, A Study in Scar-
let, in 1887. Holmes became the world’s first consulting detective.1
“Holmes seemed so real, so magnificently life-like,” writes Jeremy
McCarter, “that some readers thought he really existed.”2 Indeed, Conan
Doyle regularly received letters addressed to Holmes till the end of his
days. The popularity of Holmes was such that William Gillette wrote a
play, Sherlock Holmes (1899), in which he played Holmes on tour for three
decades. It was Gillette, by the way, who coined the celebrated phrase,
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” in his play.3
Nevertheless, Dashiell Hammett dismissed Conan Doyle’s stories as
exercises in mere puzzle solving. Still Conan Doyle, whose last volume
of Holmes stories, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927,
ushered in “the so-called Golden Age of British detective fiction” in the
1920s and 1930s. “Writers became known for their expert refinements
of the puzzle.”4 The most famous of these authors was Dame Agatha
Christie, whose stories were usually set in the baronial country estates of
upper-class society. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920),
introduced the Belgian private detective Hercule Poirot, whose fictional
career endured until his last appearance in Curtain (1975), which was the
occasion of Christie’s celebrated detective receiving an obituary in the
London Times (!), Poirot, Christie’s armchair sleuth, could find the solu-
tion to any mystery with his ingenious faculties of deduction.
British mystery writer P. D. James, the creator of detective Adam
Dalgliesh, writes off both Conan Doyle and Christie as “overrated relics
of the English crime story’s much-vaunted Golden Age.” She simply dis-
misses Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes as an implausible figure. Christie
she blasts because “she wasn’t an innovator and had no interest in explor-
ing the possibilities of the genre,” as did Dashiell Hammett.5
Satirizing the mystery fiction of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler
(The Big Sleep) wrote, “Heigh ho, I think I’ll write an English detective
story, one about Superintendent Jones and the two elderly ladies in the
thatched cottage.” After the case is solved, Chandler concluded, “everyone
breathes a sigh of relief while the butler pours a round of sherry.”6 Chan-
dler believed that Dashiell Hammett’s tough, hard-boiled crime fiction,
which he began publishing in the early 1920s, was the first significant de-
parture from the more refined, genteel British school of detective stories.
We have people talk as they do talk; and, as some of them are of a low station
in life, no doubt they often say things in a similar way.” Such resemblances
between Hemingway and himself, Cain conceded, suggest that “I had in
some part walked in his footsteps.” But Cain decidedly denied that he could
be compared to Hammett. After reading twenty pages of Hammett (the first
chapter of The Glass Key), “I said, forget this goddamned book.” Yet, Cain
complained, critics referred to his “‘hammett-and-tongs’ style.”21
The hard-boiled detective story first began appearing in the pages of
the pulp detective magazine Black Mask in the spring of 1923. (Pulp fic-
tion got its name from the “cheap, rough, wood-pulp paper” on which it
was printed, a paper far less costly than the smooth paper typical of slick
magazines like the Saturday Evening Post.)22
While Joseph “Captain” Shaw was editor of Black Mask (1926–1936)
the magazine defined the best of American hard-boiled detective fiction
by its departure from the older, conventional British detective stories.
“We meditated on the possibility of creating a new type of detective
story,” Shaw later wrote, different from the mystery stories of Conan
Doyle; that is, “the crossword puzzle sort, lacking—deliberately—all other
human emotional values.”23
Dashiell Hammett’s detective stories were first published in Black
Mask in the fall of 1923. Hammett was a literate and polished writer. He
had himself been an operative for the Pinkerton Agency, the first private
detective agency in the United States, which had been established in 1850.
In fact, Pinkerton’s trademark, an all-seeing eye coupled with the motto
“We never sleep,” was the genesis of the term private eye.24
10
Notes
1. Allen Eyles, Sherlock Holmes: A Centenary Celebration (New York: Harper &
Row, 1986), 111.
2. Jeremy McCarter, “Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes,” New York
Times Book Review, December 20, 2007, 15.
3. Eyles, Sherlock Holmes, 39.
4. “Detective Fiction,” in Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, ed. Domi-
nic Head, rev. ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 296.
5. Janet Maslin, “P. D. James Is on the Case,” New York Times, December
7, 2009, sec. C:1.
6. Roger Schatzkin, “Doubled Indemnity: Raymond Chandler, Popular Fic-
tion, and Film” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1984), 113.
7. Woody Haut, Heartbreak and Vine: Hard-Boiled Writers in Hollywood
(London: Serpent’s Tail, 2002), 17.
8. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in Raymond Chandler,
Later Novels and Other Writings, ed. Frank MacShane (New York: Library of
America, 1995), 989. This essay originally appeared in Atlantic Monthly, De-
cember 1944. It is not to be confused with the Introduction to The Simple Art of
Murder, a volume of Chandler’s short stories, cited below.
9. Mike Ripley and Maxim Jakubowski, “Fresh Blood: British Neo-Noir,” in
The Big Book of Noir, ed. Ed Gorman, Lee Server, and Martin Greenberg (New
York: Carroll and Graf, 1998), 320.
10. William Nolan, “Introduction,” in Dashiell Hammett, Nightmare Town:
Stories, ed. Kirby McCauley, Martin Greenberg, and Ed Gorman (New York:
Vintage Books, 2000), xii.
11. Dashiell Hammett, “Introduction,” in The Maltese Falcon (New York:
Modern Library, 1934), viii.
12. Jerry Speir, Raymond Chandler (New York: Unger, 1981), 10.
13. Letter from Raymond Chandler to Cleve Adams. Dated September 4,
1948, in Philip Kiszely, Hollywood through Private Eyes: The Hard-Boiled Novel
in the Studio Era (New York: Lang, 2006), 35.
14. Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” 991.
15. Raymond Chandler, “Introduction,” in The Simple Art of Murder, in Ray-
mond Chandler, Later Novels and Other Writings, 1017.
16. Dashiell Hammett, Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, ed. Richard Lay-
man and Julie Rivett (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001), 396.
17. Edmund Wilson, “The Boys in the Back Room,” in Edmund Wilson, Clas-
sics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York: Noonday Press,
1967), 21.
11
18. Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, rev. ed. (New York:
Da Capo Press, 2009), 28–29.
19. Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” 988.
20. Robert Gale, A Dashiell Hammett Companion (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 2000), 115.
21. James M. Cain, “Preface,” in James M. Cain, Three by Cain (New York:
Vintage Books, 1984), 352–54.
22. Marilyn Yaquinto, Pump ’Em Full of Lead: Gangsters on Film (New York:
Twayne, 1998), 75.
23. Joseph Shaw, “Introduction,” in The Hard-Boiled Omnibus: Early Stories
from Black Mask, ed. Joseph Shaw (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), v.
24. Clifford May, “The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly
236, no. 2 (August 1975): 30.
25. Nolan, “Introduction,” in Dashiell Hammett, Nightmare Town, xiii.
26. Hammett, “Introduction,” in The Maltese Falcon, vii–viii.
27. Julian Symons, Dashiell Hammett (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jova-
novich, 1985), 3.
28. Somerset Maugham, “The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story,” in
Somerset Maugham, The Vagrant Mood: Six Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-
day, 1953), 126.
29. Lillian Hellman, “Introduction,” in Dashiell Hammett, The Big Knockover:
Selected Stories and Short Novels (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xvi.
30. Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House,
1983), 72.
31. Christopher Metress, “Introduction,” in The Critical Response to Dashiell
Hammett, ed. Christopher Metress (New York: Greenwood Press, 1994), xxi.
32. Nolan, “Introduction,” in Dashiell Hammett, Nightmare Town, vii.
33. Raymond Chandler, “Writers in Hollywood,” in Raymond Chandler,
Later Novels and Other Writings, 995.
34. Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” in American Movie Critics, ed.
Phillip Lopate, rev. ed. (New York: Library of America, 2008), 460.
35. Lawrence O’Toole, “Now Read the Movie,” Film Comment 18, no. 8
(November–December 1982): 37.
36. James Monaco, ed., Encyclopedia of Films (New York: Putnam, 1990), 107.
12
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EXPLORING FILM NOIR: STRANGER
ON THE THIRD FLOOR AND OTHER FILMS
I
n attempting to explain the sudden emergence of film noir in the
early 1940s, Philip Hanson points out that Joseph Breen, the industry
censor, had become more liberal in approving projects in the 1940s
that he would have turned down during the previous decade. This is per-
haps because Breen was conscious that, as Raymond Chandler remarked
in 1945, “People can take the hard-boiled stuff nowadays.”1
For example, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer submitted James M.
Cain’s novella Double Indemnity to Breen’s office in 1935, the censor de-
creed that “the sordid flavor of this story makes it thoroughly unacceptable
for screen production.”2 When Paramount submitted a screen treatment
(detailed synopsis) of Double Indemnity to Breen in 1943, however, Breen
approved the project, commenting that, after all, “adultery is no longer
quite as objectionable” as it once had been in films.3
13
14
15
German Expressionism
“It might be said that Hollywood’s most generous benefactor was Adolf
Hitler,” film historian Tony Thomas has written. “The Nazi regime
forced numerous . . . directors to find their way to California.”16 When
Hitler came to power in 1933, he “put into action policies of extreme na-
tionalism. As a scapegoat for Germany’s political, military, and economic
troubles of the previous fifteen years, Hitler targeted Jews,” Giannetti and
Eyman point out. “After May, 1933, when he became chancellor, pre-
scient Jewish Germans began packing their bags, for under the Nazis no
Jew could be employed in any branch of the film industry.”17
Since the German film industry was the foremost center of filmmaking
in Europe, Austrians like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zinnemann
worked in the studios in Berlin, along with native Germans like Robert
Siodmak. In 1929 Siodmak, Wilder, and Zinnemann joined forces on a
semidocumentary entitled Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday). The
film was directed by Siodmak, written by Wilder, and Zinnemann was
the assistant cameraman. All three of them would migrate to Hollywood
eventually and become directors there—and all three, along with Lang,
16
are represented in this book. Lang, Wilder, and Zinnemann joined the
exodus to Hollywood after Hitler nationalized the German film industry
in 1933.18 Siodmak chose to make films in France throughout the 1930s
and decamped for Hollywood in 1939, when the war broke out in Europe.
They were all working in Germany when the movement known as
expressionism had a significant impact on both stage and screen. It is not
my purpose to dwell in detail on the influence of expressionism on the
films of the directors who immigrated to Hollywood from Germany in
the wake of the rise of Hitler, but the following observations are in order.
Lotte Eisner, in The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cin-
ema, describes the movement in the following terms: “Expressionism sets
itself against Naturalism, with its mania for recording mere facts”; instead,
the expressionistic artist seeks the symbolic meaning that underlies the
facts.19 German expressionistic films were shot on claustrophobic studio
sets, where physical reality could be distorted. To be precise, expression-
ism exaggerated surface reality in order to make a symbolic point.
For example, the outer world may be distorted “in order to better
express the anxious, tormented inner world of the characters.”20 As early
as 1919 Robert Wiene directed Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari), a key expressionistic film. In the film Francis, a student,
denounces Dr. Caligari, the head of a mental institution, as a madman.
But the epilogue reveals that it is Francis who is insane. Consequently,
the foregoing tale is a lunatic’s hallucination, as seen through the eyes of
the demented Francis. Accordingly, Wiene made use of expressionistic
lighting throughout the film.
A sinister atmosphere is created in certain interiors by infusing them
with menacing shadows looming on walls and ceilings, which give a
Gothic quality to the doom-laden characters and serve to convey the an-
gular, warped world of Francis’s deranged mind. Similarly expressionistic
lighting lends itself readily to the moody atmosphere of film noir. Thus
in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street: chiaroscuro cinematography depicts eerie,
night-shrouded streets and alleys, ominous corridors, and dark archways,
which contribute to the stark atmosphere of film noir.
It has been said that immigrant filmmakers from Germany like Fritz
Lang avoided implementing expressionism in their American films alto-
gether. That is not really the case. Actually Fritz Lang insisted that he
employed expressionism in only a few key scenes in his American thrillers.
17
French Naturalism
Jean Renoir declared that La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931) was “an attempt
to make a naturalistic film.”23 Naturalism emphasizes realistic detail, in
order to build up an authentic atmosphere that would make a story seem
more true to life. As a matter of fact, the release of La Chienne coincided
with the movement toward greater realism in French cinema in the 1930s.
Avoiding studio glamour, now movies were frequently shot on location in
order to lend them a stronger sense of realism. Hence films were often
acted out in realistic surroundings, which dictated that the actors give
performances for the most part free of theatrical mannerisms and that the
camera employ a newsreel-like style to photograph the action. These films
gave screen fiction a new kind of verisimilitude.
Renoir was in the front rank of French directors employing the new
naturalism. According to André Bazin, Renoir was “one of the masters of
photographic realism. He was also the heir of the tradition of the natural-
istic novel,” represented by Emile Zola’s novels like La Bete Humaine (The
Human Beast), which Renoir filmed in 1938.24
After they had fled Germany in 1933, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder
spent a year in Paris, where each of them made a film, before moving on to
Hollywood in 1934. They were both working in Paris when the movement
called naturalism took hold in the French film industry. By then Renoir
18
had released Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), with Michel Simon as a
scruffy tramp. Like La Chienne, Boudu was shot on the streets of Paris.
The cinematographer for La Chienne was Theodor Sparkuhl, yet
another refugee from the German film industry, who worked in Paris for
a while before heading for Hollywood—as did Lang and Wilder. La Chi-
enne was a powerful naturalistic drama that painted a vivid, unvarnished
picture of life in the bohemian Montmartre district of Paris, where Renoir
shot the film on location. Fritz Lang remade La Chienne as an American
film noir, Scarlet Street, which is examined in chapter 5. Hence I shall take
the occasion to discuss La Chienne at this point.
The films in the cycle of French naturalism in the 1930s focused
on the troubled lives of haunted characters and emphasized doom and
despair. La Chienne is a dark drama about Maurice (Michel Simon), a
hapless bookkeeper who is infatuated with Lulu (Janie Mareze), a greedy
harlot. Maurice is crushed when he discovers that she is having an affair
with another man.
As Renoir describes the scene in which Maurice confronts Lulu, “Sud-
denly he understands she does not love him, has never loved him. He tells
her so, and it makes her laugh; that laughter is so exasperating” that Mau-
rice snatches a letter opener that is lying nearby “and stabs her to death.”25
Sometimes Renoir places his camera outside a room where a scene
is taking place, and photographs the action going on inside the room
through a doorway or a window. The viewer accordingly feels as if they
are observing a scene that is really taking place—it is not merely a scene
staged for the camera. Thus, after Maurice murders Lulu in her apart-
ment, Sparkuhl’s camera pans up to the apartment window from the street
below and peers into the room. We then see Maurice gazing silently at the
dead girl for the last time, before he flees the scene of the crime.
At the same time we can hear some street musicians as they sing a
romantic ballad outside Lulu’s apartment building. The love song is an
ironic comment on the romantic illusions that Maurice had earlier nur-
tured about the faithless Lulu.
When I spoke with Michel Simon in June 1967, at the Berlin Film
Festival, he said that he was pleasantly surprised that La Chienne had
turned out so well, since it was Renoir’s first major sound picture. He
noted that it was fortunate that he possessed a deep voice that was per-
fectly suited for sound films. Sadly, he added, Janie Mareze, who played
19
Lulu, was killed in an auto accident only two weeks after shooting was
completed.
Renoir’s later film, La Bete Humaine, was also remade as a film noir
by Fritz Lang, entitled Human Desire (1954). Renoir’s movie centers on
Jacques (Jean Gabin), a train engineer. He is also a psychopath who kills
his mistress Severine (Simone Simon) in a fit of madness after she aban-
dons him for a younger man.
Once more Renoir made excellent use of actual locations. As Jacques
drives his steam engine along the railroad track the day after the murder,
“the charging train becomes a portent of an unstoppable fate: His despair
is mounting in unison with the accelerating train; the engineer jumps to
his death.” In sum, in La Bete Humaine Renoir again “constructs a world
in which sex and violence are fused inextricably,” thereby paving the way
for film noir.26
Billy Wilder’s crime film Double Indemnity (1944) highlighted the
movement toward naturalism in American cinema that harkened back
to the French naturalism of the 1930s. Films like Double Indemnity had
the same kind of documentary realism that had characterized naturalistic
French films like Renoir’s La Chienne. Wilder shot Double Indemnity on
location in some of the seedier sections of downtown Los Angeles. The
iconography of naturalism was reflected in the shadowy nighttime streets,
the tawdry nightspots, and the haunted faces of the actors.27
Foster Hirsch, in his exhaustive study of film noir, writes that the trend
prospered between the early 1940s and the late 1950s. To be more precise,
Paul Schrader states that the outer limits of the cycle stretch from The
Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), which Orson Welles adapted
from Whit Masterson’s hard-boiled novel Badge of Evil.28 Welles’s grim
study of the ignominious downfall of a corrupt cop named Quinlan (played
by Welles) appeared just when film noir was on the wane. Hirsch told the
New York Times that Welles’s film “gathered many of the noir trademarks”
(paranoia, double-dealing, darkness, and danger) into a summary statement
of the genre’s conventions and thus serves as a “convenient demarcation” for
the end of the classic noir cycle. Nevertheless, he adds that the impulse that
fueled noir “did not suddenly stop after Touch of Evil.”29
Although film noir has ceased to exist as a distinct movement in
American cinema, its influence survives in the tough, uncompromis-
ing crime movies that Hollywood continues to turn out from time to
20
time. These films, known as neo-noir, retain the qualities of film noir
as it existed in the classic period. For example, films made from Patricia
Highsmith’s fiction, like The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), still bear the
unmistakable earmarks of classic film noir (see chapter 13).
Although The Maltese Falcon is usually deemed the first full-fledged
film noir, Stranger on the Third Floor, released a year before Falcon, can be
considered a proto-noir, that is, a film that anticipates film noir. Conse-
quently, I shall discuss it before turning to The Maltese Falcon in the next
chapter.
21
Peter Lorre in the title role of Stranger on the Third Floor, now considered the precursor of
film noir.
22
and codified the visual conventions of film noir.”30 For example, Mu-
suraca suggested a jail cell in the present film by merely a bed with barred
shadows on the wall. Indeed, Musuraca would become a leading director
of photography during the period of classic noir, with movies like Lang’s
Clash by Night (1952) to his credit.
In Stranger on the Third Floor cab driver Joe Briggs (Elisha Cook, Jr.)
is convicted of slitting the throat of Nick, the manager of a neighborhood
diner, largely on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of the key
witness, newspaperman Michael Ward (John McGuire), who saw Briggs
running from the scene of the crime. But Michael soon begins to suspect
that the sinister stranger who lives near him in a seedy rooming house is
the real culprit.
Michael suffers gnawing misgivings that Briggs may be innocent. He
has a weird nightmare in which his next-door neighbor, Albert Meng,
an obnoxious busybody, is slain, and Michael is accused of the murder.
Among the images that materialize in Michael’s nightmare: “A forest
of oblique lines silhouette Michael’s cell wall; the figure of blindfolded
justice hangs over the courtroom; an electric chair casts its giant shadow
against a wall, barred by diagonal lines.”31
The bizarre, six-and-a-half-minute nightmare sequence was, of
course, photographed by Nicholas Musuraca; it was the first of many
such stark sequences the cinematographer would contribute to noir films.
The strongly expressionistic dream sequence reflects the overt influence of
German films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on Musuraca’s work.
Michael awakens from his grotesque nightmare, only to discover that
Meng really has had his throat slashed; he suspects the phantom stranger
on the third floor. Ironically, Michael is incriminated in Meng’s death by
the same sort of circumstantial evidence that served to convict Briggs, and
he is railroaded into jail.
While Michael languishes in a jail cell, Jane, his fiancée (Margaret
Tallichet), is determined to track down the elusive stranger. Michael had
described him to her as a sullen foreigner, at once sinister and pathetic,
with bulging eyes, and wearing a shabby overcoat and a grimy silk scarf.
Late one night, when Jane, weary of searching the area for the stranger,
steps into the diner where Nick was killed, she spies a man who fits Mi-
chael’s description of the stranger. He is ordering two raw hamburger
patties, with which to feed a stray dog.
23
Recalling the old adage that the murderer returns to the scene of the
crime, Jane strikes up a conversation with the lonely man. They go for a
walk as darkness encroaches on the deserted street. The stranger admits to
Jane that he has escaped from a mental institution and is afraid that he will
be captured and locked up there again. Suddenly he turns on her: “They
sent you to take me back, because they knew I would trust a woman!”
The maniac goes berserk and attempts to strangle Jane, but she breaks
free. He chases her into the street, where he is run down by a truck. As
he lies dying, he confesses that he killed both Nick and Meng, because
they had each threatened to report him as an escaped lunatic. “But I’m not
going back,” he murmurs as he expires. . . .
Lorre’s biographer perceptively states that his characterization of
the stranger “is an updated version of the murderer in M, Hans Beckert.
“Feeding stray animals and killing people evokes the ugly memory of the
childlike Beckert, who kindheartedly offered his young female victims
candy before murdering them.”32
Jason Holt writes that the first film noir is not The Maltese Falcon but
“the little known Stranger on the Third Floor, in the inception of the classic
period.”33 But it is precisely because the latter film is little known that it
qualifies as a precursor of film noir, not as the first film noir. After all, Mu-
suraca’s brilliant use of expressionistic photography went almost unnoticed
at the time, with critics dismissing the movie as pretentious and confusing,
mostly because of the nightmare sequence. Variety carped, “It’s a film too arty
for average audiences,” freighted with “fancy camera effects and lighting.”34
Without Nicholas Musuraca as his lighting cameraman, Boris Ing-
ster “never again directed anything nearly as interesting as this neglected
demi-classic.”35 The more widely known Maltese Falcon was much more
influential in initiating the film noir cycle. (Interestingly enough, Peter
Lorre and Elisha Cook, Jr., appeared in both Stranger on the Third Floor
and The Maltese Falcon.) In short, The Maltese Falcon remains the “official”
beginning of the film noir cycle.
Notes
1. Philip Hanson, This Side of Despair: The Movies and the Great Depression
(Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 154.
2. Murray Schumach, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor (New York: Da
Capo, 1975), 64.
24
3. Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1996), 187.
4. Andrew Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film,
1927–49 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 108.
5. J. P. Tolette, “Film Noir at Columbia,” in Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a
Studio, ed. Bernard Dick (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 107.
6. Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” 456.
7. Nino Frank, “The Crime Adventure Story: A New Kind of Detective
Film,” trans. Barton Palmer, in Perspectives on Film Noir, ed. Barton Palmer (New
York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 21.
8. Etienne Borgers, “Série Noire,” in The Big Book of Noir, 232.
9. Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” 457.
10. Christopher Orr, “Genre Theory in the Context of Film Noir,” Film
Criticism 22, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 24; see also Dickos, Street with No Name, 2.
11. Stephen Holden, “Neo-Noir’s a Fashion That Fits Only a Few,” New York
Times, March 8, 1998, sec. 2:15.
12. Ronald Schwartz, Neo-Noir (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2005), x.
13. Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, 119.
14. Penelope Houston, Contemporary Cinema (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 66.
15. Dickos, Street with No Name, 156; see also Bernard Dick, “The Femmes
Fatales of Film Noir,” in Literature/Film Quarterly 23, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 136.
16. Tony Thomas, The Films of the Forties (New York: Carol, 1993), 136.
17. Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman, Flashback: A Brief History of Film, rev.
ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2010), 119.
18. See Amos Vogel, “You Have to Survive Even If It Kills You,” Film Com-
ment 30, no. 2 (March–April, 1994): 31–36.
19. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in German Cinema, rev.
ed., trans. Roger Greaves (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 10.
20. Brian McDonnell, “Film Noir Style,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, ed.
Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
2007), 72.
21. Fritz Lang, interview by the author, Beverly Hills, June 9, 1974. See Jim
Hillier and Alastair Phillips, 100 Film Noirs (London: British Film Institute,
2009), 244.
22. Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 115.
23. David Thomson, Have You Seen . . . ?: 1,000 Films (New York: Knopf,
2008), 163.
24. William Verone, “Jean Renoir,” in The Encyclopedia of Filmmakers, ed.
John Tibbetts and James Welsh (New York: Facts on File, 2002), vol. 2, 324.
25. Thomson, Have You Seen . . . ?, 163.
25
26. Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir (New York:
Limelight, 1999), 73.
27. See Dickos, Street with No Name, 17–18.
28. Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” 457.
29. David Everitt, “The New Noir: In the Daylight, but Still Deadly,” New
York Times, January 23, 2000, sec. 2:28.
30. Eric Shaefer, “Nicholas Musuraca,” in International Dictionary of Films and
Filmmakers, ed. Nicolet Elert, Andrew Sarris, and Grace Jeromski, rev. ed. (New
York: St. James Press, 2000), vol. 4, 604.
31. Stephen Youngkin, The Lost One: Peter Lorre (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 2005), 168–69.
32. Youngkin, The Lost One, 169.
33. Jason Holt, “A Darker Shade,” in The Philosophy of Film Noir, 27.
34. Variety Film Reviews (New Providence, N.J.: Bowker, 1997), vol. 8. This
collection of reviews is unpaginated.
35. Jay Nash and Stanley Ross, eds., Motion Picture Guide (Chicago: Cine-
books, 1987), vol. 7, 3164. Pagination is consecutive throughout all twelve
volumes.
26
w
NIGHTMARE TOWN: DASHIELL
HAMMETT’S FICTION AS FILM NOIR
w
JOHN HUSTON: THE MALTESE FALCON
F
ilm noir has a closer connection with its literary sources than any
other trend in American cinema. This is because writers of hard-
boiled fiction like Dashiell Hammett had an impact on the mov-
ies by supplying subject matter for noir films. Thus, just as Hammett’s
Maltese Falcon was a milestone in the development of hard-boiled fiction,
so John Huston’s film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon was the founding
motion picture of the original film noir cycle.
Be that as it may, The Maltese Falcon has not been the subject of
scholarly examination to the same degree as other major noir films such
as Preminger’s Laura. The very popularity of The Maltese Falcon has been
reason enough for some critics to write it off as a mere “crowd pleaser,”
rather than as an authentic work of cinematic art. There is, of course, no
reason why a film cannot be both.
Dashiell Hammett wrote that the inspiration for The Maltese Falcon
came from his reading about the Knights Hospitallers (Templars) of St.
John the Baptist, founded during the Crusades for the care of pilgrims to
the Holy Land.1 A Warner Bros. researcher discovered in the Los Angeles
Public Library that after Emperor Charles V ceded Malta to the Knights
Hospitallers they became known as the Knights of Malta. In order to ac-
knowledge that Malta was still under Spain, they paid tribute to Charles
by presenting him every year with a live falcon on All Saints Day.2
Hammett embroidered on the historical facts by writing that in 1539
the Knights sent to Charles the statue of a falcon studded with precious
gems. But the falcon was later lost, and no one knows what became of
29
30
Julian Symons points out.7 Hammett pays more attention to character de-
velopment in the novel than he did before in his short fiction. Most critics
see The Maltese Falcon as the peak of Hammett’s achievement. As Ross
Macdonald puts it, “The Maltese Falcon broke the barrier of the genre: it
was and is a work of art.”8
31
occasion of its re-release, Breen was appalled at the risqué elements in the
film. He later declared that this picture was the final deciding factor in his
officially implementing the Censorship Code in July 1934 as an effective
measure in raising the moral tone of Hollywood pictures.10
Be that as it may, the Del Ruth Falcon had been a hit, and Warner
Bros. production chief Hal Wallis sent a memo to Warner executive
Harry Joe Brown, dated June 27, 1934, suggesting a remake of The Mal-
tese Falcon. Wallis maintained that some elements of the novel had been
overlooked in the 1931 movie, and that there was still enough material in
the book to serve as the basis of another film version of the novel: “I think
we can get another screenplay out of it.”11
The original story, as reworked for the remake, turned out to be some-
thing of a romp, foolishly played for laughs. This film was entitled Satan Met
a Lady (1936). Referring to Spade in the film’s title as “Satan” is a reference
to Hammett’s description of Sam Spade as “a blond Satan.”12 This adapta-
tion of the book was directed by William Dieterle, a German immigrant
who was a dependable craftsman; still, his forte was decidedly not comedy.
Warren William was given the role of Spade, now called Ted Shayne,
a dapper, wise-cracking private eye, much more of a roguish flirt than was
Cortez’s Spade. Bette Davis played the femme fatale, now called Valerie
Purvis. Davis did so under protest, as she thought the script was clumsy
and second rate.
In actual fact, the screenplay was by Brown Holmes, who had collabo-
rated on the script for the 1931 Falcon. This time around Holmes altered
Hammett’s plot beyond recognition in his scenario for Satan Met a Lady.
The Maltese Falcon itself is transformed into a ram’s horn, supposedly
stuffed with jewels, that allegedly once belonged to the legendary eighth-
century French hero Roland. In addition, Gutman is refashioned into Ma-
dame Barabbas (Alison Skipworth), a dowager crook, whose young lover is
called Kenneth (Maynard Holmes), rather than Wilmer—their relationship
is thus rendered heterosexual to satisfy the censorship code. Furthermore,
Ted Shayne’s affair with his partner’s wife is only hinted at for the same
reason. At the fadeout, Warren William’s Shayne laughs cynically as he
hands over the treacherous Valerie to the police, whereas Cortez’s Spade
turns over Ruth Wonderly to the cops with wistful resignation.
Critics disliked this low-rent version of Hammett’s novel, which had
been retooled into a vehicle for Bette Davis, as well as a comedy of sorts.
32
They called it a slapdash, near parody of the book, and a real snooze. In
short, Satan Met a Lady squandered a great novel.
Although Del Ruth’s film was certainly a better take on the book
than Dieterle’s, John Huston nevertheless believed that those two pic-
tures only touched the story contained in the Hammett original. For
example, Spade’s tormented sexual attraction to the “black widow” Brigid
O’Shaughnessy was underdeveloped in this movie. Huston whipped up
yet another screenplay for The Maltese Falcon, with some help from his
fellow screenwriter Allen Rivkin (who received no screen credit). Huston
hoped to direct the finished product.
33
elements of film noir: There is, for example, the male protagonist who is
characterized by pessimism and “a cold, detached view of the world.” The
femme fatale is “sexually alluring, but treacherous.” A somber urban set-
ting, often photographed at night, “with dark alleyways and sleazy bars, is
the common milieu.”18 Indeed, Borde and Chaumeton, in their pioneering
1955 study of film noir, cite film historian George Sadoul as saying, “The
Maltese Falcon created, in one fell swoop, the conventions of film noir.”19
Warner Bros. already owned the screen rights to Hammett’s book,
so they were free to do yet another remake. The studio assigned Huston
a tight shooting schedule of six weeks, and allocated him a budget of
$381,000. This was a modest sum by the standards of the time. “Since no
particularly large sums of money were involved,” writes Philip Kiszely, the
studio was not risking a great deal on a neophyte director.20
Huston remembered, “I was extremely lucky to have such a fine group
of actors to work with. I had known Humphrey Bogart, who played
detective Sam Spade, for a long time. I had written High Sierra for him
earlier. George Raft had been approached to play Spade, but he didn’t
want to work with a director who was a newcomer.”
Besides, Raft saw The Maltese Falcon as a “low budget whodunit,” and,
as such, not an important picture. So the role of Sam Spade went to Hum-
phrey Bogart, who defined the quintessential noir gumshoe as worldly-wise,
cynical, quick witted, and courageous. “The belted trench coat and the soft-
brimmed fedora became a Bogart trademark.”21 Mary Astor, who received
an Academy Award for her performance in The Great Lie (1941), was suit-
ably cast in the role of Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a pathological liar.
Huston selected Peter Lorre to play the small-time crook Joel Cairo;
Lorre had scored a critical success in Stranger on the Third Floor, in which
he was “the squat, wild-eyed spirit,” slyly prowling in and out of the shad-
ows.22 That description could likewise fit Cairo. Since Cairo is an overt
homosexual in the book, Hal Wallis warned Huston, “Don’t try to get a
nancy quality into him,” since homosexuality was still taboo according to
the Censorship Code.23 Huston has Cairo make his first appearance in the
picture by presenting Spade with a scented calling card that smells of gar-
denia; this signals to the audience that the effeminate Cairo is homosexual.
John Huston saw Sydney Greenstreet in the touring company of Rob-
ert E. Sherwood’s play There Shall Be No Night at the Biltmore Theater
in Los Angeles. Huston coaxed Greenstreet, who had made a career of
34
playing butlers on the stage, to make his screen debut at age sixty-one as
Kasper Gutman (Casper in the novel: Huston, like Del Ruth, wanted the
name to have a “foreign” flavor). Greenstreet was very close to Hammett’s
conception of Gutman, an ostensibly friendly fat man on the surface, but
quite devious underneath.
Elisha Cook, Jr., who also appeared in Stranger on the Third Floor, was
given the part of Wilmer Cook, Gutman’s boyish “gunsel”—Breen let the
term pass because he assumed that it referred to a gunman. The term, as cor-
rectly used by Hammett in the book, is underworld slang for a young man
kept by an older man. Cook looks much younger than his thirty-five years,
because of his diminutive size. The part of Wilmer was his defining role as
one of life’s losers. Cook complained later on that, after The Maltese Falcon,
he was required to play a series of “pimps, informers, and cocksuckers.”24
“Warner Bros. was indulgent with me,” Huston recalled, supplying
him with an experienced production crew, including production designer
Robert Hass, who had served in the same capacity for the 1931 Falcon, and
cinematographer Arthur Edeson, who had photographed Satan Met a Lady.
The story is set in San Francisco, where Hammett lived throughout
the 1920s, a locale that provided him with material for his fiction. The
screenplay begins with a new client, Ruth Wonderly, coming to Spade
with a tale about her sister Corinne, who has come to San Francisco with
a man named Floyd Thursby, with whom Corinne is infatuated. Spade
accepts a $200 retainer from Wonderly and arranges to have his partner,
Miles Archer, follow Thursby in order to find Corinne. The upshot is
that Archer is killed, shortly after Thursby is killed, and Spade learns
that Ruth Wonderly has no sister. In fact, Ruth Wonderly is really Brigid
O’Shaughnessy, who is fond of employing aliases.
Brigid eventually admits that she lied to Spade in order to have him
put a tail on Thursby, her erstwhile cohort, whom she no longer trusted.
Spade replies to Brigid’s confession, “We didn’t exactly believe your story.
We believed your two hundred dollars. I mean that you paid us more than
if you’d been telling the truth; and enough more to make it alright.” This
is a salient example of Huston lifting Hammett’s dialogue right from the
novel for the screenplay.25
As for Brigid’s being a habitual liar, she admittedly lies constantly,
but always with a sprinkling of truth that suggests the illusion of sincerity.
Moreover, she tries hard to justify her lies, after they are exposed, so that
35
she can elicit renewed confidence from her victim by her confession. She
can then continue deceiving them. The full extent of Brigid’s treachery is
not revealed until the film’s end.
Spade had suspected from the outset that Brigid was a congenital liar.
She was telling the truth, however, when she called Thursby a dangerous
man. She tells Spade, “He never went to sleep without covering the floor
around his bed with crumpled newspapers, so nobody could come silently
into his room.” Spade infers that Brigid knew Thursby’s bedtime habits be-
cause she had slept with him. He concludes that Thursby was Brigid’s lover
as well as her partner in crime. Brigid concealed her real motives for hiring
Spade, he later reflects, because “everybody has something to conceal.” That
statement, says Stephen Cooper, “could well be his working motto.”26
Spade’s unswerving adherence to his professional code of honor and
fair play provides the mainspring of the plot. We relate to Sam Spade,
writes Roger Ebert, “because he does his job according to the rules he lives
by,” and because we sense that beneath his rough exterior is a humanity
that can be reached.27
Spade, as Bogart plays him, is a man of principle who cannot be
bought. His cynicism masks his basic integrity. “Don’t be too sure I’m as
crooked as I’m supposed to be,” Spade warns Brigid; “that kind of reputa-
tion makes it easier to deal with the enemy.” At one point Spade finds
it expedient, for example, to convince Gutman that his services are for
sale to the highest bidder, and he is therefore not committed to helping
Brigid, who hired him in the first place.
Bogart’s Sam Spade is an antihero, “a cynical private eye caught in a den
of jackals,” says Charles Berg; he is at once tough and vulnerable.28 Spade is
willing at times to make moral compromises, wherein he employs deception
and even violence in order to reach his goals. Nevertheless, as Ebert con-
tends, he has an ethical code he will not break. Perhaps John Huston said
it all when he declared, “Dashiell Hammett was highly moral and adhered
strictly to the set of rules that his protagonist has laid down for himself.”29
Prior to the start of principal photography on June 9, 1941, Huston,
as a tyro movie director, took the precaution of storyboarding every scene
in the film. “I didn’t want to look like a fool on my first picture,” he ex-
plained. “Before I started shooting I made drawings, set-up by set-up, of
the action. I discovered that about half the time the actors automatically
fell into the blocking that I had worked out in my drawings, and the rest
36
Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) watches Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) question Joel
Cairo (Peter Lorre), a suspicious character, in John Huston’s film of Dashiell Hammett’s
Maltese Falcon.
of the time I would either bring them into line with my original concep-
tion of the blocking or let them work out something for themselves.”
Because of the movie’s frugal budget, the stark sets were supplied with
plain furnishings by production designer Robert Hass, as, for example,
Spade’s seedy bachelor flat. Moreover, Huston utilized low-key light-
ing, which often darkened the sets, thereby creating a sinister, brooding
atmosphere. The shadowy sets also kept the rather simple décor from be-
ing noticed by the audience. Little wonder that low-key lighting became
customary on noir films.
Huston was fortunate to have as director of photography on his first
film Arthur Edeson, who had photographed the original Frankenstein
(1931) for James Whale, which showed that he was familiar with Ger-
man expressionism; Edeson employed it skillfully in his use of chiaroscuro
lighting throughout Falcon. Huston collaborated closely with Edeson
during the shoot. He had Edeson photograph Greenstreet with low angle
shots at times; shooting upward at Greenstreet made him look all the
more massive and menacing.
37
38
honey.”33 Spade learns that Brigid was previously in cahoots with Cairo
and Gutman to track down the falcon. But Brigid and Thursby had
recently located it during an expedition to Istanbul. They subsequently
made a pact in Hong Kong, whereby they would make their way back
to the States separately, while Captain Jacobi, skipper of the La Paloma,
smuggled the falcon to San Francisco aboard his ship.
After Miles Archer and Floyd Thursby are both liquidated, Capt.
Jacobi shows up mortally wounded in Spade’s office and gives him the
package containing the falcon before he expires. (Capt. Jacobi is played by
Walter Huston, the director’s father, in an uncredited cameo.) So Spade
now has three murders to investigate: Miles Archer, Floyd Thursby, and
Capt. Jacobi. The San Francisco fog is gathering around the case faster
than Spade can lift it.
Spade in due course arranges a showdown in his apartment with all
the principals present. Gutman admits that he had Wilmer kill Thursby,
Brigid’s ally, because Thursby and Brigid planned to keep the black bird
for themselves. Gutman assumed that he could reason with Brigid once
Thursby was out of the way. Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer later went to
Brigid’s apartment for a confrontation with her, and found Capt. Jacobi
there. Jacobi, another ally of Brigid’s, suddenly snatched the falcon, which
he had brought to Brigid from Hong Kong, and fled down the fire escape.
Wilmer shot Jacobi as he made a run for it, but Jacobi managed to make
it to Spade’s office with the black bird before dying.
Spade convinces Gutman to let Wilmer take the fall for murder-
ing Thursby and Jacobi. Wilmer is distraught that the man who is both
his boss and his lover is willing to sacrifice him. Gutman apologizes to
Wilmer by saying, “I couldn’t be fonder of you if you were my own son;
but, if you lose a son, it’s possible to get another. There is only one Mal-
tese falcon!” Wilmer, who refuses to be the fall guy, makes his getaway
from Spade’s apartment.
Spade arranges to have Effie, his secretary (Lee Patrick), deliver the
falcon (which Spade has kept hidden) to his apartment. Gutman unwraps
the package feverishly and begins scraping the black enamel off the statue
with a knife to reveal the bejeweled figuring underneath. Everyone is
devastated to discover that the statue is a fake, made of lead. Gutman
composes himself, however, and invites Cairo to accompany him to Is-
tanbul, to obtain the genuine falcon from the duplicitous fence who sold
39
Brigid the false falcon; Gutman and Cairo leave together. Spade phones
the police and tells them to pick up Wilmer, Gutman, and Cairo before
they blow town: Wilmer, who was working for Gutman, shot Thursby
and Jacobi, and Cairo was in with them.
Then Spade turns his attention to Brigid, whom he accuses of slaying
Miles Archer. She killed Miles with the gun she had earlier obtained from
Thursby. That way, she figured, Thursby would be convicted of Miles’s
murder, and she could acquire the falcon for herself. (She had not counted
on Wilmer shooting Thursby.) Miles was too experienced a private eye,
Spade points out, to have gone up a blind alley after a man he was fol-
lowing. “But he’d have gone up there with you, angel. He was just dumb
enough for that.” Brigid is the only person involved in the case who could
have lured Miles to his death in a dark alley.
Sam’s determination to find Miles’s killer reflects his loyalty to his
partner. As he puts it, “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to
do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of
him. He was your partner, and you’re supposed to do something about it.”
Spade may be portrayed as an ambiguous figure, involved in a dubious
business, comments Steven Gale, “but ultimately he is found to be admi-
rable because he adheres to” his professional code: “partners are supposed
to look out for each other.”34 And so Sam informs Brigid that he is turning
her over to the police. Although Sam finds Brigid attractive, he will not
violate his code for her.
Moreover, Sam is painfully aware that Brigid has sought to manipu-
late him all along. As a matter of fact, if he had accompanied Brigid that
first night, instead of Miles, she would not have hesitated to murder him,
just as she did not hesitate to shoot Miles. To Brigid, the femme fatale,
Sam was just part of her overall scheme “to acquire the Maltese falcon
for herself.”35 When the cops take Brigid away, Huston photographs the
iron grille on the hotel elevator closing across her face in close-up. This
foreshadows the prison bars that Brigid must look forward to.
One of the police detectives, Tom Polhous, looks at the scarred,
counterfeit falcon and asks Spade, “What’s that?” Sam replies, “The stuff
that dreams are made of.” This line of dialogue does not appear in the
novel, and has been attributed to Huston. But Huston maintained that
the phrase was “Bogie’s idea.” Before they shot the scene, Bogart said to
Huston, “John, don’t you think it would be a good idea, this line? Be a
40
good ending?”36 The line may have been Bogart’s idea, but the primary
source is Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), where Prospero, the magi-
cian, intones, “We are such stuff / As dreams are made of” (IV.i.156–57).
The focus in the movie’s ending is on the phony falcon, and the
capacity of human beings for self-delusion. The falcon thus takes on a
symbolic significance; it represents what Tennessee Williams once called
“the long delayed, but always expected something that we live for.”37 All
of us know the experience of building our expectations of something we
look forward to so much that we are inevitably doomed to disappointment
if and when it comes to pass. The gang of fortune hunters in The Maltese
Falcon waste their lives pursuing a fabled treasure they will never find.
As for the genuine, priceless falcon, it still is stashed away somewhere
between Istanbul and Hong Kong; and, as the movie’s printed prologue
declares, its fate “remains a mystery to this day.”
Not surprisingly, Hammett considered Huston’s film to be superior
to the previous two adaptations of his novel. “Have you seen The Maltese
Falcon yet?” he wrote to his estranged wife Josephine Dolan Hammett,
on October 20, 1941. “They made a pretty good picture of it this time,
for a change.”38 For the record, Warner Bros. released a DVD set in 2006
comprising all three versions of The Maltese Falcon, so the reader can
compare the three.
The reviewers of Huston’s movie agreed that it was an outstanding
crime film. Most of them marveled that Huston’s initial foray as a film
director produced such an accomplished work. As Berg observes, Huston
“establishes the cramped, claustrophobic cosmos from which none of the
characters escapes unscathed. For a first-time director, Huston’s ability
to keep the tone unrelentingly arch and nasty is remarkable.”39 In the last
analysis, Huston’s seminal movie opened the door for film noir.
When The Maltese Falcon opened in Paris in the summer of 1946,
Nino Frank, who shortly thereafter wrote a groundbreaking article about
film noir in The French Screen (August 28, 1946), enthusiastically reviewed
Huston’s picture three weeks earlier in the same journal (August 7, 1946).
“I will not insult my reader by telling him who Dashiell Hammett is: a
private detective turned writer,” whose influence “remains profound.” In
place of the British school of detective fiction, which is “a pleasant sub-
stitute for crossword puzzles,” Hammett presents the hard-boiled private
detective “who lives on the fringe of the law.” Like Hammett’s novel,
41
Notes
1. Hammett, “Introduction,” in Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, vii.
2. Undated summary of historical data; The Maltese Falcon file in the Warner
Bros. Collection in the Archive of the Library of the University of Southern
42
California; see also Edmund Wright, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of World His-
tory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 352–53.
3. Dashiell Hammett, “The Whosis Kid,” in Dashiell Hammett, The Conti-
nental Op, ed. Steven Marcus (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 217.
4. Dashiell Hammett, “The Gutting of Couffignal,” in Dashiell Hammett,
The Big Knockover, 34.
5. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage Books, 1992),
274.
6. Hammett, “Introduction,” in Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, vii.
7. Symons, Dashiell Hammett, 66.
8. Metress, “Introduction,” in Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett, xix.
9. The Maltese Falcon (1931) file, in the National Film Archive of the Library
of the British Film Institute.
10. Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2007), 70.
11. Satan Met a Lady file, in the Warner Bros. Collection in the Archive of
the Library of the University of Southern California.
12. Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, 3.
13. John Huston, interview by the author; London, July 31, 1972. All quota-
tions from Huston that are not attributed to another source are from this interview.
14. Joseph McBride, Hawks on Hawks (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1982), 60.
15. Jeffrey Meyers, Bogart: A Life in Hollywood (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1997), 124; see also John Huston, An Open Book (New York: Knopf, 1980), 78.
16. Lawrence Grobel, “John Huston Interview,” in John Huston: Interviews,
ed. Robert Emmet Long (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 163.
17. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, rev. ed. (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 60.
18. Kristen Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction,
rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 215.
19. Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film
Noir, trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2000), 34.
20. Philip Kiszely, Hollywood through Private Eyes: The Hard-Boiled Novel in
the Studio Era (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 83.
21. George Perry, Bogie: The Life and Films of Humphrey Bogart (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 126.
22. David Thomson, New Biographical Dictionary of Film, rev. ed. (New York:
Knopf, 2010), 545.
23. Richard Barrios, Screening Out: Playing Homosexual in Hollywood (New
York: Routledge, 2003), 137.
43
44
w
STUART HEISLER: THE GLASS KEY
EDWARD BUZZELL: SONG OF THE THIN MAN
D
ashiell Hammett set The Glass Key in an unnamed city on the
Eastern Seaboard—most likely Baltimore, where he grew up
and was first employed as a Pinkerton operative. Hammett’s
first novel, Red Harvest, looked forward to The Glass Key in that it was
about violence and corruption in the city. Specifically, Red Harvest is set
in Personville, nicknamed Poisonville. When the last honest citizen in
town is murdered, the Continental Op, Hammett’s familiar private eye, is
determined to punish the guilty.
The hero of The Glass Key is Ned Beaumont, personal assistant and
sidekick of political boss Paul Madvig. Although Ned is not a private de-
tective in the usual sense of the term, like the Op, Beaumont is a special
investigator for the district attorney’s office. As such, Ned attempts to
solve a murder case in which Paul is accused of the crime. He is not only
Paul’s henchman, but his loyal friend.
Ned Beaumont in some ways resembles Dashiell Hammett: Beau-
mont “wears a neatly trimmed mustache (like Hammett) and drinks a
lot (as Hammett was already doing).”1 He is also, like Hammett, a natty
dresser, who chides Paul about wearing “silk socks with tweeds.”2 Paul’s
poor taste in clothes underscores how he would like to raise his social
status but is not adept in doing so.
Admittedly, Ned is in the employ of Paul Madvig, a powerful, dis-
honest ward boss, who operates in the corrupt world of city politics. Still,
Ned is doggedly determined to clear his boss of the murder charge, even
45
if it means taking on the city’s mobsters. “In the matter of integrity,” com-
ments Dooley, “Ned Beaumont is cut from the same cloth as the rest of
Hammett’s heroes.”3 Ned is well aware that, even after he has captured
the culprit who committed the murder, the corrupt urban environment
will outlast his efforts to see justice done. In short, the city, in Hammett’s
bleak vision, remains essentially lawless.
Unlike Sam Spade, Ned Beaumont does wind up at novel’s end in a
love relationship. The novel concludes with Ned and Janet Henry telling
Paul that they are leaving town together. Nevertheless, the symbolism of
the book’s title undercuts the “happy ending.” Specifically, the title refers
to Janet’s dream, which she relates to Ned at one point. In her dream Janet
and Ned get lost in a forest and happen upon an apparently abandoned
house. They find the key under the doormat and unlock the front door,
only to discover inside hundreds of snakes, which slither through the door
and go off into the forest.
Janet later confesses to Ned, after she and Ned have fallen in love,
that her dream was really a nightmare. The key was made of glass and
shattered in Ned’s hand after he got the door open. “We couldn’t lock the
snakes in and they came out all over us; I woke up screaming.”4 Of course,
commentators on the novel have had a field day with Janet’s nightmare.
The simplest explanation, however, is perhaps the best. Julian Symons
writes that “the common sense view of the fragile key is this: The glass key
is meant to symbolize only that the relationship between Ned Beaumont
and Janet Henry” is likewise fragile; “it may not last.”5
With the publication of The Glass Key in 1931, several critics agreed that
this novel along with The Maltese Falcon were the best detective stories to
come along in a long time. Hammett biographer Diane Johnson believes The
Glass Key to be “as elegant and controlled in style as anything Hammett ever
wrote.”6 Furthermore, it was a best seller, and so Hollywood came calling.
Hammett’s novels had proved easily adaptable for the screen. “Writers
on the order of Dashiell Hammett,” brandishing incredibly laconic prose
and razor-sharp dialogue, “wrote books that had almost the skeletal struc-
ture and style of a script,” Lawrence O’Toole points out. Hammett was
adept at conveying a great deal of exposition through dialogue. O’Toole
adds that film noirs such as The Glass Key “capitalized on the filmic qualities
of hard-boiled fiction: crisp, clever plotting; locales where light and shadow
could disport themselves; and characters short on talk and big on action.”7
46
47
Ed Beaumont (Alan Ladd) and Janet Henry (Veronica Lake) in Stuart Heisler’s film of Dashiell
Hammett’s The Glass Key.
48
sion of The Glass Key, “continuing his guise as a quiet little tough guy.”14
Furthermore, there was a sexual chemistry between Ladd and Lake that
would undoubtedly work well in The Glass Key, which, as things turned
out, was released just six months after This Gun for Hire.
The Glass Key was chosen as a vehicle for Ladd because Paramount
figured that if Warner Bros. could make a killing with a remake of Ham-
mett’s Maltese Falcon, they could do the same with a remake of Hammett’s
Glass Key. Accordingly, the remake would have a bigger budget and a
stronger cast than the 1935 version.
49
50
51
52
tor in the office of District Attorney Farr to track down Taylor Henry’s
killer. After all, Farr deputized Ed in the first place because of Paul’s
pulling strings on Ed’s behalf.
When Ed confronts Varna about his efforts to pin Taylor Henry’s
murder on Paul Madvig, his sworn enemy, Varna sics Jeff, his vicious
henchman, on Ed. The notorious Varna threatens Ed that Jeff will go to
work on him until he is willing to betray Paul by saying that Paul mur-
dered Taylor. Shortly thereafter Ed finds himself in a sleazy den, where
Jeff beats him senseless with maniacal glee, all the while calling him
“sweetheart” and “cuddles.”
Heisler hints at the sexual ambiguity “strikingly implicit in the homo-
erotic undertow of the sadomasochistic beating of Ed by Varna’s heavy,
Jeff.”25 Indeed, the masochistic link between Ed and Jeff is suggested by the
manner in which Ed submits to being repeatedly slugged by Jeff. “I never
seen a guy who liked being hit so much,” Jeff exclaims. Manny Farber calls
their relationship “a strange mixture of sadism and affection.”26 While shoot-
ing this sequence, the rugged William Bendix accidentally landed a punch
on Ladd’s jaw that knocked him cold. Heisler, “never one to allow a convinc-
ing shot to go unrecorded,” ordered that shot to be used in the film.27
In the end, Ed decides he has had enough and sets fire to the mattress
in the room where he is imprisoned. While Jeff is preoccupied with put-
ting out the flames, Ed escapes by jumping through a window. Janet Henry
comes to visit Ed while he is recuperating in the hospital. Asked why he
took such a pummeling for Paul, Ed answers, “Because he is my friend,
and he’s square. He would have taken a beating for me.” Janet admires Ed’s
stubborn loyalty to his friend and realizes that she is falling for Ed.
While he is hospitalized, Ed learns that Varna has cajoled Clyde
Matthews, publisher of the Observer, a local newspaper, into agreeing to
publicly accuse Madvig in print of slaying Taylor Henry. The “exposé”
is to appear in the paper the following morning. So Ed decides to check
himself out of the hospital and pay a visit to Matthews’s country estate,
where Matthews is holed up with Varna and his goons.
Ed forces Clyde Matthews to admit that his newspaper is bankrupt and
that he is heavily in debt to Varna; that is why he is willing to do Varna’s
bidding. Eloise Matthews, Clyde’s philandering wife, displays contempt for
her husband when she hears that he is broke; after all, she only married him
for his money. She accordingly begins flirting crassly with Ed on the couch.
53
When Clyde witnesses his wife openly kissing Ed, the distraught husband
goes upstairs to his bedroom and blows his brains out.
Geoff Mayer claims that Ed, in order to prevent the publication of
Varna’s accusation against Madvig, “provokes the suicide” of the publisher
by “seducing his wife.”28 On the contrary, there is no indication that Ed
actually “seduces” Eloise by having sex with her on the living room couch,
either in the novel or in the film, at this point. Ed does accept Eloise’s
advances, but their smooching is interrupted by the gunshot from upstairs.
Ed simply could not have foreseen that his having indulged in heavy
petting with Eloise would have driven her husband to take the extreme
measure of committing suicide. In any case, with Clyde Matthews out of
the picture, Ed moves quickly to kill the story about Madvig’s murdering
Taylor Henry so that it will not be front page news in the Observer.
Ed, still desperate to smoke out Taylor Henry’s killer and exonerate
Paul, seeks out the inebriated Jeff in a dingy basement bar. While Ed is
attempting to pump Jeff for information about the killing, Varna shows
up. He ominously warns Jeff that he talks too much when he is drunk
and smacks him harshly. Jeff goes berserk and strangles Varna to death in
retaliation. Ed watches impassively, but does not intervene. After throt-
tling Varna, Jeff blurts out, “I’m just a good-natured slob everybody thinks
they can push around.” Ed calls the police, who take Jeff into custody. Ed
accordingly wreaks vengeance on his enemies without lifting a finger: the
ruthless Varna is dead, and the savage Jeff will be executed for his murder.
As Nash and Ross observe, “This is a tough, raw crime yarn that pulls no
punches, with taut direction from film noir specialist Heisler.”29
At the movie’s climax, Ed goads the real murderer of Taylor Henry
into confessing to the district attorney. Ralph Henry admits that he killed
his son during an argument on a deserted street at night. “I told him he
would ruin my political career” with his dissolute lifestyle, the senator
explains. “Taylor hit me; we scuffled.” The senator hit his son with his
walking stick. “Somehow he fell down, and his head hit the curb. He was
dead—it was an accident.” Ralph Henry adds that Paul was present, but,
for Janet’s sake, Paul helped him cover up the killing.
The movie concludes in a sentimental fashion. Ed and Janet tell Paul
they are going to go away together and make a fresh start in life elsewhere.
Paul responds that they are “two kids who have got it bad for each other.”
He magnanimously gives them his blessing: “Get going, before I change
54
55
ties to the completed novel. In both versions an eccentric, not to say mad,
inventor named Wynant has vanished without a trace. As the story line
develops in the finished novel, Wynant is really dead, in spite of the fact
that his crooked lawyer, Herbert Macaulay, insists that he is still alive.
The main character in “The First Thin Man” is John Guild, a private
detective. Hammett apparently abandoned the first draft of the book
because Guild was turning out to be a pedestrian gumshoe, much less dis-
tinctive than the colorful Sam Spade. In rewriting this material Hammett
transformed the central figure into the charming, dapper ex–private eye,
Nick Charles. Nick has retired from his profession to manage the business
affairs of his wife, Nora, a lumber heiress.
The thin man of the title in Hammett’s novel is Clyde Wynant, who
is so called because his corpse fits conveniently into a very narrow hiding
place in the cellar of his laboratory, where it is concealed by the murderer.
But most readers assumed that the thin man was Nick Charles, “because
thin is cool and suave,” and because Nick prefers drinking to eating.33 Cer-
tainly the term refers to Nick in the film version and in the five sequels.
In his completed novel Hammett leavened the darker aspects of the
mystery story with comedy, which sets it apart from the first draft, as well
as from all of Hammett’s previous novels. Nick and Nora are a sophisti-
cated couple, whose clever repartee and breezy badinage endeared them
to the reading public. Lillian Hellman observed that the Charleses have
one of the few marriages in modern literature where “the man and woman
actually like each other.”34 It is Nora who coaxes Nick out of retirement
to unravel the murder mystery. Nick eventually figures that Macaulay
killed Wynant when the inventor discovered that Macaulay was guilty of
embezzling funds from Wynant’s fortune.
The Thin Man received good reviews and was a best seller when it
was published in 1934. MGM bought the screen rights for $21,000 at the
behest of director W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke.
56
57
and the characters of Nick and Nora for $40,000. He commented that
no one had “ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters.
They can’t take that away from me, not even for $40,000.”38 Hammett
ultimately earned $1 million in royalties from the novel and its spin-offs,
including a radio show (1941–1950), a TV series (1957–1959), and, of
course, the original movie and its five sequels.39 Song of the Thin Man is
the last and the best of the sequels—and qualifies as film noir.
58
Song of the Thin Man. There is an uncanny interplay of light and shadow
in the present film, which creates a brooding atmosphere of tension and
uncertainty that smacks of German expressionism.
Just as Paramount selected a writer of hard-boiled fiction, Jonathan
Latimer, to write the screenplay of The Glass Key, so Metro wisely chose
mystery writer Steve Fisher (I Wake Up Screaming) to be principal screen-
writer for Song of the Thin Man, aided by the movie’s producer, Nat Perrin.
Fisher was a Black Mask alumnus like Hammett and had recently taken up
screenwriting; he had adapted Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake for
MGM, released in February 1947. Fisher fashioned a tough, gritty script
for Song of the Thin Man, which avoided superficial melodrama.
Song of the Thin Man exemplifies the kind of film that Manny Farber
called “termite art”—a small, unpretentious movie that “evades affecta-
tion.” It has no ambition to be a pompous, inflated “elephantine” drama
that smacks the viewer with “artiness.” It rather “nibbles away” at “a few
spots of tingling, jarring excitement.”41
William Powell and Myrna Loy did their last star turn as Nick and
Nora Charles in Song of the Thin Man. The supporting cast was headed
by Gloria Grahame. Grahame had “opened her noir career” by playing a
weary dance hall hostess in Edward Dmytryk’s film noir Crossfire (1947),
just before appearing in Song of the Thin Man as Fran Page, a sultry night-
club thrush.42 Judith Williamson has said of Grahame, “Neither we nor
the other characters know whether to believe what she says; elusive as a
cat,” she is all but unknowable herself.43
Silver and Ursini single out the scene in the present film as typical
noir in which Grahame as Fran Page sings a torch song in a smoky café.
“She seems to lean on the piano for support, and her face is sullen and
suspicious.”44 Rosher’s adroit lighting of the scene makes Fran stand out
from the darkness and gloom that surround her. At this point Fran has all
the earmarks of a femme fatale.
Kevin Brownlow has told me that the noir look of Song of the Thin Man
is largely due to Rosher, and not to Buzzell: “I would not have credited Buz-
zell with any photographic expertise, whereas Rosher was a photographic
genius.”45 Indeed, Rosher had earned a second Oscar for photographing
The Yearling (1946) just prior to beginning work on Song of the Thin Man.
The film opens with Nick and Nora Charles attending a charity ball
aboard the S.S. Fortune, a floating gambling casino operated by Phil
59
Brant. Tommy Drake’s dance band, with featured clarinetist Buddy Hol-
lis (Don Taylor), is on hand. In the course of the evening Mitchell Talbin
(Leon Ames), Drake’s business manager, warns Drake about his wayward
personal life. In fact, Drake, with his gambling and womanizing, is cut
from the same cloth as the dissolute playboy Taylor Henry in The Glass
Key. Like Taylor Henry, Tommy Drake will meet a violent end.
Drake attempts to steal cash from the safe in Brant’s office in order to
cover a gambling debt. But he is shot to death in the middle of the robbery.
Brant is the prime suspect in the killing of Drake because he had quarreled
with Drake earlier in the evening about Drake’s compulsive gambling.
Brant entreats Nick Charles to help him clear his name, but Nick—as
always—maintains that he has retired from sleuthing. Whereupon Nora—
as always—coaxes him into taking the case. Another important suspect is
Buddy Hollis. The mentally unstable Buddy, who is a hopeless alcoholic,
disappears shortly after the murder, thereby casting suspicion on himself.
Another clarinetist in Drake’s band, Clarence “Clinker” Krause
(Keenan Wynn) steers Nick and Nora around to several New York jazz
clubs frequented by musicians like Buddy for after-hours jam sessions.
(The sequence recalls The Phantom Lady, Robert Siodmak’s 1944 noir, in
which the heroine visits several jazz clubs looking for the fabled lady of
the title.) In one nightery, Fran Page sings with a combo. While Fran is
warbling a romantic ballad, Clinker tells Nick that she had been Buddy’s
heartthrob—until she jilted him for Drake. Buddy was inconsolable at the
loss of Fran, and he has continued to carry the torch for her.
Nick encounters Clinker Krause again when he sneaks aboard the S.S.
Fortune, which has been moored offshore near the wharf since Drake’s
murder. As Nick prowls the dark corridors of the gambling ship, the beam
of his flashlight pierces the darkness, signifying how Nick is endeavoring to
shed light on the dark mystery. When Nick meets up with Clinker, who has
come aboard to retrieve his clarinet, he enlightens Nick by informing him
that Fran regrets ditching Buddy for Drake, who turned out to be nothing
but “a road company Casanova” (an example of Fisher’s smart dialogue).
Hoping that Fran can help him in his investigation, Nick goes to
her apartment—only to find that Buddy’s old flame has been stabbed to
death. Nick’s practiced eye spies a matchbook from the Hotel Vesta in
Poughkeepsie. He rightly deduces that Fran had been visiting Buddy at
the Valley Rest Home near the hotel. It seems that Buddy, whose mind
60
has been shattered by alcohol, has developed a deeply rooted guilt com-
plex and believes that he shot Drake while he was in a drunken stupor.
When Nick and Nora get nowhere questioning Buddy at the rest
home, Nora goes back to see Buddy on her own. Nora assures Buddy
that she is a friend of Fran’s. Buddy erupts in a paranoid tantrum, raving,
“They sent you to spy on me because I killed Drake; and now I’ll kill you!!”
As Buddy hallucinates, Nora’s face is multiplied on the screen and melts
into a blur. Just then Nick breaks into the room and saves her from Buddy.
The hapless Buddy’s hallucinatory image of Nora, depicted on the screen
in a bizarre fashion, is a salient example of Rosher’s skillful use of German
expressionism in the film.
Nick collects all of the suspects in the case in the ballroom aboard
Brant’s gambling ship, ostensibly for the reopening of the S.S. Fortune,
but really to unmask the murderer. This obligatory ritual of gathering the
suspects together takes place at the climax of all six of the Thin Man mov-
ies. Once again Nick has plainclothesmen disguised as waiters on hand for
the showdown, just as he did in the original Thin Man movie.
The ballroom is dimly lit, with everyone bathed in shadows—a typi-
cal noir setting. Buddy is leading Drake’s band, and Nick pretends that
Buddy has recovered from his psychosis and supplied Nick with the facts
he needs to solve the case. By this ploy Nick aims to unnerve the culprit
and make him show his hand.
Nick ultimately zeroes in on Mitchell Talbin, who finally cracks and
blurts out that he killed Drake because he had seduced Mitchell’s wife
Phyllis. Nick adds that Mitchell then convinced Buddy that he had killed
Drake by planting the murder weapon on Buddy. What’s more, Mitchell
murdered Fran because she had figured out during her visits to Buddy at
the sanatorium that Mitchell had shot Drake.
After Mitchell confesses to the killings, his wife Phyllis empties her gun
into him. “I swore I’d kill the man who shot Tommy Drake,” she declares
to Mitchell as he draws his last breath. Phyllis thus reveals herself to be
the movie’s femme fatale, and not Fran Page. Fran seemed to be a femme
fatale at the outset, when she dumped Buddy for Drake, but she wound
up sacrificing her life for Buddy in the end. Having broken the case, Nick
announces that perhaps he should not give up being a private eye after all.
Song of the Thin Man was underrated by some reviewers when it pre-
miered in August 1947, simply because they assumed that it was merely a
61
routine follow-up to the four previous sequels to The Thin Man that had
gone before. Yet some other critics genuinely appreciated it. The New
York Times stated that fans of the franchise could rest assured that William
Powell and Myrna Loy “exhibit the same old zest and bantering affection”
they did in the original Thin Man thirteen years earlier. “They are as good
company now as they ever were.”46
In describing Song of the Thin Man as “this new Dashiell Hammett
detective thriller,” Variety reminded fans of the series about the roots of
the Thin Man movies in Hammett’s novel. The picture “puts the Metro
series right back in full stride. Song of the Thin Man is one of the better
pictures in the Thin Man grouping. Edward Buzzell keeps interest at a
high pitch.”47
The reputation of Song of the Thin Man has improved over the years.
This is not surprising, given the contributions of noir specialist Steve
Fisher and of the superior director of photography Charles Rosher. Silver
and Ursini cite the movie as a significant film noir in their book The Noir
Style, as mentioned. Nash and Ross observe, “The last entries in a series
are, as a rule, bad. This one breaks the mold,” and can hold its own with
other mystery movies of the period.48
More recently Ben Brantley has written that Dashiell Hammett was
the creator of Nick and Nora Charles, “the chic, martini-loving husband-
and-wife sleuths. Incarnated on screen by William Powell and Myrna
Loy, the Charleses became the template for marriage as a sophisticated
test of cleverness; and they have been copied ad infinitum.” But copies are
never as good as the originals.49
The screen credits for Song of the Thin Man state that the screenplay is
“based on characters created by Dashiell Hammett.” That is the last official
screen credit Hammett ever received on a motion picture. His influential
series of detective novels had come to an end with The Thin Man in 1934.
One of the reasons “behind Hammett’s silence for more than a quarter-
century before his death in 1961,” according to Symons, was that “he felt he
had come to the end of what he could do with the crime story.”50
In January 1936, Hammett attended a Black Mask writers dinner; it
was the only time that Raymond Chandler ever met Hammett. “Often
wonder why he quit writing after The Thin Man,” Chandler wrote to a
friend. “Met him only once, very nice-looking, tall, quiet, gray-haired.”
Chandler concluded, “Seemed quite unspoiled to me.”51
62
63
Ironically, Hammett did not admire his own work. Lillian Hellman
believed that he was ashamed of having written “mere detective stories,” on
which he squandered his obvious gifts.52 Hammett wanted to write “socially
significant novels, but he never indicated exactly what he had in mind,”
writes Hammett biographer William Nolan in his overview of Hammett’s
career. His only significant piece of fiction in later years was “Tulip” (1952),
an aborted novel that he abandoned at 17,000 words. “Tulip,” published
posthumously, is the story of an author with writer’s block.53
Kiszely notes that there is no question that alcoholism “blighted
Hammett’s productivity.” Incidents of his self-destructive behavior under
the influence of alcohol “are numerous and well-documented.” As the
years slipped by, Hammett continued to drink, gamble, and womanize.54
Furthermore, because Hammett suffered from tuberculosis, which got
worse as he got older, Nolan suggests that Hammett found the strain of
writing too much to bear.55
Dashiell Hammett never seemed to grasp that he had raised the crime
novel to the level of literature. Indeed, The Maltese Falcon and The Glass
Key, his best novels, can survive comparison with Hemingway. They give
a raw, unvarnished portrait of violence and corruption in modern life.
James Thurber once complained that even the work of the most
popular writers does not always stay in print continuously “in a country of
fickle and restless tastes that goes in for the Book of the Month and the
Song of the Week.”56 Be that as it may, Hammett’s fiction has never dis-
appeared into a literary limbo as he always feared it might. In the realm of
the detective story, Hammett remains a master, both on page and screen.
There remains one screen adaptation of a Hammett novel yet to be
treated. In 1978 his 1929 novel The Dain Curse was made into a neo-noir
film for television. This movie will be considered in chapter 12, which
looks at neo-noir.
Notes
1. Dennis Dooley, Dashiell Hammett (New York: Unger, 1984), 109.
2. Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key (New York: Knopf, 1989), 62.
3. Dooley, Dashiell Hammett, 112.
4. Hammett, The Glass Key, 211.
5. Symons, Dashiell Hammett, 84.
6. Johnson, Dashiell Hammett, 85.
64
7. Lawrence O’Toole, “Now Read the Movie,” Film Comment 18, no. 6
(November–December, 1982): 37.
8. Tom Hiney, Raymond Chandler: A Biography (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1997), 138.
9. Lee Server, “Bad Company,” Sight and Sound 19 (n.s.), no. 8 (August,
2009): 30.
10. Woody Haut, Heartbreak and Vine: Hard-Boiled Writers in Hollywood
(London: Serpent’s Tail, 2002), 14.
11. Nash and Ross, eds., Motion Picture Guide, vol. 3, 1034.
12. “The Glass Key,” in Variety Film Reviews, vol. 6, n.p.
13. Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, p. 910.
14. Thomas, The Films of the Forties, 64.
15. Geoff Mayer, “Introduction,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 35.
16. Haut, Heartbreak and Vine, 186.
17. Haut, Heartbreak and Vine, 187.
18. Letter of Joseph Breen to B. G. De Sylva, December 15, 1941, in Pro-
duction Code Administration Archive, at the Margaret Herrick Library of the
Motion Picture Academy.
19. Production Code of the Motion Picture Association of America (June
13, 1934), “V. Profanity,” 4. Production Code Administration Archives, at the
Margaret Herrick Library.
20. Andrew Sennewald, “The Glass Key,” in New York Times Film Reviews (New
York: New York Times, 1997), vol. 2, n.p. This collection of reviews is unpaginated.
21. Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, 117.
22. Mayer, “Introduction,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 12.
23. Fran Mason, American Gangster Cinema (New York: Macmillan, 2002),
61.
24. Mason, American Gangster Cinema, 61.
25. Jim Hillier, “The Glass Key,” in Alastair Phillips, 100 Film Noirs (London:
British Film Institute, 2009), 106–7.
26. Manny Farber, “Mystery Movie,” Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writ-
ings of Manny Farber, ed. Robert Polito (New York: Library of America, 2009), 46.
27. Nash and Ross, eds., Motion Picture Guide, vol. 3, 1034.
28. Mayer, “Introduction,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 12.
29. Nash and Ross, eds., Motion Picture Guide, vol. 3, 1034.
30. Bruce Crowther, Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror (New York: Un-
ger, 1989), 28.
31. Steven Marcus, “The Thin Man: An Early Typescript,” in Dashiell Ham-
mett, Crime Stories and Other Writings, ed. Steven Marcus (New York: Library of
America, 2001), 929–30.
65
32. See Dashiell Hammett, “The First Thin Man,” in Nightmare Town,
347–96. This presents the complete typescript of the first draft of the novel.
33. Thomson, Have You Seen . . .?, 880.
34. Dooley, Dashiell Hammett, 124.
35. Thomson, Have You Seen . . .?, 880.
36. Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, 419.
37. W. S. Van Dyke, “R for a Thin Man,” in Hollywood Directors, 1914–40,
ed. Richard Koszarski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 311–12.
38. Dooley, Dashiell Hammett, 118.
39. Robert Gale, A Dashiell Hammett Companion (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 2000), 248.
40. Michael Buckley, “Gloria Grahame,” Films in Review 40, no. 12 (Decem-
ber 1989): 580.
41. Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” in Farber on Film, 540,
534.
42. Brian McDonnell, “Gloria Grahame,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 199.
43. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 359.
44. Alain Silver and James Ursini, The Noir Style (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook
Press, 2003), 108.
45. Kevin Brownlow to the author, May 16, 2009.
46. “Song of the Thin Man,” in New York Times Film Reviews, vol. 3, n.p.
47. “Song of the Thin Man,” in Variety Film Reviews, vol. 7, n.p.
48. Nash and Ross, eds., Motion Picture Guide, vol. 7, 3036.
49. Ben Brantley, “In a Gilded World, Theirs Is but to Quip and Sigh,” New
York Times, February 23, 2010, sec. C:1.
50. Symons, Dashiell Hammett, 4.
51. Raymond Chandler to Alex Barris, April 16, 1949, in Selected Letters of
Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (New York: Columbia University Press,
1981), 165.
52. Dooley, Dashiell Hammett, 133.
53. Nolan, “Introduction,” in Dashiell Hammett, Nightmare Town, xi. Hell-
man included “Tulip” in The Big Knockover, 301–48.
54. Kiszely, Hollywood through Private Eyes, 61.
55. Nolan, “Introduction,” in Dashiell Hammett, Nightmare Town, xi.
56. James Thurber, Credos and Curios (New York: Harper & Row, 1967),
162–63.
66
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DARKNESS AT NOON:
REPRESENTATIVE NOIR FILMS
w
FRITZ LANG:
MINISTRY OF FEAR AND SCARLET STREET
F
ive major directors of film noir emigrated from Europe to Holly-
wood after Hitler came to power: Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert
Siodmak, Otto Preminger, and Fred Zinnemann. These émigré
directors played a large part in establishing classic film noir. Brian Mc-
Donnell states, “Among them, Fritz Lang was a central figure, contribut-
ing in a substantial way to the cycle,” with a string of film noirs.1
Although Ministry of Fear is an overlooked Lang noir, preeminent
Lang scholar Lotte Eisner terms Ministry of Fear “a definite part of the
film noir tradition.”2 In fact, Graham Greene’s 1943 novel, The Ministry
of Fear, with its “dark streets and sinister neighborhoods, the shabby
offices and shabbier hotel rooms,” seems to be perfectly attuned to the
atmosphere of film noir.3
It is an axiom of commentators on spy fiction that nearly all of the
genre’s greatest authors worked in intelligence before writing spy novels:
Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, as well as Graham Greene. They all
were familiar with the world of espionage from personal experience.
In 1941 Graham Greene was chief of the British Secret Intelligence
Service in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Greene composed The Ministry of Fear
while he was in Freetown—the only novel he wrote during the war years.
Despite the straightened circumstances in which he penned the novel, “his
prose is spare and elegant, his pacing masterly.”4
The novel moves with what has rightly been called scenario swiftness
and deals with Arthur Rowe (Stephen Neale in the film), an unhappy man
who has been detained in an asylum ever since he was convicted for killing
69
his invalid wife. Almost immediately after his release from the asylum, he
finds himself stalked and pursued by an assortment of menacing individu-
als. At first he wonders if it is his imagination, but soon discovers that a
cake he won at a charity bazaar on the first day of his release from the
institution actually contained a roll of microfilm intended for a Nazi spy
who was to smuggle this secret information out of the country.
It is easy to understand why Lang was attracted to the novel. One often
finds in Lang’s work what can be called his “paranoid theme”: the hero is sur-
rounded by an unseen enemy whose forces are everywhere. Stephen gradu-
ally finds that no one can be trusted, for even people who on the surface seem
good more often than not turn out to be in league with the enemy.
In The Ministry of Fear, then, we have a ready-made Lang situation.
Lang recalled, “I have always admired Graham Greene, and when I came
back to Hollywood from New York, where I had signed the contract, and
read the script, I did everything I could to get out of making that picture;
but Paramount wouldn’t cancel the contract. That was one of the times
that my agent had failed to get a clause in my contract that allowed me to
work on the script.”5
One reason that he would have liked to have revised the screenplay
was that the searching examination of the hero’s psychological problems,
so evident in Greene’s novel, was mostly missing from the script. Greene
portrays Stephen, the hero, as a deeply neurotic man in the novel, but in
the screenplay Stephen’s emotional problems seem to be largely behind
him. In the movie, as a matter of fact, Stephen is not responsible for his
wife’s death because she commits suicide. Hence he is not guilty of eutha-
nasia, as he is in the book.
This whole probing of Rowe’s psyche is missing from the film, but
Greene still had a soft spot for the movie in his heart: “The Ministry of
Fear was made by dear old Fritz Lang,” he said, “and I was delighted that
a veteran director of his reputation was involved in the film. But unfortu-
nately the script that he was given to work with cut out the whole middle
third of the book in which Rowe goes into a nursing home with amnesia
and tries to sort out his life. Without this section the whole point of the
novel is missing, and the story doesn’t exist.”6
The screenplay for Ministry of Fear was by Seton Miller, who was an
experienced screenwriter in Hollywood, having won an Academy Award
for coscripting Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). Miller had a reputation for
70
71
following his nervous breakdown after the death of his invalid wife. When
Stephen walks out of the dark room and into the brightly lit corridor, his
action conveys that he is now endeavoring to turn his back on his murky
past and to walk into the light of the present. Ironically, he soon enters an
even more uncertain world than the one he has just left.
On his way to the train depot to catch a train for London, Stephen
visits a charity bazaar sponsored by the Mothers of the Free Nations.
Stephen is drawn to the clairvoyant’s dark tent, where Mrs. Bellane (Mrs.
Bellairs in the novel) reads his palm with a flashlight. Stephen says, “For-
get the past; just tell me the future.” He does not wish to recall his dead
wife’s ordeal. Without realizing it, Stephen has given the secret password
to Mrs. Bellane, who then divulges to Stephen the weight of the prize
cake. Stephen wins the cake by guessing its correct weight. But just as he
is about to leave the fairgrounds, the sponsors of the fete insist that he
has been awarded the prize through an oversight and that the cake really
belongs to someone else, a Mr. Cost (Dan Duryea). Stephen nevertheless
stubbornly insists on keeping the cake and heads for the railway station.
While he is waiting to board the train, Stephen sees a blind man com-
ing down the platform toward him. The appearance of a blind man fits
in perfectly with the atmosphere of uneasy anticipation Lang is striving
to establish at this point. In describing the blind man, Paul Jensen writes:
“Preceded by the sound of his tapping cane, he appears through a cloud of
steam that gives him almost supernatural overtones.”12 As the blind man
chats with Stephen in the course of the journey, there is a close-up of his
face, which shows his eyes furtively darting around the train compart-
ment. This indicates to the viewer, if not yet to Stephen, that the man
is pretending to be blind for some malevolent purpose of his own. While
the train is halted during a Nazi air raid on the area, the man suddenly
snatches the cake and runs off into the night, only to be killed by a falling
bomb. When it came to staging a gripping scene of this sort, Lang was
without a peer in film noir.
Once in London, Stephen visits the headquarters of the Mothers
of the Free Nations, which sponsored the charity fair, in order to see
if he can ascertain the significance of the stolen cake. There he meets a
brother and sister, Willi Hilfe (Carl Esmond) and Carla Hilfe (Marjorie
Reynolds). They are Austrian refugees who run the organization, but they
prove to be of little help in solving the mystery.
72
Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) and Carla Hilfe (Marjorie Reynolds) view the corpse of Nazi spy Willi
Hilfe (Carl Esmond)—her brother—in Fritz Lang’s film of Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear.
73
74
75
of Fear has always been reckoned as a minor Lang film, when it is really
an important film noir.17
Pauline Kael called Ministry of Fear “an unmemorable Paramount
picture.”18 David Thomson replied that he simply could not accept that
the film was forgettable. Furthermore, Thomson believes that Miller’s
screenplay is underrated. It is, after all, loaded with incidents that convey
a pervasive atmosphere of fear, dread, and a malign fate. Thomson went
so far as to state that Ministry of Fear “may yet be appreciated as Lang’s
greatest film in America, more delicately poised over the razor’s edge of
war and madness” than any of his other movies.19
While Thomson’s reassessment of Ministry of Fear is a welcome cor-
rective to the negative judgments of Kael and others, the movie cannot
be called Lang’s greatest American film noir. That accolade belongs to
Scarlet Street.
76
77
78
film’s chances at the box office. The legion placed Scarlet Street in its disap-
proving “objectionable” category, for “films that can be a moral danger to
spectators,” because of the movie’s “undue emphasis on illicit love.”28
The New York State Board of Censors, headed by Irwin Conroe, was
one of several local censorship boards across the country in those days.
The New York censor originally banned the film in New York State,
objecting to the number of bedroom scenes, particularly the one in which
Chris stabs Kitty repeatedly. David Kalat remarks that initially Chris
plunged an ice pick into Kitty seven times. Conroe found the number of
stabbings excessive, given the sexual connotations of the multiple phallic
thrusts involved. Producer Walter Wanger, who negotiated with the New
York censor, agreed to reduce the stabbings to four thrusts. “The film was
so altered in all prints (not just in New York state).”29 Conroe accepted
this concession and a couple of other minor alterations in the film, and
approved the movie for exhibition in New York State.
Lang commented laconically, “Scarlet Street was originally banned in
New York State. . . . The ban was removed only after prolonged repre-
sentation.”30 He subsequently quipped to me, “It is apparently immoral to
stab a woman seven times, but moral to stab her only four times.”
Scarlet Street begins with Chris Cross receiving an award from his
boss, J. J. Hogarth, at a testimonial dinner, for twenty-five years of service
as a cashier for Hogarth’s clothing firm. Chris afterward wanders home
through the winding streets of Greenwich Village, where the streetlights
barely penetrate the darkness. “By one of those unlucky chances that were
a staple of noir films,” Chris happens upon a young woman being cuffed
by a man who runs off when Chris shouts for a policeman.31
The girl identifies herself as an actress and says she was attacked by
a purse snatcher. Actually Kitty March is no damsel in distress, but a
prostitute who was being roughed up by her pimp, Johnny Prince. (Kitty’s
relationship with Johnny smacks of sadomasochism.) Chris, in turn,
misleads Kitty into thinking that he is a wealthy painter. Chris and Kitty
have a drink in a nearby bar. Chris, who is trapped in an unhappy mar-
riage, becomes infatuated with Kitty. She is able to coax him into renting
an apartment where she can live—and he can spend time painting, away
from the unpleasant company of his shrewish wife, Adele.
Chris is eventually reduced to embezzling funds from his company
in order to meet Kitty’s continued demands for money, demands that are
79
made at the behest of Johnny, her pimp. More than once Lang shows
Chris in his cashier’s cage in the office where he is employed. Tom Con-
ley suggests that these shots of Chris imply that this cubicle seems to
“incarcerate the cashier,” that is, Chris lives in “an infinitely constraining
world,” where he is imprisoned by his obsession with Kitty, from which
he is powerless to liberate himself.32
Johnny takes some of Chris’s paintings to a Greenwich Village art
fair, to see if they will sell. The pictures are noticed by Damon Janeway,
a prominent art critic, who is impressed with their “primitive power.”
Janeway traces them to Kitty’s apartment and offers to have them exhib-
ited in Dellarowe’s fashionable art gallery. Aware that Chris never signs
his canvasses, Johnny coerces Kitty into telling Janeway that she painted
them. Kitty accordingly signs Chris’s paintings, and Johnny sells them to
Dellarowe.
When Chris discovers what Kitty has done, he is so infatuated with
her that he sees her appropriating his work as her own as the symbol of a
bond between them. “It’s as if we were married,” he says, “only I take your
name.” Chris even titles his painting of Kitty Self-Portrait.
Chris fails to realize that, in allowing Kitty to take credit for his paint-
ings, he is, in essence, forfeiting his own self-identity. He allows Kitty to
control him, to the point where he hardly exists any longer as an indi-
vidual with a will of his own. Chris’s subservient relationship with Kitty
is “a role-reversal reply of her relationship with Johnny,” who dominates
Kitty in the same manner as she dominates Chris, as Bould notes.33
Chris is likewise dominated by his wife Adele (Rosalind Ivan). He
wears an apron at home to do domestic chores; this implies that his wife
Adele wears the pants in the family. At one point Chris is wielding a
butcher knife while he cuts a slab of meat for dinner. Adele mentions a
newspaper account of a wife in Queens being murdered by her husband.
When Chris turns toward Adele with the knife in his hand, she backs
away, exclaiming, “Get away with that knife—do you want to cut my
throat?” Chris is “obviously seething with murderous rage.” The scene
thus prefigures his stabbing of Kitty at the movie’s climax: “he clearly has
the capacity for committing murder.”34
Adele’s long-lost first husband, Homer Higgins, suddenly turns up.
He had been thought to have died a hero’s death while endeavoring to
rescue a drowning woman. In fact Homer is a corrupt ex-cop who had
80
Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) and Kitty March (Joan Bennett) in Scarlet Street, Fritz
Lang’s remake of Jean Renoir’s dark film La Chienne.
faked his own death in order to escape being arrested for taking bribes—
and to be rid of his nagging wife.
Chris realizes that he is now free to marry Kitty. He goes to Kitty’s
apartment to tell her the good news. Chris is so besotted with love for
Kitty that he is confident she will accept his marriage proposal; instead,
Kitty laughs him to scorn. Suddenly, it becomes painfully clear to Chris
that she has loved her boyfriend Johnny all along, and has never loved
him. Chris is so enraged by Kitty’s cruel rejection that he seizes an ice pick
from an ice bucket and brutally stabs her to death. Chris murders Kitty
“by stabbing at her ice-cold heart with the most appropriate of weapons,
an ice pick,” comments Julie Kirgo in Film Noir: The Encyclopedia. “He fi-
nally penetrates her long-withheld body.”35 Then he makes a hasty retreat
from her apartment without being seen.
A little later Johnny shows up, roaring drunk, and finds Kitty
dead; he is subsequently accused of murdering Kitty while he was in a
81
drunken stupor, since he is the only person known to have visited her
on that fateful night. Chris keeps silent while Johnny is convicted of
the homicide on circumstantial evidence and is executed in the elec-
tric chair. Chris’s involvement in the deaths of both Kitty and Johnny
brings in to relief the symbolic significance of his name, Chris Cross.
To begin with, when an individual double-crosses the same persons
who have double-crossed him, it is known in common parlance as a
“criss-cross.” Thus, by killing Kitty and allowing her lover to be elec-
trocuted for the crime, Chris has double-crossed the two people who
had double-crossed him. Chris’s revenge amounts to a criss-cross and
hence accounts for his name.
Later on, Chris is discharged by his employer for embezzling com-
pany funds; he eventually becomes a pathetic hobo. As he wanders the
streets aimlessly, he is haunted by Kitty’s voice saying, “He brought us
together, Johnny, forever.” Lang employs expressionistic technique by
having Kitty’s voice echoing inside Chris’s head. That Chris is haunted
by Kitty’s words suggests that he will remain obsessed to the end of his
days by the realization that by killing Kitty and allowing Johnny to be
executed for her death, he has unwittingly united them forever in the
hereafter.
Chris is reduced to living in a fleabag motel with a neon sign inces-
santly flickering outside his curtainless window. He is driven to make
an unsuccessful suicide attempt by trying to hang himself in an effort,
in effect, to execute himself for his crimes. He is then evicted from the
tawdry transient motel and winds up a homeless vagrant, wandering the
city streets and sleeping on park benches. Chris expiates his guilt, says
Donald Phelps, “by having to endure the nightly spooning of the loving
couple Kitty and Johnny. Pursued by this demonic duo, Chris . . . is seen
shuffling down the Bowery, a bewhiskered derelict.”36
On Christmas Eve Chris walks past the Dellarowe Gallery, where
his painting of Kitty (entitled Self-Portrait) has just been purchased by a
rich matron. “Here is the man who made it, and nobody knows it,” Lang
commented. “He goes away down the street, with Kitty’s voice ringing in
his ears.”37
As he diminishes into the distance, the pedestrians passing him on
the pavement simply evaporate into thin air. Lang employs this expres-
82
83
Notes
1. Brian McDonnell, “Fritz Lang,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 259.
2. Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang, trans. Gertrud Monder (New York: Da Capo,
1986), 239.
3. Alan Furst, “Introduction,” in Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
(New York: Penguin Books, 2005), xii. Although Greene’s novel is entitled The
Ministry of Fear, Lang’s film is called Ministry of Fear, omitting the initial article.
4. Joseph Finder, “Five Best Novels on Political Conspiracy,” Wall Street
Journal, August 30, 2009, 147.
5. Fritz Lang, interview by the author, Beverly Hills, June 9, 1974. All
quotations from Lang that are not attributed to another source are from this
interview.
6. Graham Greene, interview by the author, Antibes, France, July 23, 1977.
7. John Gallagher, “Seton I. Miller,” in International Dictionary of Films and
Filmmakers, vol. 4, 579–80.
8. Brian McDonnell, “Dan Duryea,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 176.
9. Sheri Biesen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 92, 93.
10. Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 116, 57.
11. Iain Sinclair, “M: Murder in the City,” Sight and Sound 20 (ns), no. 4
(April 2010): 44.
12. Paul Jensen, The Cinema of Fritz Lang (New York: Barnes, 1969), 148.
13. James Welsh, “Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear: Part I,” Literature/Film
Quarterly 2 (Fall 1974): 312.
14. Quentin Falk, Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene, rev.
ed. (New York: Quartet Books, 1984), 38.
15. Andrew Sarris, “Fritz Lang,” in The American Cinema: Directors and Direc-
tions, 1929–68, rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 65.
16. John Russell Taylor, Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigrés (New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983), 192.
17. Eisner, Fritz Lang, 239, 246.
18. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, 1991), 482.
19. Thomson, Have You Seen . . . ?, 556; see also Falk, Travels in Greeneland,
40.
20. Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang (London, British Film Institute,
2000), 308.
21. Rodney Farnesworth, “Dudley Nichols,” in International Dictionary of
Films and Filmmakers, vol. 4, 609.
22. Eisner, Fritz Lang, 257.
84
85
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ALFRED HITCHCOCK:
SPELLBOUND AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
A
lfred Hitchcock is not often labeled as a director of film noirs; he
is certainly not associated with noir to the same degree as Fritz
Lang. And yet some of his thrillers, like Spellbound and Strang-
ers on a Train, are richly designed noirs. As Hirsch maintains, Hitchcock,
like all noir directors, “is attracted to stories of confinement.” He depicts
in Spellbound, for example, how “the pressure of events forces the charac-
ters into hiding,” as their world becomes “a place of lurking threats and
potential pitfalls” in true noir fashion.1
Spellbound (1945)
Spellbound was the first Hollywood movie to employ psychiatry as its
fundamental premise. As a result, a number of critics have found the
film long and slow, and have ranked it with undistinguished Hitchcock
efforts of the period like The Paradine Case (1948) and Under Capricorn
(1949). Indeed, James Agee termed Spellbound in the Nation “Hitchcock’s
surprisingly disappointing thriller about psychoanalysis.”2 Consequently,
Spellbound deserves reassessment as a first-class film noir, since it focuses
on the dark recesses of the human mind in a way that places it securely
within the parameters of film noir.
Hitchcock made Spellbound at a time when Sigmund Freud’s titil-
lating grab bag of theories about sex and dreams, and the dramatic case
histories he utilized to exemplify them, gradually captured the public’s
87
88
89
90
Dr. Brulow (Michael Chekhov) and Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) interrogate John
Ballantyne (Gregory Peck) in Hitchcock’s Spellbound.
91
92
93
that the dapper, staid Dr. Murchison has turned out to be the proverbial
lunatic who has taken over an asylum.
Spellbound was a commercial triumph when it was finally released.
The public seemed to have willingly swallowed the mixture of murder
and psychoanalysis whole, but the critical reaction to the picture was less
enthusiastic. Manny Farber grumbled in the New Republic that the movie
unreeled in “slow motion,” and he parsed the plot as complicated and unbe-
lievable.15 Other reviewers said that the Freudian psychology in the film was
on the level of an article in a newspaper’s Sunday supplement, forgetting that
the mass audience was not familiar with the intricacies of psychoanalysis.
On the one hand, Spellbound has not worn well with the critical es-
tablishment over the years. Thus Pauline Kael wrote it off as “a confection
whipped up by jaded cooks.”16 On the other hand, Donald Spoto has at
least endorsed Spellbound in his book on Hitchcock, Spellbound by Beauty.
He reminds us that “once released, Spellbound never lost its popularity.”
Spoto writes that “the enduring appeal of Spellbound derives from “the
understated performance of Ingrid Bergman and the vulnerable charac-
terization by Gregory Peck.”17
Furthermore, Spellbound has at last been acknowledged, in retrospect,
as a trendsetter. After Spellbound, mental illness became a subject for a
series of popular film noirs.18 In fact, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train
presents a textbook case in Freudian psychology in its deeply disturbed
villain, Bruno Antony.19 Moreover, Strangers on a Train is based on a
novel by Patricia Highsmith; her biographer, Joan Schenkar, calls her “our
most Freudian novelist”—another link with Spellbound.20
Hitchcock first approached Dashiell Hammett to write the screenplay
for Strangers on a Train, but Hammett replied that his last screenplay was
for the film version of Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1943), and that
was his final effort at writing for the screen.21 Hitchcock then commissioned
Raymond Chandler, another major writer of crime fiction, to compose the
script for Strangers on a Train, based on the prose treatment of the scenario
Hitchcock and Whitfield Cook (Stage Fright) had prepared.
94
95
96
Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Walker take a breather while shooting the climactic merry-
go-round sequence in Strangers on a Train. Walker plays Bruno Antony, the role for which
he is most remembered.
97
Years later, after he had retired from the screen, Farley Granger came
out of the closet and acknowledged that he was homosexual. So Strang-
ers on a Train presents “a straight actor (Robert Walker) playing Bruno,
a homosexual,” while a homosexual actor (Farley Granger) plays Guy, a
heterosexual.35 (In fact, Laurents remembered having a fling with Granger
while Granger was filming Rope.) Joan Schenkar reflects that Highsmith,
who was herself a lesbian, could not have been aware that Granger was
homosexual, “nor could Granger have known what Pat Highsmith’s
sexual tastes were. And that was the underworld of homosexuality in mid-
century America.”36
Patricia Highsmith subsequently said that adapting Strangers on a Train
for film “gave Chandler fits.”37 Actually, it was Hitchcock, not Highsmith,
who gave Chandler fits. To his chagrin, Chandler discovered that Hitch-
cock seemed less preoccupied with the fundamental plausibility of the story
than with creating a series of striking visual scenes. On August 17, 1950,
he wrote to Ray Stark, his Hollywood agent, “Hitchcock seems to be a very
considerate and polite man, but he is full of little suggestions and ideas,
which have a cramping effect on a writer’s initiative. . . . He is always ready
to sacrifice dramatic logic (in so far as it exists) for the sake of a camera ef-
fect.” This is very hard on the screenwriter “because the writer not only has
to make sense out of the foolish plot if he can; but he has to do it in such a
way that any sort of camera shot that comes into Hitchcock’s mind can be
incorporated into it.”38 It was as if Hitchcock simply directed the picture in
his head, with little concern for the sorts of questions about narrative logic
and character development that troubled Chandler.
Chandler was particularly worried about the scene in which Guy ten-
tatively promises to take the life of Bruno’s father. Guy must convince a
reasonable percentage of the audience, Chandler recorded in his notes, that
“a nice young man might in certain circumstances murder a total stranger
just to appease a lunatic.” Otherwise the viewers would not be sufficiently
involved in the subsequent development of the plot. “The premise is that if
you shake hands with a maniac, you may have sold your soul to the devil.”
He concluded with some exasperation, “Or am I still crazy?”39
In the book Guy does in fact carry through his promise to murder
Bruno’s father, but Chandler contended that, given Guy’s status as the
likable hero of the movie, the film audience would not be prepared to
believe that he is capable of committing a homicide. So, in consultation
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and discharges a passenger. We see only the feet of a man wearing flashy
two-toned shoes getting out. Then a second taxi pulls up and unloads
another traveler: we see a pair of plain brown Oxfords emerging from the
cab. The ostentatious saddle shoes that belong to Bruno indicate that he is
a fancy dresser and perhaps a frivolous type. By contrast, the modest, dark
wing-tip shoes Guy is wearing suggest that he is a conservative dresser and
probably a more sensible individual.
Both men approach the train from opposite directions, and once the
train leaves the depot, there is a shot of intersecting railroad tracks, as the
train proceeds along its route. The crisscrossing rails foreshadow how the
lives of these two individuals will likewise converge. Soon after, the shoes
of Guy and Bruno accidentally touch as they cross their legs in the parlor
car. They take the occasion to strike up a casual conversation, which will
in fact lead Guy into a dangerous relationship with Bruno that Guy could
not have foreseen. This is precisely the sort of apparently harmless chance
meeting in film noir that can lead to unexplained consequences.
One of the tense scenes to which Chandler refers is that in which
Bruno follows Miriam, Guy’s estranged wife, and her two escorts to the
Leeland Lake Carnival. They all take a ride on the carousel and sing along
with the calliope as it plays “The Band Played On.” Then Bruno lures
Miriam away from her boyfriends to a secluded corner of the amusement
park and strangles her.
The murder is ironically accompanied by the distant music of the
merry-go-round’s calliope as it grinds out its cheery rendering of “The
Band Played On.” Horrified, we watch the murder as it is reflected in
Miriam’s glasses, which have fallen to the grass during her struggle with
Bruno. Photographed in this grotesquely distorted fashion, the strangling
looks as if it were being viewed in a fun-house mirror, another reminder
of the grimly incongruous carnival setting of the crime.
Given the fact that Guy subconsciously wanted to kill Miriam him-
self, he has in effect done so through the mediation of Bruno as his proxy;
to that extent Bruno embodies the underside of Guy’s own personality,
which underlines Highsmith’s statement that the good and evil forces
warring within Guy reflect the duality of human nature itself. In Strangers
on a Train we have a perfect example of a basically decent person who is
morally stained by capitulating in some degree to a wicked influence on
his life.
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That Guy has become, however inadvertently, allied with the per-
verse force for evil that Bruno represents is concretized in the scene in
which the two men stand on opposite sides of a wrought iron fence as
Bruno informs Guy that he has taken Miriam’s life. When a squad car
appears across the street, Guy instinctively joins Bruno on the same side
of the barrier and thus implicitly acknowledges his share of the guilt for
Miriam’s demise. In his essay on German expressionism in Strangers on
a Train, Peter Dellolio comments that the expressionistic imagery of the
iron gate implies that Guy, like Bruno, belongs behind bars.44 Moreover,
the image of Guy’s troubled face barred by the sinister shadows of the gate
grille signals his imprisonment by Bruno in an unholy alliance from which
he is for now unable to extricate himself.
This dark tale of obsession and murder clearly belongs to the realm
of film noir. The milieu of noir is essentially one of shadows and is exem-
plified in the scene just described. For the shadows that fall across Guy’s
figure imply the morbid, murky world in which he is imprisoned with
Bruno.
In Highsmith’s novel, as mentioned, Guy actually murders Bruno’s
father in order to stop Bruno from ceaselessly tormenting him to do it.
Guy is then wracked by guilt and eventually surrenders to the private
detective who has been investigating Miriam’s death. Bruno, meanwhile,
gets drunk during a party on a yacht, accidentally falls overboard, and
drowns. Guy reflects afterward that “he knew now that Bruno had borne
half his guilt.”45
It is clear, therefore, that Chandler kept Highsmith’s plot intact up to
and including Miriam’s murder. But when Chandler had Guy draw the
line at slaying Mr. Antony, Chandler parted company with the book in a
substantial way and took the story in another direction, after the halfway
mark. Chandler, who regularly submitted pages of the script to the studio
while he was writing the screenplay, mailed the final pages on September
26, 1950. His draft concludes with Bruno, wearing a straightjacket, con-
fined in a padded cell in a lunatic asylum.46 Chandler felt that some of the
scenes in his draft were admittedly “far too wordy,” but by and large he
thought he had done an acceptable job.47
Chandler was chagrined to learn that Hitchcock had borrowed Ben
Hecht’s assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, to revise his screenplay, with an as-
sist from Hitchcock himself and Barbara McKeon, the movie’s associate
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producer. After all, it was common in those days for scriptwriters to work
in teams, like piano movers, a practice Chandler deplored.
In any case, Ormonde sharpened the dialogue—which Chandler
himself had admitted was “too wordy”—and tightened the narrative struc-
ture of the script. In consultation with McKeon, Ormonde sometimes
would condense Chandler’s draft by eliminating whole sequences from
his screenplay; at other times she would simply combine two of his scenes
into one scene. On the other hand, Ormonde often incorporated Chan-
dler’s crackling dialogue into the final draft, which was dated October 18,
1950.48
Hitchcock confirmed that in the final screenplay Guy is painfully
aware that Miriam’s death has freed him of the two-timing wife he de-
spised. Consequently, Guy strives to bring Bruno to justice in the film
in order to expiate his own subconscious guilt for Miriam’s slaying, since
“Guy felt like murdering her himself.”
Guy is given the chance to redeem himself by pursuing Bruno back
to the scene of Miriam’s murder and forcing Bruno to confess the truth
about her death. As they wrestle with each other aboard the carousel, the
mechanism suddenly goes berserk, changing what is normally a harm-
less source of innocent pleasure into a whirling instrument of terror. The
carousel thus serves as still another reflection of Hitchcock’s dark vision
of our chaotic, topsy-turvy planet. As the runaway merry-go-round con-
tinues to swirl at top speed, its rendition of “The Band Played On” is also
accelerated to a dizzying tempo, and mingles macabrely with the screams
of the hysterical riders trapped on board. A mechanic at last manages to
bring it to a halt, but it stops so suddenly that the riders go sailing off in all
directions as the machinery collapses into a heap of smoldering wreckage,
bringing this sequence to a spectacular climax. Bruno dies in the debris,
unrepentant to the last.
The climactic amusement park scene has no parallel in Chandler’s
original draft nor in Highsmith’s novel. Hitchcock had recalled a
runaway carousel in a 1946 British novel entitled The Moving Toyshop
by Edmund Crispin (pen name of Robert Bruce Montgomery).
So Hitchcock decided to stage the climax of the film in the same
amusement park where Miriam had been murdered. He accordingly
opted to use the suspenseful fairground scene from Crispin’s book in
the film.
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The carousel scene in Strangers on a Train as filmed, with Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) and
Guy Haines (Farley Granger, dark blazer) locked in a death struggle.
In The Moving Toyshop the detective, Gervase Fen, slugs it out with
Sharman, the villain, aboard a merry-go-round that is out of control.
When the carousel finally comes to a halt, Fen is uninjured and Sharman
is hurt, but still alive. The question still remains as to why Hitchcock never
gave Crispin credit for the use of the fairground scene from his novel in
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the preview version Hitchcock had prepared for test screenings in Los An-
geles in March 1951, prior to the final version released to theaters.55 This
prerelease version contains two scenes that were revised in minor ways; but
another crucial scene differs noticeably from the theatrical version.
The preview version contains some dialogue in this scene Hitchcock
excised from the release prints. These lines occur in the scene in which Guy
and Bruno first meet aboard the train and point up Bruno’s homosexuality
in a rather overt fashion. For example, some of the additional lines of dia-
logue bring into relief Bruno’s stereotypical hatred of women, epitomized by
his utter contempt for Miriam, who has been unfaithful to Guy. “Let’s not
talk about it anymore,” Guy responds stoically. But Bruno is not to be dis-
suaded: “Women like that can sure make a lot of trouble for a man.” Bruno
then brings up the subject of revenge by expressing his theory that “every-
body is a potential murderer. Now, didn’t you ever feel that you wanted to
kill somebody? Say, one of those useless fellows that Miriam was playing
around with?” Guy brushes aside Bruno’s question, but Bruno persists in
following this line of thought by unveiling his plan that he could liquidate
Miriam, and Guy could reciprocate by disposing of Bruno’s father.
Bill Desowitz declares that the complete Bruno-Guy dialogue con-
tained in the earlier cut of the movie amplifies Bruno’s homosexual attitudes
by foregrounding his hatred for the opposite sex and his corresponding
preference for the members of his own sex. The result, says Desowitz, is
that “the complete Bruno-Guy sequence is richer and more outlandish”
than the subsequent compressed version; “it enlivens the exchange between
Bruno and Guy” and makes Bruno appear “more evil, more seductive.”56
In short, it appears that Hitchcock deleted this passage of dialogue,
amounting to two minutes of screen time, from the release prints because
of the strong homosexual content, which he assumed the industry film
censor would disapprove of. Hitchcock was aware that at the time that
he made Strangers on a Train, Joseph Breen, the censor, maintained that
homosexuality was too strong a subject for American motion pictures. He
was backed up by the Censorship Code, which stated flatly that any refer-
ence to “sex perversion” was forbidden. As Thomas Doherty comments,
Breen was committed to keeping homosexuals in “the celluloid closet.”57
Withal, the film was a phenomenal critical and popular success when
it premiered in July 1951, with reviewers toasting the film as a top-notch
thriller. One critic even mentioned how subtly the film appeals to the outlaw
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lurking in all of us. There were some dissenters. More than one critic called
the plot implausible, while Manny Farber went much further when he called
Strangers on a Train “fun to watch, if you check your intelligence at the box
office.” Farber contended that Hitchcock cleverly masked the movie’s im-
plausibilities “with a honey-smooth patina of sophistication . . . and general
glitter”—a remark that is in complete harmony with Chandler’s criticism of
the film.58
Be that as it may, Malcolm Jones, a contemporary critic, writes that
the secret of the film’s success is fairly simple: “At the heart of nearly all
of Hitchcock’s movies, and certainly his greatest ones, are ordinary people
caught up in circumstances they can neither explain nor control.”59 That,
in a nutshell, is what Strangers on a Train is all about.
Some cinephiles claim to have discovered that, twelve minutes into
Strangers on a Train, a previously unnoticed figure standing behind Miriam
in the early scene in the music store where she is employed is Patricia High-
smith herself, looking into a notebook. But Highsmith was twenty-nine
when the film was shot, and the lady standing behind Miriam is clearly mid-
dle aged. Besides, Highsmith declined Hitchcock’s invitation to visit the set
during shooting.60 So there is no Highsmith cameo in Strangers on a Train.
Patricia Highsmith stated in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction that
she considered Strangers on a Train “one of the best of the films” made
from her novels.61 In fact, when she was asked before her death in 1995
which of the movies from her work she preferred, she had not changed her
mind, largely because of Robert Walker’s peerless performance as the silky
psychopath.62 His Bruno is on a par with the legendary villains of film noir.
In addition, Strangers on a Train can be favorably compared to An-
thony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), in which Matt Damon
plays a sly homosexual psychopath reminiscent of Bruno Antony. In fact,
the New Yorker affirms that “the prototype of Ripley was Bruno in Strang-
ers on a Train, immortalized by Robert Walker in Hitchcock’s film.”63
Minghella’s film will be considered in chapter 13 as a neo-noir.
Notes
1. Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 142.
2. James Agee, Film Writings and Selected Journalism, ed. Michael Sragow
(New York: Library of America, 2005), 209.
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107
24. Gordon Gow, “The Fifties,” in Hollywood: 1920–70, ed. Peter Cowie
(New York: Barnes, 1977), 184.
25. “Hitchcock: Three Nightmares,” Newsweek, January 24, 1966, 89.
26. John Russell Taylor, Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (New
York: Da Capo, 1996), 214.
27. MacShane, Life of Raymond Chandler, 171.
28. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1985), 193.
29. Roger Ebert, The Great Movies II (New York: Broadway Books, 2005),
429.
30. McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, 442.
31. Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (New York: Norton, 1993), 34.
32. Jane Sloan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Guide to References and Resources, rev. ed.
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 239.
33. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. (New
York: Harper and Row, 1987), 94.
34. Leitch, The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, 322.
35. McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, 451.
36. Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art
of Patricia Highsmith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 276.
37. Patricia Highsmith, “Introduction,” in The World of Raymond Chandler,
ed. Marian Gross (New York: A and W, 1978), 5.
38. Taylor, Hitch, 215.
39. Raymond Chandler, “Notes about the Screenplay of Strangers on a Train,”
in Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine
Walker (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 133–35.
40. Robert Corber, “Hitchcock’s Washington and ‘the Homosexual Menace,’”
in Hitchcock’s America, ed. Freedman and Millington, 99.
41. Paul Jensen, “Film Noir and the Writer: Raymond Chandler,” Film Com-
ment 10, no. 6 (November–December 1974): 25.
42. Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed by the author, New York, May 4,
1974. Unless specifically noted otherwise, any quotations from Alfred Hitchcock
in this chapter are from the author’s conversation with him.
43. Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (New York: Boyars, 1994), 9.
44. Peter Dellolio, “Expressionist Themes in Strangers on a Train,” Literature/
Film Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 262.
45. Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, 264.
46. Raymond Chandler, Strangers on a Train: A Screenplay (Los Angeles:
Warner Brothers, 1950), 101. Extensive revisions to the screenplay by Czenzi
Ormonde are not included in this version of the script.
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109
w
GEORGE CUKOR: A DOUBLE LIFE
BILLY WILDER: SUNSET BOULEVARD
G
eorge Cukor is chiefly known for his stylish, sophisticated
romantic comedies like Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia
Story (1940), both with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
He dipped into film noir most notably on two occasions, with Gaslight
(1944), a gothic thriller with Ingrid Bergman, and A Double Life (1947),
a psychological drama with Ronald Colman. Of the two, Gaslight is still
considered an important noir, while A Double Life is unfortunately not
held in similar esteem.
111
strangles a prostitute. As the publicity layouts for the film declared, Tony
is an actor “consumed by the fires of his own greatness.” Putting it another
way, Stanislavsky baldly stated, “When an actor begins to believe the part
he’s playing, fire him!”1
The dark, brooding atmosphere of the film, coupled with the equally
cynical, somber vision of life reflected in this tale of obsession, despair,
and death, marks the movie as an example of film noir. Like Spellbound
and other film noirs of the period, A Double Life dramatizes mental illness
as a motive for murder.
Noir was flourishing when Cukor filmed A Double Life. The grim
realism of noir is reflected in the location sequences shot around New
York City, so many of which ominously take place under cover of dark-
ness. Cukor insisted with the front office at Universal-International that
he would have to do some location work in New York to “get away from
the studio back lot,” and to give the picture documentary-like realism.2 He
used the old Empire theater, which was demolished in 1953, to shoot all
of the scenes in the film that take place on the stage.
Cukor cast Ronald Colman against type as Anthony John. The ur-
bane Colman usually played “the mature, amused romantic,” as when he
enacted the judge in George Stevens’s Talk of the Town (1942).3 Cukor
prodded Colman “out of his shell of British reserve to get a more expan-
sive and demonic performance than he had ever given.”4
Colman was somewhat insecure about playing the scenes from Shake-
speare’s play that occur in the film, since he had not performed on the
stage for many years. So Cukor, Garson Kanin recalled, “brought in the
classical stage actor Walter Hampden from New York” to coach Colman
in the Shakespeare scenes.5
“While I don’t think he was as great an Othello as Lawrence Olivier
was on the stage,” Cukor commented, “I thought it was a respectable try.
. . . I thought Colman spoke some of the lines very movingly.”6
Cukor hired Shelley Winters to play the blowsy, buxom, and volup-
tuous waitress in A Double Life. Winters had mostly played small parts in
some forgettable movies up to this point, but her role as Pat Kroll in the
present film proved to be a breakout performance for her. Dave Kehr says
that the femme fatale in a noir film is “usually a bottle blonde, stuffed
into a tight sweater that outlines her oddly conical breasts. Her mouth is
wide, painted, and clamped on a cigarette, her eyes burn too brightly.” She
112
113
Signe Hasso as Brita and Ronald Colman as Anthony John, a deeply disturbed actor, in
A Double Life.
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115
from the murder scene of Othello, which was shown in performance earlier
in the film. Tony, now transported into this scene of the play, hears the
voice of Desdemona request him to extinguish the lamp in her bedroom
before she drifts off to sleep. In his role as Othello, Tony quenches instead
the life within Pat Kroll, thinking all the while that it is Desdemona that
he is sending off to sleep forever.
While Tony throttles the life out of this wretched creature, an ele-
vated train thunders by the window of Pat’s squalid flat; its nerve-jangling
clamor is a fit accompaniment for the ugly violence taking place inside.
Indeed, this unsettling noise is more effective than any background music
could have been at this point.
The creative use of sound in this sequence is matched by equally cre-
ative camerawork. As Pat falls backward on the bed in death, the camera
catches in close-up her hand pulling across the foot of the bed the curtain
that separates her bedroom from the rest of her scruffy little flat. Her action
recalls the way in which Desdemona in a similar fashion reaches up from
her bed and closes the drapery of her sumptuous four-poster as she breathes
her last. These complementary images accentuate still more the close paral-
lel between Pat’s murder in real life and that of Desdemona in the play.
Tony, increasingly identifying with Othello, becomes insanely jeal-
ous of press agent Bill Friend, whom he suspects of having an affair with
Brita. He finally attacks Bill and nearly strangles him—while muttering
some of Othello’s lines. Bill calls him a maniac; and thereafter Bill be-
comes increasingly convinced that Tony is insane. Indeed, Bill picks up
on Tony’s attempt to strangle him while quoting Othello’s dialogue and
recalls that the tabloid press has linked Pat Kroll’s murder with Othello’s
strangling Desdemona in the current production of the play. With that,
Bill steadily builds up a convincing case, based on circumstantial evidence,
that points to Tony as Pat Kroll’s killer. He takes his case to the police,
who arrange to arrest Tony following a performance of Othello.
The movie ends with a striking bit of visual imagery. After the police
have discovered, with the help of Bill, that the actor is the killer they are
after, they go to the theater and wait for him backstage while he finishes
what is to be his last performance. Once more merging illusion with real-
ity, Tony plays Othello’s suicide scene with a real dagger, and ends his
own life as he ends the play. Tony expires with Brita’s name on his lips.
Like Othello, he is “a man that loved not wisely but too well.”15 The film’s
116
final, unforgettable image is that of the curtains parting to allow the star
to take his bows—while the spotlight reveals only an empty stage. The
slow dimming of the spotlight beam into darkness thus signals the fading
away of a once-great star in the theatrical firmament.
“When I discussed the suicide scene with Ronnie Colman,” Cukor
remembered, “I said that a light should come into Tony’s eyes just before
he dies,” as if his entire life is illuminated in his eyes at the moment of
death. “When I looked at the rushes the next day there it was! He really
knew how to act for the camera.”
Tony’s suicide in A Double Life recalls a similar scene in Fritz Lang’s
silent movie Spione (Spies, 1928). At the conclusion of Spies, Haghi, an
enemy agent, is performing on stage as Nemo the clown. He notices the
police in the wings, waiting to arrest him after his performance. Rather
than submit to capture, Haghi substitutes real bullets for the blanks he
usually employs in his act, and kills himself on stage while laughing ma-
niacally. The audience assumes that this is all part of his performance and
erupts into wild applause as the curtain falls and the movie ends.
The obvious parallels between the suicide of Tony and that of Haghi
were nevertheless a coincidence, since Garson Kanin indicated that he
and Ruth Gordon were not familiar with Lang’s film, which had not been
widely seen in this country at the time they wrote their script.
The Motion Picture Academy conferred an Oscar on Colman for his
performance in A Double Life. “The statuette,” Colman biographer Sam
Frank notes, “was as much a lifetime achievement award as it was sincere
applause for a fine job of acting.”16
The film was a huge hit and garnered enthusiastic reviews. Variety
stated, “George Cukor’s direction has found all of the merit in the char-
acters written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.” Variety’s comments
refer not only to Colman, but to Shelley Winters, Edmond O’Brien, and
Signe Hasso, all of whom did “impressive work” in the movie.17
The enthusiasm for A Double Life, displayed at the time of its original
release, cooled over the years; and the film has not continued to be ap-
preciated by film historians as the grand film noir that it is. But A Double
Life is a film still worth watching, and it has attracted on DVD some of
the wider audience it deserves. As Tony Thomas, one of the movie’s few
champions, states in The Film of the Forties, “Even for those with little
interest in the theater, it is an arresting and disturbing film.”18
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If George Cukor’s A Double Life centers on an aging actor who goes in-
sane and murders his lover, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard focuses on a has-
been actress who goes crazy and slays her inamorata. Yet the two movies are
rarely if ever mentioned as companion pieces, even though they were made
only three years apart. Both films depict a noir character who is haunted “by
deep psychological scars which lead to . . . psychotic behavior.”19
Although Sunset Boulevard is revered as one of Wilder’s most respected
films, it is seldom mentioned in studies of film noir. William Relling asserts
that Sunset Boulevard “is more of a gothic horror story than a noir story,
since my personal definition of noir demands that as a key component of the
plot there has to be a crime committed.”20 Brian McDonnell responds that,
admittedly, “almost all noir scenarios contain a crime. Technically, Sunset
Boulevard fits this prescription because it certainly begins with a man’s body
being recovered by police from a swimming pool.” The movie goes on to
depict the shadowy world of self-deceit and exploitation that “embodies the
thematic preoccupations of film noir.”21
The picture also resonates with the theme that pervades Wilder’s
films. As Wilder himself formulated that theme: “People will do any-
thing for money—except some people, who will do almost anything for
money.”22 Joe Gillis, the antihero of Sunset Boulevard, it becomes appar-
ent, “will do almost anything for money.”
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Cukor told me that he assured Wilder that Swanson could play a movie
goddess hoping for a comeback convincingly, since at that point she was a
Hollywood has-been. But Swanson did not withdraw into seclusion after
her Hollywood days. By the time Wilder wanted her for his movie, she
had moved to New York and become the hostess of a local TV talk show.
Another actor on Wilder’s wish list was Erich von Stroheim, whom
he wanted to play Norma’s butler, Max von Mayerling. Like Stroheim,
Max had been a director of silent films; in fact, Max had directed Norma
Desmond in a silent picture, just as Stroheim had directed Gloria Swan-
son in a silent movie. But, like Stroheim, Max’s directorial career did not
survive the coming of sound. Max winds up as Norma’s dignified butler
and last admirer.
At first, Stroheim wanted no part of the role, because Max was a relic
of Hollywood’s past—like Stroheim himself. Stroheim finally accepted
the part, though he thought it demeaned him. Nevertheless, forever after
he referred to the role of Max as “that goddamned butler.”24
In addition, Wilder got Cecil B. DeMille to play himself in Sunset
Boulevard. In the film’s scenario DeMille had directed Norma as a young
actress, when in reality DeMille had directed Gloria Swanson in films
like Male and Female (1919) “in the old days.” DeMille appeared in the
sequence in Sunset Boulevard in which Norma visits him on the set of
Samson and Delilah (1949). Actually DeMille had just finished shooting
his picture. “We used his sets when Norma visits him,” which were still
standing, Wilder remembered.25
In the screenplay Wilder and Brackett mention that Norma has Max
screen “one of Norma’s old silent pictures” for Joe.26 Wilder told me, “I
used a clip from Queen Kelly in the course of Sunset Boulevard,” in the
scene in which Norma shows Joe one of her vintage films. “It was an
interesting tie-in, that the clip of Gloria Swanson as a younger film star
was actually from the one picture in which she was directed by Stroheim,
who was playing Norma’s former director in Sunset Boulevard. This added
a more genuine flavor to the film.”
When I asked Wilder why he substituted his own intertitle for the one
in the scene he was using from Queen Kelly, he replied, “I couldn’t use the in-
tertitle for the one in the scene he was using from Queen Kelly because Queen
Kelly was a movie starring Gloria Swanson, while the clip being projected
in Sunset Boulevard was supposedly from a film starring Norma Desmond.”
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120
the Los Angeles County Morgue. Avram Fleishman, in his book Nar-
rative Films, wonders whether the morgue sequence was ever filmed.28
Indeed it was. As a matter of fact, Paramount archivists discovered some
of the footage of this sequence and included it as a special feature in the
2008 release of Sunset Boulevard on DVD.
The morgue prologue originally appeared after the opening credits.
The sequence shows the dead body of a young man named Joe Gillis
being wheeled into the morgue. He then starts to recount to his fellow
corpses the tale of how he came to die. But preview audiences found the
sequence ludicrous rather than sad, and so Wilder scrapped it.
Many film historians assume that Wilder devised a whole new
opening sequence, on which he expended additional time and money
filming. But that is not the case. Cinematographer John Seitz testifies
that the footage of Joe’s corpse floating in Norma’s pool, while the
police fish him out, had already been shot for use toward the end of
the film. “We already had both,” that is, the morgue sequence, plus the
scene at the pool.29 Wilder himself stated, “No new footage was shot.”
He simply added a voice-over narration by Joe Gillis, telling posthu-
mously of the events leading up to his demise; and his story makes up
the bulk of the film.30
Paramount hosted a full-dress preview screening at the studio in April
1950, to which three hundred members of the Hollywood industry were
invited. Wilder was particularly concerned about how the film community
would accept the picture.
After the opening credits, in which the film’s title is seen stenciled in
wedge-shaped letters on a curb, the police are shown swarming around a
swimming pool. The pool is on the grounds of an immense baroque estate
on Sunset Boulevard; it is just after dawn. A corpse is floating facedown in
the pool. The dead man is Joe Gillis, who begins to tell the filmgoer his
story, voice-over on the sound track. Joe is thus narrating the film “from
beyond the grave,” writes Avram Fleishman, “from the detached perspec-
tive of the dead.”31 This is one of the few instances in film history wherein
a movie’s narration is supplied by a dead person.
The film’s dark, morbid atmosphere implies that Sunset Boulevard,
like A Double Life, is in the film noir style. Joe narrates the film “in the
tough, florid style of a film noir hero,” says Terrence Rafferty, “that is, in
the defensive voice of a born loser.”32
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122
“a boom microphone passes behind her, disturbing her hat and casting a
shadow over her face. . . . Norma scowls at the microphone, the very thing
that ended her era.”34
Norma mentions to DeMille that the studio has been calling her
urgently, but it is not, as she thinks, about making her Salome movie; it
is merely to arrange to borrow her car, a venerable Isotta-Fraschini with
leopard-skin upholstery, for a Crosby picture. “DeMille manages to sup-
press this fact, to forestall her humiliation.”35
On New Year’s Eve Joe has a quarrel with Norma, who is drunk; he
walks out on her. But Max soon phones him, to inform him that Norma
has attempted suicide; so Joe returns to the house and finds Norma ly-
ing in her gondola-shaped bed, and they are reconciled. At the stroke of
midnight, as the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” waft into the room, “she
reaches up and pulls him toward her with nails that look like talons,” com-
ments Morris Dickstein.36 Joe has indeed fallen into the hands of a typical
femme fatale of film noir.
Cecil B. DeMille plays himself in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, with Gloria Swanson as Norma
Desmond, the role that crowned her career.
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The film’s title refers to the passing of the old Hollywood: it recalls the
tragic lives of has-been film stars like Norma Desmond, whose careers in
silent pictures were eclipsed by the advent of sound. In effect, the sun set on
their careers when they failed to make a successful transition to sound films.
The decaying swimming pool on Norma’s estate, in which John Gilbert
swam ten thousand midnights ago, is a relic of the grandeur of Norma’s
long-lost heyday as a superstar in Hollywood. It is cracked and empty at the
film’s start, but Norma subsequently restores the pool and fills it when Joe
enters her life. Norma’s restoration of the pool symbolizes how she hopes to
revive her lost youth and to relive her past through Joe by arresting the decay
of her own life. “I picked up the image of the pool from a Raymond Chan-
dler story: Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool,” said Wilder.
“Still, I didn’t conceive the pool so much as a metaphor for Norma’s
personal decay, but as an authentic depiction of the way a woman like
Norma, living in the past, would allow her property to slide in to ruin,”
Wilder explained. “Even today there are old Hollywood estates with
empty swimming pools, with rats running around in them, and cracked
tennis courts with sagging nets. That is part of our community; people are
up, and then they are down.”
Norma’s romance with Joe is doomed to be short lived; as time goes
on, Joe finds it intolerable to allow himself to be supported by a wealthy,
aging woman. He realizes that he is an opportunist who has sold himself
to the highest bidder. He thus reflects Wilder’s favorite theme: Joe can no
longer bring himself to do anything for money.
Joe strikes up a relationship with Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), an-
other aspiring screenwriter. She sees one sequence in a scenario of Joe’s,
entitled Dark Windows, to be “moving and true.” She is confident that
it could be made in to a screenplay about “teachers and their threadbare
lives.” Unlike Norma’s script for her creaky melodrama, Joe and Betty are
writing a screenplay that is vital and compelling. After Joe catches her
enthusiasm he works on it surreptitiously with Betty several nights a week.
But Norma inevitably discovers that Joe is seeing Betty and becomes in-
sanely jealous.
One fateful night Joe finally summons the courage to tell Norma that
he is terminating their sordid liaison once and for all. “Norma, you’re a
woman of fifty,” Joe tells her. “There is nothing tragic about being fifty,
unless you try to be twenty-five!” When she threatens to kill herself if he
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125
Erich von Stroheim and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, Wilder’s dark fable about
Hollywood.
but an old-time producer told her, “She can’t show herself, Gloria. She’s
overcome; we all are.”
But Louis B. Mayer, the pompous chief executive of MGM, threw a
tantrum in the lobby, Wilder remembers. Then, spying Wilder, he shook
his pudgy fist at him, denouncing him as a disgrace to the industry. “You
have dirtied the nest. You should be kicked out of this country, tarred and
feathered, you goddamned foreigner son-of-a-bitch.” In the heat of the
moment Mayer apparently lost sight of the fact that he too was an im-
migrant, having been born in Minsk, Russia. By Wilder’s own testimony,
he responded to Mayer in kind. “Yes, I directed this picture,” Wilder said;
“Mr. Mayer, why don’t you go fuck yourself?!”38
Discussing Mayer’s tirade later, Wilder insisted that Sunset Boulevard
“was not anti-Hollywood,” as Mayer contended. Joe Gillis was a hack and
Betty Schaefer tried “to put Joe back on the right track,” Wilder explained.
“I don’t say anything derogatory about pictures” in this film.
Very few critics panned Sunset Boulevard when it premiered at the
Radio City Music Hall on August 10, 1950; admittedly one reviewer
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127
Taken together, A Double Life and Sunset Boulevard are two film noirs
that offer the darkest accounts of Broadway theater and the Hollywood
film industry on record.
Notes
1. Page Cook, “The Sound Track: A Double Life,” 33, no. 1 (January 1982): 53.
2. George Cukor, interview by the author, Los Angeles, August 18,
1980. All quotations from Cukor that are not attributed to another source are
from this interview.
3. Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 176.
4. Sam Frank, Ronald Colman: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1997), 20.
5. Garson Kanin, interview by the author, Beverly Hills, March 4, 1981.
6. Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, “George Cukor,” in George Cukor:
Interviews, ed. Robert Emmet Long (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2001), 58.
7. Dave Kehr, “Dangerous to Know,” New York Times, February 7, 2010,
sec. 2:14.
8. Brian McDonnell, “Edmond O’Brien,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 343.
9. Crowther, Film Noir, 65.
10. Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor: A Double Life (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1991), 196.
11. Emmanuel Levy, George Cukor: Master of Elegance (New York: William
Morrow, 1999), 166.
12. Michael Kanin, interview by the author, Beverly Hills, July 10, 1987.
13. Cook, “The Sound Track,” 54.
14. Cook, “The Sound Track,” 53.
15. William Shakespeare, Othello, V.ii.351.
16. Frank, Ronald Colman, 20.
17. “A Double Life,” in Variety Film Reviews, vol. 7, n.p.
18. Thomas, The Films of the Forties, 222.
19. Silver and Ursini, The Noir Style, 27.
20. William Relling, “A Walk on the Wilder Side,” in The Big Book of Noir,
39.
21. Brian McDonnell, “Sunset Boulevard,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 398.
22. Billy Wilder, interview by the author, Hollywood, September 30,
1975. Any quotations from Wilder that are not attributed to another source are
from this interview.
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w
ROBERT SIODMAK: THE KILLERS (1946)
DON SIEGEL: THE KILLERS (1964)
R
obert Siodmak is a puzzling paradox among film noir directors.
He was “a talented director with an unquestionable flair for film
noir,” according to Jean Pierre Coursodon. Yet “little has been
written about him,” despite the fact that films like The Killers, derived
from the Hemingway short story, are quintessential noir, featuring a
doom-ridden hero.1
In Ernest Hemingway’s short story cycle about Nick Adams, young
Nick comes under the temporary influence of some older men, most no-
tably Ole Andreson in “The Killers.” Under the spell of such men Nick
gradually grows in maturity from adolescence to young manhood; for it
is by observing their behavior under stress that he learns how to face the
harsher and more perplexing aspects of adult life.
“The Killers” has been filmed twice in Hollywood. The role of Nick
Adams is slighted in the first film and is nonexistent in the second. The
reason that Nick appears to be fairly expendable in the two film adapta-
tions of “The Killers” is that in this particular short story he is not so much
an actor as an observer.
As Hemingway conceived the story, the title documents the young
man’s first direct encounter with the forces of evil, as represented by the
two paid assassins from Chicago who invade a small town to murder an
ex-prizefighter called Ole Andreson, whose nickname is “Swede.” Nick is
shattered by the way in which the killers have methodically gone about the
business of tracking down their victim, and then announce with total impu-
nity their intent to murder Swede in the diner where Nick is having supper.
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in his own right of such crime melodramas as The Maltese Falcon, received
no screen credit for collaborating on the screenplay of The Killers because
technically he was under contract at the time to Warner Bros. and could
not officially be credited with a screenplay for Universal.
Veiller made some contributions to the script of The Killers around
the same time he wrote the screenplay for Orson Welles’s The Stranger,
which is treated later in this book. “Incidentally,” Siodmak continued,
“Hemingway’s original was only eleven pages, which was used for the
opening. The rest was invented.”6
The opening sequence of the 1946 film transfers Hemingway’s short
story to the screen virtually intact in the opening moments of the film. The
balance of the screenplay veers into the realm of film noir. Indeed, the movie
presents a typical film noir milieu, represented by tawdry cabarets, stale ciga-
rette smoke, naked lightbulbs, and dark alleys. Colin McArthur writes in
Underworld USA that Siodmak often invites his audience into the dark and
sinister film noir world of his crime melodramas by a forward tracking shot
seen from the filmgoer’s point of view, and The Killers is no exception to this
rule: “In the opening of The Killers, the point of view is from the back seat
of the killers’ car as it hurtles through the darkness towards the little town of
Brentwood, New Jersey, where Swede waits to be killed.”7
The darkness that surrounds them until they enter the brightly lit
diner seems to presage that during their brief stay in town the powers of
darkness will hold sway. The two gunmen (William Conrad and Charles
McGraw) casually announce that they plan to kill Pete Lunn (the alias
Ole Andreson has been using) when he comes in for supper. They then
proceed to hold Nick, George the counterman, and Sam the cook at bay.
When Swede does not appear, they disappear once more into the darkness
from which they had materialized a few minutes before.
Nick rushes to the boardinghouse where Ole Andreson (Burt Lan-
caster) lives to warn him, but it is already too late. The powers of darkness
are already enveloping Swede, who lies on his bed in the murky shadows
of his shabby room. He is aware that his death has only been temporar-
ily postponed by his failure to appear in the diner for supper. After Nick
departs, Swede continues to stare at the door of his room, until it suddenly
bursts open and the two gunmen, minions of darkness seen only in sil-
houette, blast away at the camera, which then cuts to Swede’s hand slowly
sliding down a brass bedpost in death.
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Aside from a few minor discrepancies, the film has up to this point
been fairly faithful to its literary source. But the script omits the final
scene of the short story, which takes place back at the diner, where Nick’s
brief conversation with George and Sam makes it clear what a traumatic
experience this brush with evil has been for Nick; for his helplessness to
save Swede fills him with horror and grief. It is this scene that substanti-
ates the fact that Hemingway’s short story really centers on Nick’s reaction
to what has happened and is not principally about Ole Andreson at all.8
Asked by boxer Gene Tunney about the real-life counterpart of Ole
Andreson, Hemingway replied that it was Andre Andreson, who had
agreed to throw a fight, but then went on to win it. “All afternoon he had
rehearsed taking a dive,” Hemingway explained, “but during the fight he
had instinctively thrown a punch he didn’t mean to.” The fighter whom
Andre Andreson decked in a 1916 bout was Jack Dempsey. Andreson was
shot to death in a Chicago tavern in 1926, the year Hemingway wrote
“The Killers.”9 In the film Swede is murdered, not for failing to throw a
fight, but because he allegedly double-crossed some gangsters.
The short story serves as a prologue to the rest of the screenplay. Huston
constructed a cleverly conceived backstory that centers on Jim Reardon, an
insurance investigator who is making an official inquiry into Swede’s death
because Swede carried a policy with Atlantic Casualty, Reardon’s agency.
Hemingway’s “hard-boiled dialogue and laconic style” pervades much of the
additional material appended to Hemingway’s story by Huston.10
According to Siodmak biographer Deborah Alpi, “Huston was solely
responsible for the final draft of the script.”11 Since Huston composed the
screenplay for The Maltese Falcon, it appears that he modeled Reardon in
The Killers on Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. As played by Edmond
O’Brien, Reardon’s cocky assertiveness marks him as an intrepid Sam
Spade figure, “cast in the mold of the hard-boiled detective.”12 Reardon is
as grimly determined to solve the mystery of Swede’s murder as Spade was
to unravel the mystery surrounding the slaying of Miles Archer.
At times Reardon talks like Spade. Thus Reardon, almost in spite of
himself, is fascinated by the manner in which Kitty Collins had slyly ma-
nipulated Swede into participating in a payroll robbery some time back;
he comments, “I would like to have known the old Kitty Collins”—a wry
remark worthy of Sam Spade. “And it’s no knock on O’Brien’s perfor-
mance,” comments Jonathan Lethem, “to savor his meticulous imitation
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135
Hellinger, who had a knack for recognizing talent, selected two virtual
unknowns to star in The Killers. The movie was Burt Lancaster’s debut
film. “In The Killers I was a big, dumb Swede,” Lancaster remembered;
“there was no need to be highly ostentatious. For a new actor this is much
easier than something histrionic.”15
Lancaster went on to play in several more film noirs, because he so
perfectly embodied the vulnerability of the classic noir antihero who is
victimized by a femme fatale. Similarly, Ava Gardner, who had previously
played only minor parts in movies, became the iconic figure of the femme
fatale in other noir films after her portrayal of the devious, remorseless
Kitty Collins in The Killers.
In contrast to Lancaster and Gardner, Edmond O’Brien was an estab-
lished star when he took the part of the dogged claims investigator, Jim
Reardon, who dominates the movie after the prologue. O’Brien would
continue to play significant roles in several more noirs, including A Double
Lily (Virginia Christine), Ole Andreson (Burt Lancaster), and Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) in
Robert Siodmak’s film of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers.
136
Life. So too Albert Dekker was a pro at this point in his career, and often
played strong, menacing types like crime boss Big Jim Colfax in The Kill-
ers. And Sam Levene was typically cast as a soft-tough cop, as he was in
After the Thin Man, before taking a similar part in the present film, that
of Lieutenant Sam Lubinsky.
Behind the camera there was director of photography Elwood
“Woody” Bredell, who had worked with Siodmak on Phantom Lady. In
The Killers Bredell presents a virtual inventory of noir cinematography.
Because Bredell employed low-key lighting throughout the film, he cut
back drastically on lighting the sets, reducing the number of arc lamps,
especially for night scenes.
Accordingly a sinister atmosphere was created in certain interiors by
infusing them with menacing shadows looming on the walls, which gave
a Gothic quality to the faces. All in all, Bredell’s chiaroscuro cinematogra-
phy, with its night-shrouded streets and alleys, ominous corridors, and dark
archways, gave the picture a rich texture. After being coached by Siodmak,
Bredell later observed, “he could light a football field with a match.”16
The Killers reflects “a moody intensity that is reminiscent of the German
Expressionism of Fritz Lang, whose work heavily influenced Siodmak,”
according to Borde and Chaumeton.17 But Siodmak also favored location
shooting. Thus the present movie combined dark, brooding studio sets with
actual locations. For example, the daring payroll robbery at a Hackensack
factory was filmed on location in a documentary style, and photographed in
a single, continuous take that was as smoothly executed as the crime itself.
The shot begins from the point where the gang, disguised as work-
men, enter the main gate of the Prentiss Hat Company. The camera then
peers through the window of the payroll office as the mobsters take the
money. It then rises to a high angle, as they exchange gunfire with guards
on the factory grounds; the camera then proceeds to film their escape out
the main gate. The narrator of this flashback is Kenyon, Reardon’s boss;
he comments that one of the guards “fell to the ground with a bullet in
the groin.” This underscores the notion that the movie portrays a chaotic
world prone to eruptions of grisly violence.
In keeping with the conventions of film noir, the movie is character-
ized throughout by an air of grim, unvarnished realism, typified by the
payroll robbery sequence. Siodmak photographed the scene with a harsh,
newsreel-like quality.
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139
140
“I guess our luck’s run out, Kitty.” Reardon watches Colfax die and taunts
Kitty, saying, “Your would-be fall guy is dead.” Colfax simply would not
lie to the cops with his dying breath by declaring Kitty’s innocence. “In
classic film noir,” Wager comments, “the femme fatale’s actions almost
always prove fatal to her as well as to her male victims.”27
James Agee opined in his notice of The Killers in the Nation that the
dialogue Huston concocted for the screenplay, “though generally skill-
ful and talented, isn’t within miles of Hemingway’s in quality.”28 On the
contrary, Hemingway wrote in a 1959 essay on the films of his fiction
that he much admired Huston’s work. “It’s a good picture, and the only
good picture ever made of a story I wrote. One reason for that is that John
Huston wrote the script.”29
Mary Hemingway told me that Hemingway himself was pleased with
the movie. “The only film made from his work of which Ernest entirely
approved was The Killers.”30 The studio presented him with a print of the
film, and he frequently ran it for guests at his home in Cuba, although he
invariably fell asleep after the first reel—the only portion of the picture
based directly on his story.
Hemingway scholar Melissa Harmon writes that Siodmak’s Killers
is a “truly moving and terrifying adaptation of one of Hemingway’s best
stories.”31 Moreover, Siodmak’s film has been incorporated into the group
of films preserved by the National Film Registry at the Library of Con-
gress. Daniel Eagan states in his book on the registry movies that Siod-
mak films like The Killers offer “a compelling and seductive equivalent” to
hard-boiled fiction.32
In 1952 Siodmak reteamed with Burt Lancaster for his last Hol-
lywood movie, a swashbuckler entitled The Crimson Pirate. He then re-
turned to Europe and eventually settled in his native Germany in 1954,
where he continued to direct brisk thrillers. In 1959 Siodmak made a
film in Britain, The Rough and the Smooth (U.S. title: Portrait of a Sinner).
It was actually a film noir featuring Nadja Tiller as a calculating femme
fatale who betrays three men—including William Bendix (The Glass Key),
whom she drives to suicide. But this movie is no match for Siodmak’s
American noirs.
Siodmak made some outstanding noirs in Hollywood, as did Wilder
and Zinnemann. (Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and Zinnemann’s Act of Vio-
lence are represented in this book.) Yet Hirsch rightly laments that Wilder
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142
wished to use was the catalyst of a man knowing he’s going to be killed and
making no attempt to escape sure death,” he explained.36
Though the remake of The Killers has little connection with Heming-
way, it is an excellent thriller in itself. Siegel collaborated (uncredited)
with screenwriter Gene Coon, who had written some episodes of Dragnet,
on the script. They sought to avoid making a mere rehash of the Siodmak
film by introducing some neat plot twists of their own, such as having the
killers themselves, rather than an insurance investigator, probe the mo-
tives for the hero’s steadfast refusal to avoid his own murder.
Even the look of Siegel’s film is different from that of Siodmak’s
movie. Since Siodmak shot his film in black and white and Siegel’s movie
was to be in color, the latter decided to replace the ominously dark at-
mosphere of Siodmak’s film noir with several scenes of mayhem shot in
bright sunshine to imply that in the savage world of the film, evil is just
as likely to strike in broad daylight as under the cover of darkness. Siegel’s
movie is “pervaded with noir-like sadism and double dealing, but is pho-
tographed in band-box colors,” writes James Naremore.37 The killers are
willing to do their dirty work in the afternoon sunshine.
The movie’s prologue takes place in Miami, Florida. The opening
sequence only remotely resembles the short story, whereas the parallel
sequence in Siodmak’s movie encapsulated most of the key elements of
Hemingway’s short story.
The opening sequence in the remake is set in a home for the blind. The
peaceful atmosphere of a warm, sunny afternoon is shattered by the chilly
intrusion of two killers, Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager), who
have come to murder Johnny North (John Cassavetes), a failed auto racer
who teaches a course in auto repair to the blind residents of the home.
Charlie inquires of the blind receptionist, Miss Watson, the where-
abouts of Jerry Nichols, the assumed name that Johnny has been going
by. (Miss Watson is played by Virginia Christine, who was Lt. Lubinsky’s
wife in the Siodmak film.) When she replies that Jerry cannot meet with
them until after his class, Charlie says with feigned nonchalance, “Lady,
we just haven’t got the time.” With that, Charlie knocks Miss Watson
unconscious, and he and Lee proceed to Johnny’s classroom.
A blind old man (instead of young Nick Adams) warns Johnny that
two sinister strangers are looking for him, but Johnny does not flee. In-
stead, he resolutely stands his ground as the two assailants burst into his
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classroom and fill him with lead. The passing years have not blunted the
shocking violence of this scene, made all the more authentic by Siegel’s
employing real blind people as Johnny’s students.
Charlie and Lee are impressed by the tranquility with which Johnny
North has met his fate, and they resolve to find out why, particularly because
Charlie remembers that four years before, North was implicated in a million-
dollar mail truck heist from which the stolen money was never recovered.
Siegel films often deal with “the antisocial outcast,” writes An-
drew Sarris; “his gallery of loners” includes Dancer (Eli Wallach), the
psychopathic professional killer in The Lineup and Charlie Strom, the
cold-blooded veteran hit man in The Killers.38 Just as Huston apparently
modeled Reardon in his script for the 1946 Killers on Sam Spade in The
Maltese Falcon, so too Siegel seems to have modeled Charlie Strom in the
1964 Killers on Dancer, a sociopath with a wicked glint in his eye. Charlie,
like Dancer, has survived as a hired gun by relying on meticulous plan-
ning. Dancer in The Lineup must track down a cache of heroin seized by
some criminals who have double-crossed a drug czar; and he does so with
a relentlessness that is likewise evident in Charlie in The Killers.
“The progress from Dancer in The Lineup to Charlie in The Killers
is a short one,” according to Silver and Ursini. “Charlie wears the same
dark business suit as Dancer and carries the same caliber handgun with a
slightly longer silencer.”39 Dancer is gunned down on an unfinished high-
way; Charlie dies, after a bloody shoot-out, on a suburban lawn. Too late
they both learn that eventually everyone loses.
Siegel insisted that the cast of The Killers was a major factor in the
movie’s success as an important gangster movie. Siegel elicited from Mar-
vin the best performance of his career as a psychotic killer who dresses
impeccably, sports dark shades, and carries his revolver in a businesslike
attaché case emblematic of his cool professionalism.
Geoffrey O’Brien writes, “If Angie Dickinson,” as the femme fatale
Sheila Farr, “lacks the aura of Ava Gardner, she does at least perfectly
communicate the chic rapacity” that her role requires.40 As for John Cas-
savetes, although he acted in films to gather funding for the independent
films he directed, his role as the earnest, obsessed Johnny North in The
Killers is one of his best performances. Lastly, there is Siegel’s great cast-
ing coup: Siegel cast Ronald Reagan against type as the villain of the piece
in what turned out to be, interestingly enough, the actor’s last film before
144
Charlie (Lee Marvin) as one of the killers in Don Siegel’s remake of Siodmak’s The Killers.
145
location in a posh suburban home the studio had rented for the day. But
it had to be reshot later because Marvin had arrived drunk; and redoing
the scene, of course, meant an expensive return to the location site.
When similar incidents occurred, Siegel finally decided to take the ac-
tor aside during a break in shooting and tell Marvin of his concern: “Look,
you just can’t work when you’re like this,” Siegel said. “So let’s go through
it one more time for show, call it a day, and do it right tomorrow.” Later
in the day Marvin remarked to Siegel: “I liked the fact that you talked to
me alone.” From then on, adds Siegel, Marvin did not show up drunk for
the duration of shooting.
Clu Gulager, who played Lee, Charlie’s deranged cohort in the film,
said that Marvin’s drinking problem was rooted in the fact that “he was
the most insecure actor I’ve ever known.” Nevertheless, Marvin’s under-
stated performance in this film “is the apex of his career.”42
Although Siegel shot a film with economy and speed, he took his time
in the editing room, where he and editor Richard Belding spent twenty-
five days working round the clock to turn the 180,000 feet of the rough
cut of The Killers into a final print of 9,000 feet, so that the film would fit
into a two-hour TV time slot.43
Composer John Williams (Star Wars) was still known as Johnny Wil-
liams when he scored The Killers in 1964. He had drifted into scoring TV
dramas for series like Playhouse 90 in the mid-1950s, and also had scored
some low-budget features. Williams’s music for The Killers showcases
prominent brass motifs and pounding percussion rhythms, mingling dis-
sonant themes with sweeping lyrical melodies. Still Ronald Schwartz is
correct in saying that Williams’s music for the remake of The Killers is no
match for “Miklos Rozsa’s masterpiece, which punctuated the action of
the 1946 original.”44
After the prologue, in which the killers slay Johnny, the remake pro-
ceeds in flashback fashion, the same format used in the previous movie, to
fill in the background behind the hero’s death. Charlie and Lee are at the
center of the film, as they seek out the individuals who knew Johnny North.
This time the femme fatale who suckers the hero into getting involved in
a robbery is Sheila Farr. Like Kitty, her predecessor in the first movie, she
then manages to con the rest of the gang into believing that Johnny has
double-crossed them and made off with all of the plunder, when in fact it
is Sheila and her lover, Jack Browning, who have done the double-crossing.
146
When Johnny discovers that Sheila’s loyalty all along has been to Jack
Browning, and that she and Jack are now husband and wife, he is crushed
by Sheila’s betrayal. Indeed, Charlie declares to Sheila at one point, “Now
I understand why Johnny just stood there when we shot him. The only
man who isn’t afraid to die is the man who is dead already. You killed
Johnny; you didn’t need us.” That line of dialogue is worthy of Huston.
After strong-arming several people who knew Johnny for informa-
tion about his past, Charlie and Lee decide to blackmail Browning by
threatening to tell the mob that it is he and Sheila who should have been
murdered. Browning, using a high-powered rifle, ambushes the two
blackmailers from his office window, killing Lee instantly and mortally
wounding Charlie. But Charlie lives long enough to follow Browning to
his fashionable home, where Sheila is anxiously waiting for him. Brown-
ing stuffs his briefcase with the stolen money, hoping to leave town with
Sheila before Charlie catches up with them. But it is already too late.
As Charlie draws a bead on them, Sheila begs him to listen to her
spurious excuses for her part in the whole affair. Before firing, Charlie
shakes his head wearily and murmurs for the last time in the film his oft-
repeated remark, “Lady, I just haven’t got the time.” The middle-aged
Charlie has known all along that, given the many years he has already
survived the perils of his profession as a paid assassin, he is living on bor-
rowed time; he is now aware that his time has at last run out.
After he shoots Browning and Sheila, Charlie staggers out of the
house into the bright sunlight with the briefcase full of money. He col-
lapses, dumping the money all over the lawn. Hearing a police siren in the
distance, he raises his arm, points his index finger as if it were his revolver,
and dies. Charlie knows his arsenal is exhausted, just as he knows his life
is spent, but he nevertheless makes this one final futile gesture of defiance
against the forces of law and order as he expires and the movie ends.
As things turned out the movie was first released as a theatrical feature
and not premiered on television after all. The network censors thought
the film too violent for the home screen, and NBC executives concurred,
especially since the recent assassination of President Kennedy had sparked
protests from the public about TV violence promoting violence in real life.
Moreover, the scene in which Browning ambushes Charlie and Lee from
a vantage point high above the street was thought to resemble the circum-
stances of the president’s death too closely, although the similarity was
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148
Notes
1. Jean Pierre Coursodon, “Robert Siodmak in Black and White,” in The Big
Book of Noir, 41.
2. Joseph Flora, “Men without Women,” in Hemingway: Eight Decades of
Criticism, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin (East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 2009), 289.
3. “The Killers,” Time, September 4, 2006, 74.
4. Philip Booth, “Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’ and Heroic Fiction,” Literature/
Film Quarterly 35, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 405.
5. Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies: A History of the Gangster Genre, rev. ed.
(New York: Da Capo, 1997), 196.
6. Robert Siodmak, “Hoodlums: The Myth,” in Hollywood Directors: 1941–
76, ed. Richard Koszarski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 286.
7. Colin McArthur, Underworld USA (New York: Viking, 1972), 105.
8. Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers,” in The Short Stories of Ernest Heming-
way (New York: Scribner, 2003), 288–89.
9. Philip Young, “Big World Out There: The Nick Adams Stories,” in The
Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, ed. Jackson Benson (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975), 35.
10. McDonnell, “The Killers,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 242–43.
11. Deborah Alpi, Robert Siodmak: A Biography with Critical Analyses of His
Film Noirs (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998), 154.
12. Mason, American Gangster Cinema, 78.
13. Jonathan Lethem’s remarks are taken from his essay “The Killers (1946),”
included with the DVD of the film (released by Criterion in 2003), 2.
14. Cinema’s Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood (Karen Thomas, 2007, television
documentary). This documentary contains rare footage of Siodmak giving a brief
interview about working in Hollywood.
15. Karen Hannsberry, Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir (Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 2003), 372.
16. Hillier and Phillips, 100 Film Noirs, 205.
17. Borde and Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 79.
18. Robert Horton, “Music Man: Miklos Rozsa,” Film Comment 31, no. 6
(November–December, 1995): 2–3.
19. Larry Timm, The Soul of Cinema: Film Music (Upper Saddle River, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 2003), 144.
20. Booth, “Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’ and Heroic Fatalism,” 408.
21. Siodmak, “Hoodlums: The Myth,” 286.
22. Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 118.
149
23. Jack Shadoian, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 81.
24. Manny Farber, Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Far-
ber, ed. Robert Polito (New York: Library of America, 2009), 290.
25. Jans Wager, Dames in the Driver’s Seat (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2005), 92.
26. Michael Walker, “Robert Siodmak,” in The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian
Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1992), 113.
27. Wager, Dames in the Driver’s Seat, 42.
28. Agee, Film Writing and Selected Journalism, 252.
29. Joseph Flora, Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Stories (Boston:
Twayne, 1989), 139.
30. Mary Hemingway, letter to Gene Phillips, August 20, 1978.
31. Melissa Harmon, “Ernest Hemingway: The Man and His Demons,” Bi-
ography 2, no. 5 (May 1998): 93.
32. Eagan, America’s Film Legacy, 396.
33. Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 117.
34. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–68,
rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 137.
35. Don Siegel, A Siegel Film (London: Faber, 2003), 235.
36. Siegel, A Siegel Film, 235.
37. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, rev. ed. (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 190.
38. Sarris, The American Cinema, 137.
39. Silver and Ursini, The Noir Style, 249.
40. Geoffrey O’Brien’s essay, “The Killers (1964),” is included with the DVD of
the film (released by Criterion in 2003), 2; it is in the same set with Siodmak’s film.
41. Don Siegel, interview with the author, Chicago, November 13, 1979. Any
quotation from Siegel that is not attributed to another source is from this interview.
42. Clu Gulager, interview included in the DVD of The Killers (1964).
43. Stuart Kaminsky, Don Siegel, Director (New York: Curtis Books, 1974), 176.
44. Ronald Schwartz, Noir, Now and Then (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 2001), 34.
45. Shadoian, Dreams and Dead Ends, 237.
46. Thomson, New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 829.
47. Andrew Tudor, “Don Siegel,” in International Dictionary of Films and
Filmmakers, vol. 2, 466.
150
w
OTTO PREMINGER:
LAURA AND ANATOMY OF A MURDER
C
harles Derry has observed that the public persona of European-
born filmmaker Otto Preminger was that of a Teutonic tyrant,
“terrorizing his actors and bullying his subordinates”—an image
augmented by his acting appearances as a heel-clicking Nazi in films like
Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953). Derry adds, “It may have been this public
persona, more than anything else,” that impeded an appreciation of the
director’s achievements as a worthy film director.1
During the 1930s American film executives made periodic trips to
Europe in search of fresh talent. Joseph Schenck, the head of Twentieth
Century-Fox, interviewed Preminger during a visit to Vienna in the spring
of 1935. He was impressed with Preminger’s experience in the theater and
invited him to come to Hollywood. Preminger accepted Schenck’s offer.
Preminger, who hailed from Vienna, as did Fritz Lang and Billy
Wilder, followed them to Hollywood a few years after they migrated
there. Preminger and the other European exiles remained in Hollywood
and contributed to American movies their technical and artistic talent for
filmmaking. Film historian Robert Sklar writes, “It’s hard to imagine the
shape of American cinema without the contribution of” these exiles.2 In
point of fact, foreign directors, precisely because they are not native-born
Americans, are sometimes able to view American life with a vigilant, per-
ceptive eye for the kinds of telling details that homegrown directors might
easily overlook or simply take for granted. In fact, European directors, like
Preminger, were able to catch the authentic atmosphere of the United
States as surely as any native-born filmmakers.
151
Laura (1944)
Preminger was not satisfied with the screenplay of Laura, adapted from the
1942 novel by Vera Caspary. So he revised it extensively, in tandem with
the screenwriters. He was particularly pleased with the revisions done by
Samuel Hoffenstein, who had coscripted the fine film of The Phantom of
the Opera (1943) with Claude Rains. “Hoffenstein practically created the
character of Waldo Lydecker,” the waspish, Machiavellian gossip colum-
nist, in the script, Preminger recalls in his autobiography. “From the book
we retained only the gimmick of Laura first appearing to be the victim of a
murder, and afterward, when she reappears, becoming the chief suspect.”3
Truth to tell, Mark McPherson, the detective in charge of the murder
investigation, arrests Laura as a ploy to lure the real killer out in the open.
Vera Caspary took one look at the script and voiced her disappoint-
ment with it to Preminger. “Why are you making a B-picture out of my
novel?” she inquired. Preminger answered that that was Zanuck’s decision,
not his.4 (Film noirs, as we know, were often low-budget films.) Caspary
later complained that Preminger “wanted to make it a conventional de-
tective story.”5 She pointed out that Mark McPherson in her novel was
a fairly sophisticated police detective, while the script had retooled him
152
into a tight-lipped, uncouth cop, who was born in a low-slung fedora and
cheap trench coat.
Caspary was convinced that Preminger had done violence to her book
in the screenplay. He responded in his autobiography, where he explains,
“When I prepare a story for filming, it is being filtered through my brain.
. . . I have no obligation, nor do I try, to be ‘faithful’ to the book.”6
Preminger submitted the revised script to Bryan Foy, the executive in
charge of the B-picture unit at Fox. Foy rejected the rewrite. “Otto com-
plained that I didn’t read the script of Laura when I turned it down,” Foy
told me. “I asked Dave Stevens, my assistant, to read it and to compare
notes with me. I subsequently informed Otto that Dave read it and said it
was lousy. Otto insisted that I should send the screenplay to Zanuck for
his opinion, and so I did.”7
After Preminger appealed to Zanuck, the latter not only approved
the revised screenplay that Preminger had supervised, but personally took
over the supervision of the picture from Foy. That meant that Laura was
automatically placed in the schedule of the A-picture unit.
Zanuck likewise sided with Preminger about the choice of Clifton
Webb to play the villain in Laura. The casting director had vetoed Webb
because he thought Webb effeminate. Preminger countered that the
audience would never suspect that the witty and urbane Webb was the
murderer, and that would make for a nifty surprise ending.8 He was right
in holding out for Webb, since Webb’s polished performance in his screen
test impressed Zanuck considerably.
Preminger selected Gene Tierney to play the sultry Laura and Dana
Andrews to play the determined police lieutenant Mark McPherson.
Tierney and Andrews would both appear in other Preminger film noirs.
Indeed, Preminger reteamed them in Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950),
an underrated noir about a rogue cop (Andrews) who accidentally slays a
suspect, and Tierney played the dead man’s widow.
Rounding out the cast of Laura were Vincent Price as the opportunis-
tic playboy Shelby Carpenter, to whom Laura becomes briefly engaged;
and Judith Anderson as Ann Treadwell, Laura’s aunt, a socialite who has
her sights set on Shelby. Price and Anderson both won plaudits for their
performances.
Principal photography commenced on April 27, 1944, with Rouben
Mamoulian directing. When Preminger viewed the rushes of each day’s
153
154
Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) and Laura (Gene Tierney) in Otto Preminger’s Laura.
Naremore refers to the fact that both Clifton Webb and Vincent Price
were homosexual and observes that any film that placed Clifton Webb
and Vincent Price “in the same drawing room is inviting a mood of fey
theatricality.”13 Foster Hirsch adds in his biography of Preminger that the
movie’s oblique handling of Waldo’s and Shelby’s sexuality gives Laura
intriguing noir shadings.”14
As a matter of fact, Laura is typical of film noir, in the manner in
which it examines the dark side of the human condition. It places Prem-
inger in the company of other émigré directors like Lang, Wilder, and
Siodmak, who all made significant noirs.
Foster Hirsch opines that “the best noir directors were German or
Austrian expatriates who shared a world view that was shaped by their
bitter personal experiences of . . . escaping from a nation that had lost its
mind.” In point of fact, “the group of expatriate directors who were to
become the masters of the noir style,” Hirsch continues, brought to their
American films a predilection for “stories about man’s uncertain fate, and
about psychological obsession and derangement.”15
155
Laura is very much in keeping with the conventions of film noir. The
dark world of film noir, notes Barton Palmer in his book on the subject,
is one where a woman with a past can encounter a man with no future.16
That Laura was in the vanguard of film noir movies is evident from a
seminal essay on film noir written in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank;
he terms Laura an example of “a new type of crime film” coming out of
Hollywood, which he designates as film noir.17
Preminger directed a series of excellent film noirs throughout the
1940s and 1950s, but his detractors acknowledge only Laura as a worthy
noir. They overlook, for example, Fallen Angel, with Dana Andrews as a
con man in cahoots with a femme fatale (Linda Darnell), as well as Where
the Sidewalk Ends and Anatomy of a Murder. Nevertheless, a limited group
of film historians, which includes Andrew Sarris, take Preminger seri-
ously as an artist and recognize his later noirs as “moody, fluid studies in
perverse psychology,” in the tradition of Laura.18
When David Raksin was commissioned to compose the background
music for Laura, Preminger informed him that, for the principal theme of
the score, he wanted him to use Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady.”
Raksin objected that the tune was already too familiar to moviegoers. “So
Otto gave me the weekend to come up with a song to replace ‘Sophisti-
cated Lady.’ Coincidentally, that Saturday I received a letter of farewell
from a lady I was in love with. I put the letter on my piano on Sunday
evening, . . . and it was in my mind as I began to compose. The tune came
to me: The melody of our theme song needed to evoke melancholy, and I
had just been given a heavy dose.”19
Raksin poured all of his feelings of unrequited love into the melody,
and the music gave a nostalgic, regretful dimension to the movie’s score.
Later on Johnny Mercer wrote a lyric for the theme, which is not in the
film. The title tune struck a chord with the movie-going public; it sub-
sequently became a standard popular song. Cole Porter even said that,
out of all the romantic ballads ever written, he would have liked to have
composed the theme from Laura.20
After Zanuck watched the rough cut of Laura, he muttered, “Well,
we missed the bus on this one.” He especially had misgivings about the
last fifteen minutes of the movie, which seemed a little flat. Then Zanuck
remembered that Laura herself had narrated a section of the novel.21
Hence he decided that the last quarter hour of the film should be reshot
156
from Laura’s point of view. When Preminger received the revised ending
of the script, he thought Laura’s monologue in the scene was pointless
and confusing. In it Laura contradicts Waldo’s account of their first meet-
ing—which is shown in flashback earlier in the film.
In Waldo’s version of their first encounter, which he narrates on the
sound track, Laura buttonholes him in a restaurant and entreats him to
endorse a fountain pen she is promoting in an ad campaign for the ad-
vertising agency she works for. Laura tells Mark in the new scene, “That
never happened; that is a story Waldo wrote for his column. He likes to
make things up; and, once he writes something, he believes it.”22 She says
that Waldo first met her in night court, where he was gathering mate-
rial for his column. She had been arrested for nonpayment of rent, and
Waldo bailed her out. She concludes that she will never forget what he
did for her.
Preminger told me that he pointed out to Zanuck that the crit-
ics would scold the filmmakers for “cheating” the audience by labeling
Waldo’s flashback as spurious later in the film, since the filmgoer initially
accepted it as genuine, when Waldo narrated it earlier in the movie.
Moviegoers, after all, usually assume that the camera does not lie. But
Zanuck was adamant and insisted that Preminger film the new ending,
with Laura’s monologue intact.
Zanuck scheduled a private screening of the revised rough cut and in-
vited his friend Walter Winchell, the influential newspaper columnist and
radio commentator. After the picture was over, Winchell congratulated
Zanuck, saying, “Big time! Great!” Then he said, “But the ending; I didn’t
get it. You’ve got to change it.” Zanuck turned to Preminger and inquired,
“Do you want your old ending back?” Preminger replied, “Of course.”23
So Preminger excised the scene in which Laura negated Waldo’s
flashback about how he met her, and the flashback now stood as true
and authentic. Preminger was grateful to Winchell for intervening and
later repaid him by giving him a cameo appearance in the Joan Crawford
vehicle he directed, Daisy Kenyon (1947).
Laura begins with Waldo Lydecker, a cynical, sardonic newspaper
columnist intoning in a voice-over: “I shall never forget the weekend
Laura died. With Laura’s horrible death, I was alone—with only my poi-
gnant memories of her.” Laura is thought to have been murdered when a
young woman’s corpse is found in her apartment.
157
158
159
fashion mannequin on parade.” Yet her Laura is the object of “the kind
of gaga-eyed reverence that you find in perfume ads.” He also dismissed
Dana Andrews’s “wooden” performance as Mark McPherson.33 Liahna
Babener (who calls Farber “Manny Farrell”) laments his lack of appre-
ciation for Tierney and Andrews, whose performances in this and other
Preminger film noirs are still insufficiently appreciated.34
But Farber was definitely in the minority among reviewers of the film.
Furthermore, Joseph LaShelle won an Academy Award for his cinema-
tography (Preminger and Webb were also nominated).
Perhaps of all the praise that this polished, suspenseful thriller has
received, British director Ken Russell said it best. He recalled reflecting,
after viewing Laura as a teenager, that had he died right after seeing the
film, “it would have been with the certain knowledge that Laura was bet-
ter than any British picture I’d ever seen.”35
Nonetheless, none of the critics of the film when it premiered
could have predicted that Laura would be considered a landmark in the
emerging trend of film noir. Daniel Eagan, in his book on the films
incorporated into the National Film Registry, writes that, after Laura,
Preminger’s “greatest successes for the next decade were in film noir,” so
that Preminger played a significant role in the shaping of film noir.36
Film historians usually name Angel Face (1952) as marking the last of
Preminger’s classic noirs and totally overlook Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
Admittedly, Angel Face is an interesting noir, in which Jean Simmons por-
trays a femme fatale, a psychopath who is doomed to compulsively destroy
her loved ones. But Anatomy of a Murder, not Angel Face, is really the last
of Preminger’s striking series of noirs, and may possibly be his best. . . .
After a decade at Twentieth Century-Fox, Preminger decided that he
would not renew his contract with Fox when it expired, but would set up
shop as an independent. By 1953 he was free to become an independent
filmmaker. As such, Preminger from now on was at liberty to choose his
own subjects for filming and secure financial backing from a major stu-
dio, which would then market the finished film through its distribution
facilities.
Preminger proved his mettle as an independent producer-director, not
only by crusading for the freedom of the screen, but also by performing
all the functions required to make and market his films. What’s more, he
championed the independent filmmakers movement by choosing projects
160
161
The author writes in the novel that the murder and subsequent trial
took place in the distant Upper Peninsula of Michigan, “a wild, harsh, and
broken land,” with a forlorn look in the late winter.39 When Preminger
went to Michigan to scout locations for the film, Voelker said later, “he
decided to film the entire picture here,” interiors as well as exteriors.40
Preminger’s thirst for realism was reflected in his predilection for shooting
on location, and for having the cinematographer utilize a newsreel-like
style in filming the action.
Preminger was convinced that the special atmosphere of the area
could not be re-created on a Hollywood sound stage, “It’s not the look of
the place I want to get on the screen,” Preminger explained; “I want the
actors to feel it, to absorb a sense of what it’s like to live here.” Transplant-
ing his cast and crew to the Upper Peninsula, he concluded, “will help to
make the film more ‘real’ than any single thing I can do.” What’s more,
“by using only real locales,” Richard Griffith writes in his book about the
making of the movie, “Preminger made one of the first American movies”
ever to be shot entirely on location.41
Filming on location had become linked with film noir, with George
Cukor shooting scenes on the streets of New York for A Double Life and
Billy Wilder filming scenes around Los Angeles for Sunset Boulevard, in
order to strive for a greater sense of realism.
Preminger chose locations in Marquette and Ishpeming, Michigan, in-
cluding the Lumberjack Tavern itself, to represent the fictitious town of Iron
City in the novel. Voelker’s own law office, which was in his home, would
serve as the law office and home of Paul Biegler in the movie. It is precisely
the grim, rugged landscape of the Upper Peninsula, with its bleak skies and
weather-beaten houses, that gives the movie the stark look of film noir. In
fact, the film’s authentic locations reflect the world of film noir, with its
succession of sleazy roadhouses, downbeat transient motels, and dingy jails.
When I asked Preminger if he thought of Anatomy of a Murder as film
noir, he replied, “You are a film historian; I am not. Call it film noir if you
like.” As a matter of fact, Preminger is best known for the series of dark
psychological thrillers that he directed in the 1940s and 1950s, beginning
with Laura. He was making film noirs, of course, before that term became
common outside of France.
Anatomy of a Murder relates to Preminger’s postwar noir period, not
only because Laura Hunt and Laura Manion share the same first name,
162
163
164
general public would not associate them with other roles they had played.
Preminger signed Ben Gazzara to play the defendant, Lt. Manion, be-
cause he possessed a menacing quality that implied that Manion was
prone to violence. George C. Scott was given the role of the slick, big-
time special prosecutor from Lansing, Claude Dancer.
Preminger pulled a casting coup in convincing a well-known lawyer, Jo-
seph N. Welch, to play Judge Weaver in the film. Michael Sragow dismissed
Preminger’s casting of a real lawyer in the film as a “gimmick.”51 But Prem-
inger offered a different explanation: “The reason that I approached Welch,”
he said, “was that no first-rate actor that I wanted to play the part, such as
Spencer Tracy, would accept it, because they thought it was too small. My
assistant suggested that I ask a real-life lawyer, and I thought of Welch, who
was famous for his role in the televised hearings that led to Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s censure by the Senate.”52 Welch’s rebuke to McCarthy—“At
long last, have you no decency, sir?”—spelled the beginning of the end of
McCarthy’s career. “I called him in Boston and sent him the script, and he
agreed to play the part.” Welch brought to the role, Preminger concluded, an
authenticity that “no professional actor could have matched.”
Preminger’s director of photography, Sam Leavitt, who had already
photographed three previous Preminger pictures, had just won an Os-
car for The Defiant Ones (1958). Leavitt managed to pack an enormous
amount of visual detail into the compositions of his shots, even though
the movie was not in widescreen, as some reviews said.
In order to avoid the inclement weather when principal photography
began on March 23, 1959, Preminger arranged to shoot the trial scenes
first. He used the local courthouse in Marquette, Michigan, which added
to the naturalistic flavor of the film. The courtroom scenes were shot
in chronological order, thereby enabling the actors to build their parts
throughout the trial sequences.
Hollywood columnists reported that Preminger had foregone his
“Gestapo” tactics in directing actors during the shoot. But Ben Gazzara
remembered Preminger as maintaining a “German formality” on the set.
Nevertheless, “the occasional eruptions,” said George C. Scott, “were
with the technical people, not with the actors.”53 Principal photography
wrapped on May 15, 1959.
Film editor Louis Loeffler, like Sam Leavitt, was a Preminger vet-
eran; he has in fact cut most of the movies Preminger had directed since
165
166
But Preminger, ever the attorney-at-law, brought suit against the City of
Chicago in the Federal District Court of Illinois. Judge Julius Miner viewed
the movie with his two preteen sons and reversed the Chicago censor’s deci-
sion, declaring that the Chicago censor “had exceeded constitutional bounds”
in banning the film, which did not undermine public morality.58 Preminger
commented, “The days of arbitrary censorship were coming to an end.”
As David Thomson makes clear in discussing the film, Manion is a
calculating, insolent individual who barely troubles to conceal his own
violent nature, and his wife “makes no effort to disguise her provocative
sensuality.”59 After sizing up Lieutenant Manion’s wife, the filmgoer can-
not help wondering if the flirtatious Laura Manion might not have invited
Barney Quill’s advances. In that case, Manion would have been more
wronged by his wife than by Barney Quill, the man he killed.
The first time Biegler meets Laura, she is wearing dark glasses to hide
her black eye. Laura claims that Barney Quill gave her the shiner when
he took her against her will. It is also feasible, legal experts Paul Bergman
and Michael Asimow state, that her husband gave Laura the black eye
when he made her admit that she had willingly made love with Barney
Quill, and that he deliberately killed Quill in a jealous rage. “Together
they concocted the rape story to cover their tracks.”60
Preminger once said that his films are often about people who are
neither black nor white, but “infinite shades of gray”; Anatomy of a Murder
is patently no exception to this rule. Like Jean Renoir, Preminger firmly
believed that everyone has their reasons for what they do, though their
motives are not always easy to discern.61
Anatomy of a Murder, according to V. F. Perkins, is a salient example
of how Preminger attempts in his films to portray “characters, actions, and
issues clearly and without prejudice.” More precisely, in the present film
“Preminger presents the evidence, but he leaves the spectator free to draw
his own conclusions.”62 In other words, the audience is asked to become
the jury and to decide to what extent each of the key characters who fig-
ures in the trial is telling the truth. That is no easy task.
Preminger opted against portraying Laura’s rape in flashback; instead,
Biegler asks her to show him the site of the assault one evening. The direc-
tor employs German expressionism in this scene. Leavitt’s noirish low-key
lighting creates a dark, sinister atmosphere in this wooded area; Biegler
and Laura are enveloped in almost total darkness. The expressionistic
167
lighting emphasizes symbolically how Quill sought to hide his evil deed
under a cloak of darkness.
Jeanine Basinger endorses Preminger’s decision not to depict in flash-
back the fateful night on which Laura contends that she was raped. If the
filmgoer were permitted to see the episode as Laura describes it in her
testimony, they would have no doubts about what happened. “Not having
seen the event through flashback,” Basinger continues, leaves the viewer
no choice “but to listen carefully to Laura’s description of it and try to
determine if she is telling the truth.”63
It is precisely in this fashion that Preminger puts the audience in the
position of the jury, forcing them to make up their own minds about all of
the testimony presented at the trial. In brief, the unique merit of the film
is that none of the issues is permitted to be clear cut for the sake of a lazy
audience. Preminger depicts the characters as complex and inscrutable
human beings whose motives are open to question.
Laura testifies that Quill “tore my panties off and did what he wanted.”
At the first mention of the word “panties” the crowd in the courtroom
bursts into raucous laughter. So Judge Weaver delivers instructions from
the bench to those present. Since Joseph Welch addresses himself directly
to the camera, it is evident that the instructions are for the filmgoers as well:
“For the benefit of the jury, and especially the spectators,” the record
will show that “the undergarment referred to in the testimony was her
panties. When this pair of panties is mentioned again in the course of this
trial, there will not be one snicker, or even one smirk in my courtroom.
There isn’t anything comic about a pair of panties which figures in the
violent death of one man and the possible incarceration of another.”
Once the question of the panties has been raised in court, Biegler
calls Mary Pilant (Kathryn Grant), the manager of the Thunder Bay Inn
where the slain bartender was employed, as a witness for the defense. She
testifies that she found a pair of torn panties, which Quill had apparently
hurled down the motel’s laundry chute. Mary then produces the tattered
panties in open court. Claude Dancer, the special prosecutor, in cross-
examining Mary, attempts to discredit her testimony by accusing her of
being Quill’s spurned mistress. Mary is reduced to tears and reveals that
Barney Quill was her father; she was his illegitimate daughter. Mary was
painfully aware that he was quite capable of violent behavior; he must have
ripped off the panties during a brutal sexual act.
168
Defense Attorney Paul Biegler (James Stewart) confronts witness Mary Pilant (Kathryn Grant)
in Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder.
169
“Twelve people from twelve different walks of life go off into a room.
. . . These twelve people are asked to judge another human being, as dif-
ferent from them as they are from each other. And in their judgment,
they must become as one mind: unanimous. It’s one of the miracles of
man’s disorganized soul that they can do it—and in most instances do it
right well. God bless juries.” These observations constitute a tribute by
Preminger, the trained lawyer, to due process of law. And the fact that
Preminger encompasses McCarthy’s lengthy speech in a single unbroken
take makes O’Connell’s delivery of it all the more effective.
The jury’s verdict, when it finally comes, declares the defendant not
guilty. From the beginning of the trial, Biegler has been aware that if he
is to get his client acquitted, he has to come up with a justifiable reason
for this act of homicide. The reasonable cause that Biegler ultimately hits
upon is, in fact, suggested by Manion himself. Manion claims that he is
not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. To be more specific, through-
out the trial Biegler pleads that Manion has been driven by an “irresistible
impulse” to kill Barney Quill. In the end, the jury sides with Biegler and
agrees with him that the accused is innocent.
Claude Dancer, the big-city lawyer, had been confident that he could
demolish the less sophisticated Biegler’s defense of Manion. But, as
Basinger shrewdly observes, Biegler wins at least partly because, “unlike
Dancer, he lives in the town where the trial is taking place and knows
the kinds of people who are on the jury.”65 Perkins reminds us that “our
primary involvement is with the lawyer, not his client.” We are gratified
that Biegler has won his case, not necessarily that he got Manion off.66
In fact the film celebrates the rural-American virtues of honesty and folk
wisdom of the unpretentious Biegler.
Nevertheless, Preminger ends the movie with a sly twist that implic-
itly casts doubt upon the verdict. When Biegler goes to the trailer camp
where the Manions have been living, he finds that they have skipped
town without paying his fee. The only souvenir they have left behind is
a note from the husband, informing Biegler that he was seized by “an
irresistible impulse” to get out of town. Biegler is left at film’s end in a
quandary: if an irresistible impulse is a convenient excuse for Manion to
cheat Biegler out of his fee, perhaps, in the last analysis, it was likewise a
convenient excuse for Manion to murder Quill. After all, it was Manion
himself who suggested the plea of temporary insanity to Biegler in the
170
171
Notes
1. Charles Derry, “Otto Preminger,” in International Dictionary of Films and
Filmmakers, vol. 6, 398; see also Dave Kehr, “A Tyrant with a Focus on Love’s
Uncertainty,” New York Times, December 30, 2007, sec. 2:23.
2. Robert Sklar, “The Ufa Story,” New York Times Book Review, October
13, 1996, 20; see also John Russell Taylor, Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood
Emigrés (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983), 16.
3. Otto Preminger, Preminger: An Autobiography (Garden City, N.Y.: Dou-
bleday, 1977), 72.
4. Preminger: An Autobiography, 72.
5. Vera Caspary, “My Laura and Otto’s,” Saturday Review, June 26, 1971,
36.
6. Preminger: An Autobiography, 111.
7. Bryan Foy, interview by the author, Los Angeles, September 4, 1975.
8. Otto Preminger, interview by the author, New York, April 22, 1979. Any
quotations from Preminger that are not attributed to another source are from this
interview.
9. Chris Fujiwara, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Prem-
inger (New York: Faber and Faber, 2008), 40.
10. Gerald Pratley, The Cinema of Otto Preminger (New York: Barnes, 1971),
61.
172
173
174
58. Dawn Sova, Forbidden Films: Censorship (New York: Facts on File, 2001),
18.
59. Thomson, New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 779.
60. Paul Bergman and Michael Asimow, Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the
Movies (Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews and McMeel, 1996), 234.
61. Basinger, “Anatomy of a Murder,” 170; see also Thomson, New Biographical
Dictionary of Film, 715.
62. V. F. Perkins, “Why Preminger?” in Movie Reader, 43.
63. Basinger, “Anatomy of a Murder,” 176.
64. Bergman and Asimow, Reel Justice, 236.
65. Basinger, “Anatomy of a Murder,” 180.
66. V. F. Perkins, Film as Film (New York: Penguin, 1978), 148.
67. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 184.
68. Willi Frischauer, Behind the Scenes of Otto Preminger (New York: Morrow,
1974), 181.
69. Eliot, Jimmy Stewart, 332.
70. Paul Mayersberg, “From Laura to Angel Face,” 44–46.
71. Nash and Ross, eds., “Anatomy of a Murder,” in Motion Picture Guide, vol.
1, 63.
72. Basinger, “Anatomy of a Murder,” 181.
175
w
FRED ZINNEMANN: ACT OF VIOLENCE
STANLEY KUBRICK: THE KILLING
F
red Zinnemann broke into motion pictures in 1929 by collaborating
on Menschen am Sonntag, a semidocumentary made in Berlin, as the
assistant cameraman. This was the same film that gave Billy Wilder
and Robert Siodmak their start in the movie business as well. Like Wilder,
Zinnemann was an Austrian, working in the Berlin film industry, who im-
migrated to Hollywood after Hitler took over the German film industry.
Menschen am Sonntag, in retrospect, can be seen as a forerunner of the
trend in American film toward greater realism that followed World War
II, a trend that Zinnemann was very much a part of. Zinnemann sought
to establish himself in Hollywood primarily by making documentary
shorts at MGM from 1937 to 1941. Jack Ellis writes that Zinnemann
consequently “remained close to the documentary impulse of Menschen am
Sonntag when he graduated from making short documentaries to directing
features.”1 He started with a low-budget whodunit called Kid Glove Killer
(1942), starring Van Heflin as a police scientist who solves a murder.
Zinnemann moved on to making more important pictures like The
Search (1948), a solid realistic drama about displaced European children
after World War II. It was the first film that he had shot in Berlin since
Menschen am Sonntag. The strong realism of The Search coincided with the
movement toward naturalism in American cinema in postwar Hollywood.
Zinnemann’s “documentary impulse” inspired him to take a documentary-
like approach to making fiction films. Silver and Ursini sum up the situ-
ation in Hollywood at the time that Zinnemann made his first film noir,
Act of Violence. Film noirs were often low-budget pictures, “which dictated
177
178
179
Thomson is one of the few film historians who recognizes how Richards’s
“tough, tight script, done economically and effectively,” pitilessly depicts a
story “crowded with weak people and desperate compromises.” This is one
of the few Zinnemann pictures devoid of hope, in which the protagonist
“cannot avoid being destroyed by consequences.”12 As such, Act of Violence
is typical of film noir, presenting as it does a man whose life is disrupted
by his own weakness and misfortune.
The film’s opening scenes, as portrayed in the script, are riveting. The
hardened war veteran, Joe Parkson, wears a trench coat and a snap-brim
fedora that immediately suggest film noir. The disabled veteran has a limp;
his physical affliction is symbolic of his twisted personality; that is, his mind
is crippled. Joe lives in a seedy, cold water flat in a New York slum, which is
portrayed with the gritty realism of the docu-noirs of the period.
Joe soon catches a Greyhound bus for California, where he plans to
kill an old army buddy, Frank Enley, who is now an admired citizen liv-
ing in the sunny Los Angeles suburb of Santa Lisa. As Joe leaves the bus
station in Santa Lisa and crosses the street to his hotel, he has to make
way for the Memorial Day parade, while some elderly veterans march by,
proudly displaying the American flag.
Zinnemann commented, “I liked the idea of this man, who was the
veteran of an inhuman experience in the war, having to step back because
a few old guys were walking past him, carrying the American flag, as
though they owned it.”13 Joe first traces Frank to Red Wood Lake, where
Frank is fishing. As soon as Frank spots Joe, rowing in broad daylight on
the placid lake, he realizes that Joe has pursued him to California with
vengeance on his mind; Frank panics and hurries back to town.
Frank arrives home at nightfall, and Robert Surtees’s cinematography
gives the encroaching darkness an atmosphere of foreboding. “The script of-
fered a great range of possibilities for visual treatment,” Zinnemann writes in
his autobiography; “they were thoroughly explored by Bob Surtees, our cam-
eraman.”14 Zinnemann first met Surtees in Berlin in the mid-1920s, when
Surtees came over from Hollywood to serve his apprenticeship as a camera
assistant at a Berlin studio. By the time Surtees photographed Act of Violence,
he was recognized as one of Hollywood’s most reliable cinematographers.
Although Act of Violence, like many film noirs, had a limited budget,
Zinnemann could still afford to fill the key role with seasoned actors. He
chose Van Heflin, who had appeared in Zinnemann’s first feature, Kid
180
Glove Killer, to play Frank Enley. Heflin had already won a best support-
ing actor Oscar for his own film noir, Johnny Eager (1941). The director
cast Robert Ryan as Joe Parkson. “Ryan’s angular, sharp facial features, his
ability to convincingly suggest violence and seething hatred” had made him
one of film noir’s most prominent villains.15 Yet these roles were at complete
variance with his real nature, which was very benign. “I like stories about
guys who get knocked around,” Ryan explained, “because most people do
get knocked around”—Joe Parkson was crippled in the Nazi POW camp.16
Mary Astor, the legendary temptress of The Maltese Falcon, gives a
peerless performance in the present film in the role of Pat, a tired street-
walker who gives Frank shelter as he flees from Joe’s vengeance. She
recalled that she actually found the dress she wore in the movie “on the
rack at the cheapest department store. We made the hem uneven, put
a few cigarette burns and some stains on the front.” Astor also wore an
unbecoming wig and “used too much lipstick and too much mascara.”
Surtees obligingly employed unflattering lighting to help her look like a
hooker past her prime.17 Pat is drawn to try and help Frank because he is,
like herself, an unlucky traveler in the urban netherworld.
The musical score was provided by another émigré from Hitler’s Ger-
many, the Polish composer Bronislau Kaper. He had scored some roman-
tic films in Hollywood, but he preferred darkly serious movies like Orson
Welles’s The Stranger (1946) and Act of Violence. The jagged theme Kaper
provided for the scene in which Frank first meets up with Pat, the shady
barfly, in a dive is particularly noteworthy. Zinnemann noted that “the
score was conducted by a promising young musician—none other than
André Previn,” who would become a film composer in his own right.18
At the beginning of the movie Frank Enley is known as a prominent
local citizen of Santa Lisa, where he has been instrumental in the build-
ing of prefabricated houses to accommodate returning veterans and their
families. Frank has done so in order to expiate his act of cowardice during
the war. “It is no coincidence that Frank is a builder,” writes Wheeler
Dixon; “he has built a new life for himself in Santa Lisa,” where he lives
with his wife and son.19
But Joe knows Frank only as “a stool pigeon for the Nazis.” When
Frank explains to his wife Edith (Janet Leigh) why Joe is stalking him,
he says that while he was a prisoner of war during World War II he in-
formed on Joe and some other prisoners who planned to escape from the
181
Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is menaced by Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan) in Fred
Zinnemann’s Act of Violence (1949).
182
Ann Sturges (Phyllis Thaxter), Joe’s fiancée, follows him to his hotel in
Santa Lisa and pleads with him to give up his plan to liquidate Frank.
To no avail; Joe in turn follows Frank to the Blake Hotel. When Frank
encounters Joe at the convention, he again panics and runs out of the ho-
tel into the pitch-black night. Frank in effect is descending into the dark
underworld of Los Angeles.
Frank’s entry into Los Angeles’s netherworld symbolizes his down-
hill spiral into moral degeneracy; it is “punctuated by an endless series of
descents down one staircase after another.” Frank’s passage through the
lower depths of Los Angeles “is among the most mordantly gripping, gor-
geously composed episodes in all of film noir,” according to Paul Arthur.20
Frank finally lands in “one of the seediest bars ever seen in an MGM film”
where he comes across Pat, a slatternly prostitute; Johnny, a tough gang-
ster (Berry Kroeger); and Mr. Gavery (Taylor Holmes), a shyster lawyer.21
Pat introduces Frank to Gavery, the unscrupulous attorney, and they
retire to the bar’s dingy back room for a conference. Gavery advises Frank
to employ Johnny to “dispose of his problem” with Joe. Gavery all the
while plies Frank with liquor, as he proposes to Frank that Johnny should
confront Joe and be forced to shoot him “in self-defense.” When Frank
balks at the idea of murdering Joe, the heartless Gavery replies, “You sent
ten men off to die; what’s one more?”
With that, Frank abruptly leaves the bar and walks through the dark
alleys and narrow passageways of the neighborhood; he finally wanders
into a railway tunnel. Once again Zinnemann adroitly employs expres-
sionism, as Frank hears the inner voices of Joe and the duplicitous Nazi
commandant echoing in his mind. Lost in deep despair, Frank eventually
steps onto the railroad tracks, right in the path of an oncoming train. But
he jumps out of the way just in time, and we know that he at least has
conquered his impulse to commit suicide.
Pat, who has been shadowing him, takes Frank to her shabby apart-
ment. Zinnemann makes good use of this atmospheric set, bathing it in
a bleak, sickly half-light. It is here that Frank finally strikes a deal with
Johnny to liquidate Joe for him. Joe is to meet Frank at the Santa Lisa
train depot the following night for a showdown, but it is Johnny—and not
Frank—who will be waiting at the station to confront Joe. When Frank
sobers up the next day, he realizes what he has done and heads for the
Santa Lisa depot to thwart Johnny’s murder of Joe.
183
184
185
186
187
George Peatty (Elisha Cook, Jr.), Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen)
plan a heist in Kubrick’s The Killing.
Although Clean Break is set in New York City, Kubrick shot The
Killing on location in Los Angeles—and in San Francisco, the setting of
Dashiell Hammett’s stories.35 Veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard
was engaged to shoot the film. Occasionally friction developed between
director and cameraman when they disagreed on how a shot should be lit.
Eventually, however, a mutual respect developed between the two men.
Kubrick, after all, was one of the few movie directors who belonged to the
cinematographers’ union.
The Killing was scored by Gerard Fried, who composed the music for
all of Kubrick’s films of the 1950s. The pulsating theme for the opening
credits, comments David Wishart, “both elicits the hustle and bustle of the
racetrack” and grimly foreshadows the violent outcome of the caper “with
urgently etched staccato tones.” Moreover, “the bellowing, brassy horns in
the main title music” give the music “a forward thrust,” Fried says. “The
movie has gotten started and, like a runaway train, it just never lets up.”36
188
Kubrick was confident that his method of telling the story by means
of fragmented flashbacks would work as well on the screen as it did in
the novel. “It was the handling of time that may have made this more
than just a good crime film,” he said. Another thing that attracted him to
White’s book, Alexander Walker points out very perceptively in Stanley
Kubrick, Director, is that the novel touches on a theme that is a frequent
preoccupation of Kubrick’s films: the presumably perfect plan of action
that goes wrong through human fallibility and/or chance. “It is charac-
teristic of Kubrick that, while one part of him pays intellectual tribute to
the rationally constructed master plan, another part reserves the skeptic’s
right to anticipate human imperfections or the laws of chance that militate
against its success.”37 Kubrick’s theme was in harmony with the tenets
of film noir, which created “a dark, menacing, paranoid universe,” notes
Michael Cristofer, “into which many a film hero was drawn and then
destroyed by forces he could not understand or control.”38
It is clear from the outset in The Killing that the tawdry individuals
whom Johnny Clay has brought together to execute the racetrack robbery
compose a series of weak links in a chain of command that could snap at
any point. Add to this the possibility of unexpected mishaps that could
dog even the best of plans, and the viewer senses that the entire project
is doomed from the start. Nevertheless, one is still fascinated to see how
things will go wrong, and when.
Because of the intricate structure of the film’s convoluted story line, it
is appropriate to comment on the plot in some detail.
During the credits of The Killing there are several shots of the prepa-
rations before a race: the starting gate is brought into place, the horses
line up in their positions, and so on. It is a tribute to Kubrick’s natural-
istic direction that when the film cuts from these documentary shots of
the track to the betting area, few filmgoers suspect that the action has
shifted to a studio set. The voice of the narrator further contributes to
the documentary air of the picture. He introduces each of the characters,
describing why each is implicated in the plot. The narrator is Art Gilmore
(uncredited), who often spoke the voice-over narration for newsreels.
First there is Marvin Unger. “At exactly three forty-five on a Saturday
afternoon in September,” the narrator begins, “Marvin Unger walked to-
ward the cashiers’ windows at the racetrack. Despite his lifelong antipathy
for gambling, he had bet on all of the horses in the same race. He realized
189
that this method would cause him to lose in the long run, but he was shoot-
ing for higher stakes.” Marvin is helping to set up a well-planned robbery
so that he can obtain enough money to retire with financial security. He
stands at the window of cashier George Peatty. When the winner of the
race is confirmed, Marvin writes an address and meeting time on the back
of his winning ticket and pushes it through the window to Peatty. He gives
a similar note to track bartender Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer).
At 7 p.m. that same evening Johnny Clay is opening a bottle of beer
in the dingy kitchen of a flat while he describes his accomplices to his
girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray). “None of these guys are criminals in the or-
dinary sense of the word,” he explains. “They all have little problems they
have to take care of. Take Marvin Unger, who is nice enough to let me
stay here in his apartment. He is no criminal.” To quell Fay’s misgivings
about Johnny’s getting involved in a major crime after recently getting out
of prison, her lover says, “Anytime you take a chance you had better be
sure that the stakes are worth it because they can put you away just as fast
for taking ten dollars as for taking a million.” Johnny arranges to meet
Fay at the airport after the robbery so that they can go away together, and
sends her away.
Some of the strongest dramatic scenes in the film are those between
mousy George Peatty and his sluttish wife Sherry. George is hopelessly in
love with Sherry and is constantly afraid that she will two-time him with
another man—something she has done repeatedly. George is trapped in a
sadomasochistic relationship with his high-maintenance wife, a treacher-
ous femme fatale. The two performers breathe a great deal of credibility
into their handling of these scenes, particularly Cook, whom Penelope
Houston describes as “the prototype of all sad little men.”39
Thompson had “an interest in sadomasochistic relationships,” James
Naremore points out in his book on Kubrick. The dialogue in the scenes
involving the bickering couple “has the true Thompson ring.”40 Maddened
by her constant condescension, George blurts out that he is involved in a
big operation that will make them rich. Sherry shrewdly tries to pry more of
the details from him, but George, aware that he has already said too much,
becomes evasive. “My own husband doesn’t trust me,” she pouts. Sherry
later tells her lover Val (Vince Edwards) what she has been able to wheedle
out of her husband. Ironically, she is as submissive to this cheap crook as
George is to her.
190
At the meeting Johnny has called with his fellow conspirators, he goes
over the intricate plans he has laid. A single overhead lamp illumines their
worn, defeated faces as they talk, leaving them surrounded by a darkness
that is almost tangible. It is this darkness that seems to hover around Ku-
brick’s characters in many of his films and which they desperately seek to
keep from engulfing them—usually without success.
Sherry unexpectedly interrupts these deliberations when she is heard
snooping around in the corridor outside Marvin’s apartment. George
weakly whimpers that she must have found the address while going
through his pockets, since she is a very jealous wife. This incident shakes
the whole group’s sense of security about the venture, but Johnny is able to
reconfirm their confidence that the plan has not been damaged by Sherry’s
interference.
“Three days later,” the narrator says, “Johnny Clay began the final
preparations.” He hires a wrestler named Maurice to start a fight with the
track bartender to distract the police from the robbery.
Clay next visits sharpshooter Nikki Arcane (Timothy Carey) at his
farm. Johnny hires Arcane to shoot down Red Lightning, the favored
horse, during the course of the seventh race. This will delay the official de-
cision on the winner of the race and enable Johnny to make a bigger haul
before the bettors arrive at the cashiers’ windows for their payoffs. Nikki
fondles a puppy all the time that he and Johnny discuss the proposition,
which explains his hesitation to shoot an animal. “You’re not being asked
to commit first degree murder,” Johnny chides; “it isn’t even murder. The
worst they could get you for is shooting horses out of season.” The last
item on Johnny’s agenda is to rent a motel room where he can temporarily
store his rifle and hide the loot immediately after the robbery.
Tension begins to mount as the day of the holdup dawns. “Four days
later, at 7 a.m., Sherry Peatty was wide awake,” says the narrator. Badger-
ing her nervous spouse at the breakfast table, she gets him to admit that
today is the day.
From this point onward Kubrick begins to follow each separate strand
of the robbery plot through to its completion, doubling back each time to
show how each of the elements of the elaborate plan is implemented simul-
taneously with all of the others. Kubrick repeats the shots from the credit
sequence of the horses getting into starting position for the seventh race
each time he turns back the clock to develop a different step in the complex
191
robbery plan, thereby situating the viewer temporarily. (Kubrick did loca-
tion work at a track on the outskirts of San Francisco for these scenes.)
The narrator takes us to 11:43 a.m., when Nikki Arcane left his farm
in his sports car. He arrives at the track parking lot at 12:30, and bribes the
black parking attendant to let him have the position he requires in order to
draw a bead on Red Lightning. The attendant mistakes Nikki’s patronizing
manner as genuine kindness and comes over from time to time to chat with
Arcane. At one point the attendant offers Nikki a lucky horseshoe.
Nikki tensely watches the race through his gunsight. At precisely 4:23
p.m. he pulls the trigger and brings Red Lightning down. Thirty seconds
later Arcane is dead. His sports car blows a tire as he tries to drive out of
the parking lot, leaving him within the range of a track guard’s pistol shot.
Lying next to Nikki on the cement is the lucky horseshoe that he had been
given a few minutes before. A shot like this, comments Naremore, makes
The Killing seem “more slyly cruel” than an ordinary thriller.41
Kubrick has built his film from the beginning toward the peak where
all of Johnny’s meticulous planning suddenly converges on the moment
when he enters the cashiers’ office and scoops up $2 million. Johnny puts
on a rubber mask and gloves; with typical Kubrick irony, the face on the
mask is frozen with a perpetual grin.
Thus disguised, Johnny bursts into the cashiers’ room and orders
them to fill his large laundry sack with all the money it will hold. As they
do so the track announcer can be heard in the background: “We don’t
have any exact information on Red Lightning’s spill, but we do know that
the jockey was not seriously injured.” Then Johnny makes his getaway,
heaving the bulky bag, which now contains his mask, gloves, and gun as
well as the cash, out of an open window. Later we learn that Officer Ken-
nan was stationed below the window to catch the loot as it hit the ground
and transfer it to the motel room where Johnny would pick it up later.
Kubrick begins to draw the last threads of the plot together as
Johnny’s companions in crime assemble in Marvin’s shabby living room
to await Clay’s appearance with the money. The men sit around drink-
ing nervously and listening to radio reports of the “daring holdup” at the
track. George’s hand, anxiously nursing a glass, is in the foreground, sug-
gesting the tension that permeates the room.
“Where is Johnny?” George whines. “Why does his timetable have to
break down now?” There is a knock at the door, but instead of Johnny and
192
the cash it is Val, Sherry’s boyfriend, and one of his mobsters. They force
their way into the room, expecting to grab the swag for themselves. A shoot-
out ensues that leaves everyone in the room dead—except for George, who
is mortally wounded. For a moment Kubrick trains his camera on the pile
of corpses spread around the living room. The room is silent, except for the
sound of bouncy Latin music pouring from the radio, providing an ironic
contrast to the carnage of the scene. It has been quite a killing.
George Peatty has enough life left in him to struggle into his car
and drive home. George is moving with the determination of a man who
knows he must accomplish something before he takes his last breath.
Once home he finds Sherry packing to go away with Val, as he suspected
she would. She tries to mollify him with a prefabricated alibi, but for once
in his life George is not to be forestalled by his scheming wife. “Why did
you do it?” he asks plaintively, already knowing the answer. “I loved you,
Sherry.” He then blasts away with his pistol, the impotent husband finally
penetrating his wife with bullets. As George himself falls forward toward
the camera he knocks over the birdcage, symbol of his pitifully narrow
existence, which is now at an end. Sherry too has expired; she learned too
late that the worm had finally turned.
Although she appeared in only a few scenes of The Killing, the role of
Sherry Peatty proved the most significant role of Marie Windsor’s career.
In this regard Windsor exemplifies the fact that the size of a part does not
matter if one is under the direction of an expert director like Kubrick. Her
riveting portrayal of Sherry won her a place in film history as a quintes-
sential femme fatale of film noir.
Because of heavy traffic around the track, Johnny shows up late at the
gang’s meeting place, only to find a squad car arriving on the scene with
its siren wailing. Aware that something terrible has happened, Johnny
proceeds straight to the airport to meet Fay as planned. En route he
buys the largest suitcase he can find and stashes the loot in it. He finds
Fay and they proceed to the check-in counter, passing two men who are
quite clearly sizing up everyone who enters the air terminal. With nervous
nonchalance Johnny demands that the airline allow him to lug his huge
suitcase on board with him rather than stow it in the luggage compart-
ment. Throughout his bickering with the airline personnel, which Ku-
brick records in a single take, the bulky bag stands inertly in the center of
the frame, as Johnny tries to minimize its size. Realizing that he is causing
193
194
Notes
1. Jack Ellis, A History of Film, rev. ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), 272.
2. Silver and Ursini, “Introduction: The Classic Period,” in Film Noir: The
Encyclopedia, 18.
3. Fred Zinnemann, interview by the author, London, May 15, 1994. Any
quotations from Zinnemann that are not attributed to another source are from
this interview.
4. Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 217.
5. Paul Arthur, “Noir Happens: Act of Violence,” Film Comment 35, no. 4
(July–August 1999): 58.
6. Giannetti and Eyman, Flashback, 140.
7. Agee, Film Writings and Selected Journalism, 430.
8. Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 17.
9. Brian McDonnell, “Act of Violence,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 85.
10. Arthur, “Noir Happens: Act of Violence,” 58.
11. Alain Silver and Blake Lucas, “Act of Violence,” in Film Noir: The Encyclo-
pedia, 26.
12. Thomson, Have You Seen . . .?, 5.
13. Arthur Nolletti, Jr., “Conversation with Fred Zinnemann,” in Fred
Zinnemann: Interviews, ed. Gabriel Miller (Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2005), 116.
14. Fred Zinneman, A Life in the Movies: An Autobiography (New York: Scrib-
ner’s, 1992), 74.
15. Geoff Mayer, “Robert Ryan,” in Encyclopedia of Film Noir, 359.
16. Hannsberry, Bad Boys, 572.
17. Wheeler Dixon, “Act of Violence and the Early Films of Fred Zinnemann,”
in The Films of Fred Zinnemann: Critical Perspectives, ed. Arthur Nolletti, Jr. (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 43–44.
18. Zinnemann, A Life in the Movies, 74.
19. Dixon, “Act of Violence,” 52.
20. Arthur, “Noir Happens: Act of Violence,” 57.
21. Dixon, “Act of Violence,” 99. Nicholas Joy was originally elated to play
Gavery, but was replaced by Taylor Holmes; yet some sources, including Dixon,
list Joy as Gavery; see Dixon, 49.
195
22. Robert Horton, “Day of the Craftsman: Fred Zinnemann,” Film Comment
33, no. 5 (September–October, 1997): 62.
23. Hannsberry, Bad Boys, 572.
24. Farber on Film, 490.
25. Stanley Kubrick, interview by the author, London, July 18, 1973; see Na-
remore, More Than Night, 156–58.
26. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 254.
27. Arthur Lyons, Death on the Cheap: Film Noir and the Low-Budget Film
(New York: Da Capo, 2001), 284.
28. Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” 463.
29. Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” 463.
30. Edward Buscombe, “The Killing,” in The BFI Companion to Crime, ed. Phil
Hardy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 192.
31. Joseph Bevan, “The Nothing Man: Jim Thompson,” Sight and Sound 20
(ns), no. 6 (June 2010): 43.
32. Mason, American Gangster Cinema, 102.
33. Pauline Kael, Going Steady (New York: Boyars, 1994), 183.
34. Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Da Capo,
1999), 92.
35. Christiane Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (London: Little,
Brown, 2002), 57.
36. David Wishart, CD liner notes for Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick
(New York: Silva Screen Records, 1999), 6, 10.
37. Alexander Walker, Stanley Kubrick, Director, rev. ed. (New York: Norton,
1999), 52.
38. Michael Cristofer, “Lost Hollywood: Film Noir,” Premiere 14, no. 7
(March 2001): 58.
39. Penelope Houston, Contemporary Cinema (Baltimore: Penguin Books,
1969), 66.
40. James Naremore, On Kubrick (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 68.
41. Naremore, On Kubrick, 75.
42. Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies, 394.
43. “The Killing,” Time, June 4, 1956, 99.
44. Dickos, Street with No Name, 202.
45. Hillier, “The Killing,” in 100 Film Noirs, 146.
196
w
ORSON WELLES:
THE STRANGER AND TOUCH OF EVIL
O
rson Welles’s Touch of Evil is considered by many to be the last
great film noir of the classic period. Meanwhile, The Stranger is
largely ignored in most of the standard books on film noir. The
critical apathy about The Stranger is partially Welles’s own fault, since he
consistently dismissed the movie in interviews as “the one of my films of
which I am least the author.” He thought it was a failure.1 Simply put, the
picture is a good deal better than Welles was prepared to admit.
After the commercial failure of Welles’s first two Hollywood films,
Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles was
persona non grata as far as the major studios were concerned. He desper-
ately wanted to direct another film. Hence when independent producer
Sam Spiegel asked him to play the lead in The Stranger, Welles offered
to direct the movie as well. Spiegel, a newcomer to Hollywood, took him
up on his offer.
Like Fred Zinnemann, Sam Spiegel was an Austrian Jew who got his
start in the film industry in Berlin. Spiegel was employed by the Berlin
branch of Universal Pictures, preparing its films for European distribu-
tion. He fled Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and went to London, where he
had a brief career as a con man and a check forger. After serving a short
jail sentence for fraud, Spiegel immigrated to Hollywood, where he was
known officially as S. P. Eagle, in order to bury his checkered past.2 Some
of the production team on The Stranger accordingly called the film the
S. T. Ranger, as a droll reference to Spiegel’s alias.
197
Spiegel bought the screen rights to a story by Victor Travis and Decla
Dunning entitled “Date with Destiny.” As producer of the film, he asked
William Goetz, who had an independent production company, Inter-
national Pictures, that distributed its films through RKO, to join forces
with him. Spiegel arranged for Goetz to finance the film and to act as
its executive producer. Spiegel then engaged Welles to play the lead, and
Welles accepted the part—so long as he could direct the film as well. In
fact, Welles, who was eager to direct again, would not appear in the movie
unless he could direct it. Goetz, who had supported Preminger’s bid to
return to directing at Fox after Preminger’s notorious falling-out with
Zanuck, likewise favored Welles’s wish to direct The Stranger.
Spiegel and Goetz allowed Welles to direct—but with certain strin-
gent conditions. Although Welles was free to collaborate on the screen-
play before principal photography commenced, he could not deviate from
the shooting script once filming was under way. (Spiegel had heard tales
about Welles rewriting scenes just before the cameras turned.) Moreover,
Spiegel retained final cut so that he had the final say about the editing of
the film during postproduction.
“The contract that he signed in order to make the movie tied his
hands tighter than a Victorian corset,” quips Welles biographer Clinton
Heylin.3 But Welles signed the contract because he was anxious “to prove
to the industry that I could direct a standard Hollywood picture, on time
and on budget, just like anyone else.”4
198
and, in the case of The Stranger, “the danger of war criminals” still at large
exemplifies another type of postwar noir.5
John Huston, who had a hand in the writing of the screenplay of The
Killers with Anthony Veiller for Robert Siodmak, also collaborated with
Veiller on the first draft of the script for The Stranger. As in the case of
The Killers, Huston received no screen credit for his work on the screen-
play for The Stranger for contractual reasons: he could not officially work
for International Pictures while under contract to Warner Bros.
Veiller, in collaboration with Huston, composed the first draft of the
screenplay, adapted from the Travis-Dunning story.6 When Welles came
on board, he reworked some scenes with Veiller. He also added a long
prologue to the script, in which Konrad Meinike, Franz Kindler’s execu-
tive officer, searches for Kindler in Latin America, where Kindler is be-
lieved to be in hiding, along with several other unrepentant war criminals.
Meinike, in turn, is shadowed by Inspector Wilson, a Nazi hunter
who hopes Meinike will lead him to Kindler. Wilson wears a wide-
brimmed felt hat and a somewhat rumpled top coat, which make him
resemble the typical film noir detective. Meinike ultimately discovers that
Kindler is now teaching history in a New England prep school, and pro-
ceeds to look for him there, pursued, of course, by Wilson.
Welles thought “the big chase in South America was much the best
thing in the picture, . . . probably because I wrote it.”7 Welles shot this
material, which initially accounted for the first two reels of the picture;
but Spiegel excised most of it during postproduction because it was not
relevant to the main plot, which was set in a New England village.
Nevertheless, snippets of Welles’s prologue remain in the film: Meinike
reaching a South American port and lying to the authorities about his rea-
son for being there; Meinike finally coaxing a photographer who is forging
him a new passport to divulge the current whereabouts of Kindler. David
Thomson rightly believes that Spiegel’s cuts in the prologue were appropri-
ate: “Truly we do not need that part of Meinike’s story.”8
Welles himself deleted from the shooting script a bizarre dream of
Rankin’s new wife, Mary, who initially has no knowledge of her husband’s
sordid past. He had designed this hallucinatory dream to depict how Mary
was beginning to suspect that Wilson’s allegations that Charles Rankin is
actually Franz Kindler may really be true. According to Heylin, “through-
out this delirious vision the camera was supposed to slowly close in on
199
Rankin until one of his eyes fills the screen,” as Rankin is transformed into
the monstrous Franz Kindler.9
After Hitchcock released Spellbound in the fall of 1945, Welles de-
cided to cut Mary’s nightmare from the script of The Stranger, in order not
to risk the comparison of Mary’s dream sequence with the dream sequence
designed by Dali for Hitchcock’s film. After the deletion of Mary’s dream,
however, Wilson’s remark to her at film’s end, “Pleasant dreams, Mary,”
loses some of its significance.
Welles managed to get a covert reference into The Stranger to Hearts
of Age (1934), a silent short he made at age nineteen on the campus of his
alma mater, the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois. For one
thing, Welles filmed Hearts of Age on the campus of a prep school, and
much of The Stranger takes place at a prep school.
For another, if one combines the images of the bell tower in Hearts
of Age with the shots of the young Welles’s death fall from a fire escape
in the short, one gets a premonition of Welles’s death fall from the clock
tower at the finale of The Stranger. At any rate, Welles’s contention that
The Stranger is an impersonal film, and that there is nothing of him in it,
seems more of an exaggeration than ever.10
While revising the screenplay, Welles wrote most of the dialogue
in the scenes set in the local drugstore, where Wilson shrewdly gleans
information from the wily checker-playing pharmacist, Mr. Potter, about
Charles Rankin. Welles also wrote the subtle scene at the dinner party,
wherein Wilson, who is posing as an antique dealer, broaches the topic of
a Nazi resurgence. This is a subject Welles had addressed in some of his
think pieces for the New York Post in the winter of 1945. “Rankin, waxing
arrogant, launches a disquisition on the German character,” whereby he
inadvertently betrays his deeply rooted Nazi philosophy.11
“The German sees himself as conspired against, set upon by inferior
nations,” Rankin pontificates. Mary’s younger brother Noah intervenes,
“All Germans aren’t like that; what about Karl Marx?” Rankin responds
without thinking, “But Marx wasn’t a German; Marx was a Jew.” Wilson
is struck by the remark, which makes him begin to consider that Rankin
might just be Kindler. As he later reflects ruefully, “Who but a Nazi would
deny that Karl Marx was a German because he was a Jew?”
Screen credit for the script was eventually assigned solely to Anthony
Veiller by the Screen Writers Guild. Veiller, after all, was primarily
200
responsible for establishing the characters and for the basic plot of the
screenplay. Welles had only been involved in revising the screenplay.
The enterprising Spiegel brought together a sterling cast for The
Stranger. Besides Welles, there was Edward G. Robinson as Wilson, a
member of the Allied War Crimes Commission. As it happened, Welles’s
preferred choice to play Wilson was Agnes Moorhead, who had been with
Welles since his early days in radio. “I thought it would be much more
interesting to have a sinister lady on the heels of the Nazi,” he explained.12
But Spiegel would not hear of such unconventional casting. Loretta
Young, who had been a movie star since the 1930s, did a serviceable job
as Mary, Charles Rankin’s wife.
Welles managed to hire two of his former associates for his production
team. Russell Metty, an experienced director of photography, had given
Welles a hand on The Magnificent Ambersons by shooting some additional
scenes without screen credit. He subsequently photographed Welles’s late,
great film noir, Touch of Evil. Production designer Perry Ferguson had
been responsible for the sets of Citizen Kane (with Van Nest Polglase).
Ferguson erected a 124-foot clock tower that was important to the plot
(Rankin/Kindler has a passion for repairing antique clocks). Ferguson
discovered a huge discarded clock in the basement of the Los Angeles
County Museum and had it placed in the tower.
In the film the clock becomes a sixteenth-century German Gothic
clock in the town’s church tower. (One wonders how an antique Stras-
bourg clock turned up in a Connecticut village.)
Early in the film Metty photographs the town square of the village
where Rankin is hiding out, from a high angle. This overhead shot gives
the viewer a sense of the quiet atmosphere of the sleepy little New Eng-
land town where Rankin lives. The peaceful atmosphere of the village
belies the fact that a monstrous war criminal is lurking there.
During shooting Metty found that the scenes in the clock tower gave
him the greatest technical challenge. Metty recalled that “the tower was
boxed in on all four sides, and the walls could not be removed to allow for
the camera.”13 Moreover, it was difficult to keep the lights that were illu-
minating the scene out of camera range within the narrow confines of the
tower. Withal, Welles staged tense confrontations between Rankin and
his wife and with Wilson, within the tower set, all adroitly photographed
by Metty.
201
Franz Kindler (Orson Welles), a Nazi fugitive, on the clock tower, next to a gargoyle, at the
climax of The Stranger.
Bronislau Kaper, who also wrote the score for Act of Violence, pro-
vided the background music for The Stranger. Kaper churned out a fine,
suspenseful score, capturing the tense feeling of the drama, right from the
beginning with his riveting music for the opening credits, which is in fact
a mini–piano concerto.
202
203
years before. Although Meinike was aware that the girl’s death was acci-
dental, he was blackmailing Rankin in compensation for his silence about
the girl’s death. When Rankin could not afford to pay Meinike anymore,
he was forced to choke him to death. Mary agrees to guard Rankin’s secret
because, she says, “I’m already a part of it, because I’m a part of you.”
Welles’s Stranger anticipates Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, writes
James Welsh, “in the way an innocent person is drawn in to a web of
guilt and complicity” in both movies.16 In Strangers on a Train, Guy does
not turn Bruno over to the police for murdering his wife, Miriam, since
Guy subconsciously wanted to kill Miriam himself. In The Stranger Mary
is a willing accessory to Rankin’s slaying of Meinike because she firmly
believes her new husband’s phony story.
In order to finally convince Mary that Charles Rankin really is a war
criminal, Wilson shows her some newsreels that illustrate the atrocities
Rankin committed during the war. The flickering light of the movie pro-
jector is the only light in the room. This suggests that Wilson is shedding
some partial light on Rankin’s dark past for her.
The Stranger was the first Hollywood movie to incorporate actual
footage of the Nazi death camps—this was the first time that American
audiences viewed these brutal atrocities. “I do think that every time you
can get the public to look at any footage of a concentration camp,” it is
a salutary experience for them, Welles commented. The Dachau footage
happened to be filmed by Welles’s fellow director George Stevens while
he was a Signal Corps photographer during the war.17
Inspector Wilson eventually manages to convince the townspeople,
including Mary, that Charles Rankin is indeed Franz Kindler. Shocked
by Wilson’s disclosures, Mary follows Rankin to the clock tower, where
she knows he is hiding, in order to kill him herself. Mary resolutely climbs
the ladder to the top of the clock tower.
Rankin looks down at the villagers gathered around the base of the
tower. He tells Mary, “They searched the woods; I watched them, like
God looking at little ants.” In a parallel scene in Carol Reed’s The Third
Man (1949), Welles, as the evil black-market racketeer Harry Lime,
surveys the people below him from the top of a Ferris wheel. The Welles
character again sees himself as a God-like figure, superior to the ordinary
rabble that are beneath him. Like Charles Rankin, Harry Lime is arrogant
and defiant to the end.
204
205
206
Mexican police official; he was offered the part because Universal wanted
a bankable star for the picture.
In Heston’s autobiography, he recalls that, when the studio called him
about the part, they said, “We’ve got Welles to play the heavy.” Heston
wondered if they could really not have thought of the obvious: “Why not
ask him to direct, too? He’s a pretty good director, you know.” Since the
films that Welles had directed earlier in the 1950s had not been hits, the
front office hired Welles as director as well as actor on the stipulation that
he would be paid only for acting in the picture. “So Orson directed what
turned out to be a classic film for nothing.” Moreover, the parsimonious
studio allocated a budget “of less than a million dollars for the whole film,”
Heston continued; “that left little money for the actors. Nevertheless, they
all wanted to work for Orson, in the first film he’d directed in Hollywood
in ten years.”28 Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Cotten, Mercedes McCam-
bridge, and other stars appeared in cameos just to be in a Welles film.
Like Sam Spiegel before him, Universal production chief Edward Muhl
kept Welles on a tight rein, to remind him that he was operating within
the studio system and not as an independent. Muhl accordingly “restricted
Welles to an $825,000 budget and a thirty-eight-day shooting schedule.”29
While it is true that Welles would not have been familiar with the
term film noir at that time, it seems undeniable that he would have been
familiar with the concept; he was, after all, aiming to create a dark crime
thriller, which is precisely what a film noir usually was. Moreover, Touch
of Evil is now commonly regarded as the “epitaph” or “tombstone” of the
classic noir period. Thus Foster Hirsch, as noted, regards the movie as the
final statement of noir’s conventions “and a convenient demarcation.”30
The crime novel Badge of Evil was the basis of the film; it was a
pulp novel by Whit Masterson, the joint pen name of Robert Wade and
William Miller. Welles found the book routine, and the scenario Paul
Monasch derived from it mediocre. He therefore completely reworked the
script in less than a month, employing some dialogue from both the book
and Monasch’s draft.31
But Welles made some major changes in the story line while compos-
ing his screenplay. In the novel the character to be played by Heston was
an Anglo-Saxon police officer with a Mexican wife. It was Welles who
transformed the Heston character into Miguel Vargas, a Mexican police
authority, and his wife into Susan, an Anglo girl from Philadelphia. In
207
this manner Welles could position a corrupt American cop, Capt. Hank
Quinlan, against an upright Mexican police detective, thereby making
much more of the racial angle than had been the case either in the novel
or the first script, which followed the novel fairly closely.
For the record, Welles did make use of Monasch’s version of the
script and hence Monasch should not have been denied a screen credit as
coauthor of the screenplay.
At all events, for those who complained about a white actor playing
a Hispanic, Heston declared to James Delson that he played Vargas as
an intelligent, educated professional; his performance “doesn’t contribute
to the stereotype of the sombrero Mexican lazing around in the shade.”32
One of the crucial departures that Welles made from the novel and
the scenario was to relocate the setting from San Diego to Los Robles, a
fictional Mexican-American border town patterned after Tijuana; in fact
the tentative title of Welles’s script was Borderline.33
Shooting began on February 18, 1957; Welles filmed the exteriors of
the noir border town in Venice, a beach community south of Santa Monica.
(Chaplin had made a silent short, “Kid Auto Race at Venice,” there in 1914.)
More than half the movie was shot at night in and around Venice, with its
garbage-strewn alleys, stagnant canals, and pumping oil wells. Welles mostly
filmed at night “in part to avoid studio interference, but also because the
story demanded it.”34 Of course, “the enormous quantity of litter and debris”
is an expressionistic metaphor for moral decay, which is rampant among the
inhabitants of the squalid border town. As Vargas says in the film, border
towns attract the dregs of the population on both sides of the border.
“Welles’s most significant addition to the Monasch script,” Thomson
points out, “is the out-of-town motel,” where a gang of Mexican hood-
lums terrorizes Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh). “That motel is still one of the
most frightening places in American film,” along with the motel in which
Marion Crane (Janet Leigh again) is murdered in Hitchcock’s Psycho.35
Janet Leigh had appeared in Zinnemann’s Act of Violence and was
now a mature actress. She accidentally broke her arm two weeks before
principal photography began, and had to wear her arm in a sling—except
when she was on camera. Along with Heston and Leigh, Welles gathered
a superior cast.
Akim Tamiroff had played in Welles’s previous film, Mr. Arkadin (his
brother-in-law, Konstantin Shayne, played Meinike in The Stranger). In the
208
present film Tamiroff plays Uncle Joe Grandi, a petty Mexican gangster,
to perfection. Uncle Joe is a “dumpy little man with an insecure scowl and
an anxious snarl.”36 When he is agitated, which is often, Uncle Joe’s toupee
tends to slip. He is called “Uncle Joe” because he presides over a mob com-
prising mostly his nephews, a leather-jacketed gang of unruly delinquents.
Tamiroff made a specialty of playing repellant, disreputable charac-
ters, and Welles himself was playing an equally devious type in Touch of
Evil. As Quinlan, “Welles builds up his own, already bulky figure with
padding and then wears a rumpled, tent-like overcoat.”37 Pete Menzies,
Quinlan’s loyal partner, is enacted by Joseph Calleia (The Glass Key), who
gives a peerless performance.
Marlene Dietrich was an old friend of Welles; he sawed her in half
when he was entertaining the troops during World War II. Welles cast her
as Tanya, the world-weary madam of the local brothel, a part tailor-made
for Dietrich. For her part Dietrich donned the same black wig she had worn
as a gypsy in Golden Earrings ten years earlier. She is able to wear a seductive
costume and yet suggest a whiff of depravity. Although Dietrich completed
her role in just one night, she gave a memorable performance.
Welles was fortunate enough to have not only an impressive cast but
a first-rate production team as well. It was highlighted by production
designer Alexander Golitzen (Scarlet Street) and cinematographer Russell
Metty (The Stranger). Metty’s black-and-white photography on both of
his Welles pictures was outstanding. Metty was physically of Wellesian
proportions, even like Welles chewing on a cigar; but, unlike Welles, he
could be brusque to the point of rudeness.
Metty was renowned for his complicated crane shots, such as the
one that opens Touch of Evil, in which the camera, mounted on a 22-foot
crane, surveys the entire main street of a town on the Mexican border.
Richard Chatten quotes Charlton Heston as saying that many camera-
men would ask the director, “Do you want it fast or do you want it good?”
Comments Heston, “With Russ, you got both.”38 Heston described this
opening shot in detail for James Delson:
“Well, for the record, it begins on a close-up” of a man’s hand clutching
a time bomb, and the camera then “pans just enough to catch the unidenti-
fied figure dashing out of the frame.” Then Metty’s camera “pans down the
alley” in the direction in which the figure holding the dynamite has fled,
on the near side of the building, going in the same direction. You see the
209
figure (and of course, now you can’t possibly identify him) dart behind the
building. He is followed by the camera, “but still too far away to tell who
he is, he lifts the trunk of a car and puts what is obviously a bomb into the
car, slams the lid and disappears into the shadows just as the camera, now
lifting above the car, picks up the couple coming around the other side of
the building and getting in the car. You establish him as a fat political type
and she a floozy blond type. And they carry on—there’s enough awareness
of their dialogue to establish a kind of drunken nonchalance.”
The camera zooms up on a Chapman boom as the car drives out of
the parking lot and out into the street. The boom sinks down and picks up
the car as it passes rundown buildings covered with peeling posters. “The
camera then moves ahead of the car; the bomb is ticking all the while,
and consequently the filmgoer wonders when it will explode. The car
goes through the border station from Mexico into the United States. This
extended take (3 minutes, 20 seconds in length), comes to a spectacular
close as the bomb explodes.”39
The laying out of this long take was incredibly complicated and was
accomplished perfectly by Welles and Metty. In fact, Metty’s camerawork
serves Welles’s intentions throughout the movie. At one point, the mobile
camera pushes through the beaded curtains of a smoky Mexican dive, as Var-
gas roughs up an uncooperative suspect, inciting a barroom brawl. Metty’s
camera is like a whip in this scene, lashing the action into the viewer’s face.
Furthermore, Touch of Evil was the first Hollywood film to use the
handheld camera. This lightweight, portable camera enabled the camera-
man to follow Grandi around a shabby motel room at close range as he
frantically attempted to dodge the inebriated Quinlan, who was inexora-
bly intent on killing him.
Welles insisted that Metty avoid using artificial light for the daytime
scenes—unheard of technique in Hollywood films of the time; instead,
Metty employed natural light in the daytime sequences, which contrib-
uted to the stark, newsreel-like quality of the cinematography, thereby
helping to give the whole movie an air of spare, unvarnished realism.
Welles favored Metty’s use of natural light sources in the grim scenes that
take place at night. This means that there is always an identifiable light
source on the set, from which the light would ordinarily come in real life,
such as a table lamp. This, too, makes the settings in the film look more
like real buildings, and not just movie sets.
210
211
for three shooting days: close-ups, two shots, over-shoulders, and inserts.
All this was planned, of course, to astound Universal, which it surely did.
It was also a fine way to shoot the scene.”41 This long, unbroken take (5
minutes, 23 seconds), in which Quinlan relentlessly interrogates Sanchez,
creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia and tension, because the action
is confined to the cramped, suffocating apartment.
Heston concluded, “The front-office people never came near the set
again. They kept hoping for another miraculous twelve-page day. They
never got one, but Orson had persuaded them that even if he did get into
trouble, he could get out of it. As a matter of fact, they were dead right;
he had a remarkably sure foot for tightropes.”42
Welles later stated, “Everyone talks about the opening shot,” when
the bomb is planted in the trunk of the car. But he considered the interro-
gation scene, just described, to be one of “the greatest uses of the moving
camera in the history of cinema.”43
Delson commented to Heston that he handled himself well “when the
famous Wellesian scene-stealing took place.” For example, when Vargas
Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) and Ramon Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) in Welles’s Touch
of Evil, generally thought to be the last “official” film noir of the classic period.
212
confronts Quinlan with his suspicion that Quinlan planted evidence in San-
chez’s motel room, Quinlan raises his cane in anger. Its threatening shadow
falls across Vargas’s face, implying how Quinlan overshadows Vargas at this
point—he still has power and influence in the town. In playing the scene
Heston did not flinch in the face of Welles’s threatening gaze, as Delson
pointed out to him. “Well, I am happy to subscribe to the thesis that I can
stand on equal ground with Orson in a scene,” he answered.44
Principal photography wrapped in the wee hours of April 2, 1957.
Welles was one night over the thirty-eight-day shooting schedule, and
$31,000 over the $825,000 budget—a reasonable overage, considering
the meagerness of the budget to begin with.45 Welles spent two months
supervising the editing and dubbing of the rough cut mainly with editor
Virgil Vogel; another editor, Aaron Stell, also helped out.
After Welles delivered the rough cut to Universal, he decamped for
Mexico, where he was engaged during the balance of the summer in pre-
paring to direct a film about Don Quixote. It was extremely imprudent of
Welles to fly the coop without discussing in detail his rough cut with the
front office, a mistake he had made before.
While Welles was away from Hollywood, Edward Muhl, studio chief,
screened Welles’s rough cut. He and his fellow executives were baffled by
it; they found it excessively dark and disturbing. They were unsure how
to market it; it didn’t seem to fit into any conventional genre or category.
“The picture was just too dark and black and strange for them,” Welles
explained years later. “Movies weren’t nearly that black” back then; those
were different days.46
In Welles’s absence, Muhl therefore asked Edward Nims, head of
postproduction, who had edited The Stranger, to reedit certain scenes.
Muhl further enlisted a young journeyman contract director named Harry
Keller to shoot a few brief additional scenes to clarify the story line, with
Cliff Stein as cinematographer. These scenes were shot on November 19,
1957, with Welles barred from the set on his return from Mexico. Keller
accordingly shot “some bland and clichéd connecting footage.”47
Welles dispatched a letter to Heston, cited in This Is Orson Welles, on
November 17, implying that Heston should at the very least “insist on a
certain standard of professional capacity and reputation in the choice of an
alternate director. UNLESS THE STUDIO IS STOPPED THEY ARE
GOING TO WRECK OUR PICTURE.” (The caps are Welles’s.) He
213
refers to Heston’s owning a piece of the film, saying, “You must realize that,
if you have a financial interest in the picture, I have a professional one.”48
“They did a half day’s work without me,” Welles told Peter Bogdanov-
ich. “Heston kept phoning me to say what he was doing, and to ask if it
was all right, because if I didn’t approve he would walk off the set.” When
Heston reported to Welles that he was satisfied with Keller’s work, Welles
replied immediately in another letter: “The fact that your director is not,
after all, a certifiable incompetent” seemed to be enough to satisfy Heston.49
Welles was reserving judgment until he saw Nims’s cut of the film,
and he did so on December 4, 1957. He fired off a fifty-eight-page memo
to Muhl, suggesting some improvements, the following day, December 5.
“I find it hard to resist pointing out,” Welles commented in his memo
as diplomatically as he could, that Nims’s cut “displays a much hastier
craftsmanship” than his own cut of the film.50 For his part, Muhl believed
that Nims worked at a faster pace than Welles simply because he was
more efficient.
Welles closed his memo “with a very earnest plea that you consent”
to his suggestions to improve the final cut, “to which I gave so many long
hard days of work.”51 Welles later sent a copy to Heston, with a cover let-
ter, in which he stated that Muhl assured him that Nims was honoring
many of Welles’s suggestions. Welles only hoped that that was true. As
a matter of fact, some of the modifications that Welles suggested were
made by Nims, who saw himself more as Welles’s ally than as his enemy.
In any case, Henry Mancini was commissioned to compose the score
for the movie. Although Mancini became better known for his lighter
scores for movies like The Pink Panther, he was equally adept at creating
music for serious pictures. Welles had advised Mancini early on that he
did not want “tempestuous, melodramatic, or operatic scoring.”52
Mancini responded with an innovative score in which he adroitly
integrated jazz, featuring a honky-tonk player piano (which appeared
in the film in Tanya’s brothel). Chuck Berg writes that Mancini’s edgy,
jazz-inflected score “accentuates the film’s tension with Latin percus-
sion,” especially bongo drums. Moreover, Mancini brought his jazzy
scoring just as effectively to the TV detective series Peter Gunn the
following year. “Mancini acknowledged that his greatest contribution”
to movie music was his incorporation of jazz “into the mainstream film
scoring,” beginning with Touch of Evil.53 Preminger followed suit by
214
215
end of the movie, as Welles had suggested in his memo. He also removed
Henry Mancini’s title music, which accompanied the opening credits.
Welles wanted overlapping fragments of source music during the ex-
tended opening shot, Murch explains.55 Murch replaced Mancini’s music
with incidental music spilling onto the street from car radios, bars, and
juke joints; and with location sounds, including the voices of pedestrians
and even police sirens. As a result of these carefully compiled sounds,
viewers are immediately plunged into the atmosphere of a noisy main
street in a border town, as Welles intended.
In his memo Welles had offered fifty suggestions in all, with a view to
fine-tuning the film. Granted, Nims had implemented a few of Welles’s
ideas, but the majority of his changes were ignored. I have described two
of these modifications, in the film’s opening scene. The other forty-eight
are not all equally significant, but, as Murch states, they do have a power-
ful cumulative effect on the picture as a whole.
“The fifty changes that were made did not transform the film into
something completely different,” Murch emphasizes. “This Touch of Evil
is simply a better version of the same film, which is to say, more in line
with the director’s vision.”56 Similarly, Michael Dawson, who restored
Welles’s Othello, told me that the aim of the reconstruction of a Welles
film is not to “improve” on Welles’s movie, but to present it as closely as
possible to the version that he had intended.
In the light of the movie’s status in Europe as a masterwork, Touch of
Evil developed a cult following in America over the years, culminating in
the release of Walter Murch’s restored version in 1998. At that point the
movie was heralded as a superb film noir in the United States as well as
in Europe. Indeed, Touch of Evil was officially inducted into the Library
of Congress’s National Film Registry as a motion picture of lasting value,
and is included in Eagan’s book on the registry films.
Still, when Edward Muhl was asked his opinion of Welles at the time
of the film’s restoration, he answered that “Welles was a poseur who never
made a film that earned any money.”57 The unrepentant Muhl was obvi-
ously not aware of the commercial success of The Stranger, not to mention
that the restored version of Touch of Evil has done a land-office business
for Universal on DVD.
As the movie gets rolling, Miguel Vargas is involved in two ongo-
ing investigations: first, there is the death of millionaire Rudy Linnekar
216
and his girlfriend, resulting from the explosion in the border town in the
movie’s first scene; second, Vargas is also bringing to trial in Mexico City
the brother of Joe Grandi, the local crime boss in Los Robles, on drug
charges. While Vargas pursues leads in his investigations, his wife, Susan,
moves into the isolated Mirador Motel on the American side of the bor-
der, which—unknown to her—is owned by the Grandis.
Vargas suspects Quinlan, a blatant racist, of endeavoring to frame
Manelo Sanchez, a Mexican shoe clerk who is engaged to Marcia Lin-
nekar, for the death of her father, who opposed the marriage. When
Vargas uncovers evidence that implies that Quinlan has framed Sanchez,
Quinlan is apoplectic at being “caught” out of bounds.
Meanwhile, the conniving racketeer, Joe Grandi, decides to warn Var-
gas off the prosecution of his brother by victimizing his wife. He dispatches
his mob of young thugs to the creepy, deserted motel. The gang includes
a tough, muscular lesbian (Mercedes McCambridge), who sports a leather
jacket like the guys. Susan is forced to take drugs to set her up as an apparent
addict. As the hoodlums prepare to rape Susan, the leader of the pack in-
structs them gruffly, “Hold her legs.” The lesbian says, “Let me stay; I wanna
watch.” A shadow falls across Susan’s terrified face; and the door of her motel
room slams, shutting out the viewer. “Nothing is really shown beyond ter-
rible anticipation,” Thomson writes, “but it is enough, and it is repellant.”58
Assuming that Quinlan will endorse his badgering of Vargas through
the persecution of his wife, Grandi moves Susan to El Rancho Grandi, a
tawdry hotel in Los Robles, where he has a meeting with Quinlan who
has been drinking heavily. Quinlan, who suspects that the devious Grandi
might double-cross him somehow, intends to strangle Grandi with a silk
stocking. The scene is lit only by a neon sign blinking on and off out-
side the window. The unsteady, eerie light suggests how unsteady and
frightened Grandi feels. (Welles apparently borrowed the lighting effect
from the scene in Chris’s dingy hotel room in Scarlet Street.) After he kills
Grandi, Quinlan, who walks with a cane, inadvertently leaves it behind
in the hotel room.
A police physician (Joseph Cotten) subsequently advises Vargas that
there is evidence that his wife had been involved in “a mixed party” (i.e.,
racially mixed) at the Mirador Motel, before she was transported in a
drugged state to El Rancho Grandi. Vargas is outraged by the kidnap-
ping of his wife; he has a conference with Quinlan’s devoted partner, Pete
217
Menzies, about it. In the past Menzies had steadfastly supported Quinlan
as a good cop, disregarding any evidence to the contrary. But Menzies
himself discovers Quinlan’s cane at the murder scene and realizes to his
great consternation that he has been Quinlan’s dupe and stooge for years.
The distraught Menzies agrees to wear a wire, attached to Vargas’s
tape recorder, to aid Vargas in trapping Quinlan into a confession. Men-
zies and Quinlan walk through a nighttime wasteland of oil derricks
towering above a polluted river. Vargas clambers after them, even wading
beneath a bridge to keep within range of the microphone concealed on
Menzies.
Quinlan declares to Menzies self-righteously, “I never framed anyone
who wasn’t guilty!” When Quinlan’s voice echoes from Vargas’s record-
ing device and ricochets back to him, he suddenly realizes that Menzies
is involved in electronic eavesdropping at Vargas’s behest. Aware that
Menzies has betrayed him, Quinlan summarily guns down his erstwhile
partner and friend.
Quinlan then prepares to open fire on Vargas, but the fatally
wounded Menzies shoots Quinlan instead. Long ago Quinlan “saved
Menzies’s life by stopping a bullet meant for him, causing his game
leg and necessitating his use of a cane.”59 Consequently, when Menzies
shoots Quinlan, the latter says haltingly before he expires, “Pete, that’s
the second bullet I stopped for you.” In the restored version of the film,
Menzies had explained in an earlier scene about Quinlan taking a bullet
intended for him. But his explanation was one of the passages deleted
in the original release prints of the film, where Quinlan’s remark about
it is left unexplained.
The body of the corrupt cop falls backward into the slimy river, which
is choked with trash. Quinlan’s fate once again recalls Welles as Harry
Lime in Reed’s Third Man, just as Welles’s Franz Kindler also evokes
Harry Lime. In Reed’s movie Lime dies in a foul, muddy sewer. In Touch
of Evil, Quinlan ends by sinking into the depths of a filthy, stagnant
river—an expressionistic symbol of his decline into moral degradation.
Discussing this scene, Brian McDonnell observes that Touch of Evil cer-
tainly lays claim to being “the final great flourish of expressionistic style
within the classic noir period.”60
Filmmaker Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential) calls “the torturous
relationship” between Quinlan and Menzies, his loyal sidekick, a heartfelt
218
love story. Quinlan was “assisted, idolized, and loved by his heartsick
deputy, who would rather die for him than betray him—and who ulti-
mately does both.”61
Tanya materializes on the bridge over the polluted river, in the wake
of Quinlan’s death. Earlier in the picture Quinlan had asked Tanya, who
is a fortune teller, to foretell his future. “You haven’t got any,” she replied
ruefully; “your future is all used up.” How right she was. At film’s end,
Schwartz, a police detective, informs Tanya that Sanchez has confessed
to the murder of Rudy Linnekar and his girl; Quinlan had been right all
along about Sanchez. Tanya responds, “He was a great detective—and a
lousy cop” (because he unlawfully took the law into his own hands).
Schwartz says, “You really liked him.” Tanya sidesteps his observa-
tion, and answers instead laconically, “The cop did; the one who killed
him; he loved him.” Asked by Schwartz to sum up Quinlan’s character,
she responds, “He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you
say about people?” Dietrich always believed that was “the best-delivered
line of her life.”62 With that, Tanya murmurs, “Adios,” and walks away,
receding into the darkness.
219
Notes
1. André Bazin, Charles Bitsch, and Jean Domarchi, “Interview with Orson
Welles,” in Orson Welles: Interviews, ed. Mark Estrin (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2002), 74.
2. James Harvey, “Sam Spiegel,” New York Times Book Review, April 13, 2003,
29.
3. Clinton Heylin, Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Stu-
dios (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005), 169.
4. Joseph McBride, Orson Welles, rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 99.
5. Biesen, Blackout, 207.
6. Simon Callow, Orson Welles: Hello, America (New York, Viking, 2006), 267.
7. Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, rev. ed. (New
York: Da Capo, 1995), 186.
8. David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (New York: Vintage,
1997), 268.
9. Heylin, Despite the System, 180.
10. Richard France, “Orson Welles’s First Film,” Films in Review 38, no. 9
(August–September, 1989): 403–7.
11. Peter Cowie, The Cinema of Orson Welles, rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo,
1989), 89.
12. Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 187.
13. Charles Higham, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 225.
220
221
222
w
THE LOWER DEPTHS:
THE RISE OF NEO-NOIR
w
DASHIELL HAMMETT AND NEO-NOIR:
THE DAIN CURSE AND HAMMETT
A
fter the heyday of film noir ended in the late 1950s, there were
sporadic attempts to revive it in the 1960s with films like The
Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1968). The 1970s ushered in a
resurgence of interest in film noir with movies like Chinatown (1974), and
the antihero took on a larger profile. This dark type of film, peopled with
desperate and depraved characters, was christened neo-noir. This cycle of
tough, cynical crime movies gained momentum in the 1980s with movies
like Body Heat (1981) and in the 1990s with films like L.A. Confidential
(1997). Moreover, “neo-noir continues to expand in the twenty-first cen-
tury” with pictures like The Ghost Writer (2010).1
Contemporary audiences find the doomed protagonist of a neo-noir
intriguing, writes David Everitt. “Almost always he damns himself by giv-
ing in to temptation—either a proposition from an alluring woman or a
scheme to make easy money,” often engineered by a femme fatale.2 “The
neo-noir spirit,” comments Ronald Schwartz, boldly carries forward film
noir’s underlying cynicism and pessimism about “the moral bankruptcy of
contemporary America.”3
What’s more, many detective movies made since the days of classic
noir qualify as neo-noir, because they have the benchmarks of the noir
films of yesteryear. Stephen Holden states that the noir formula demands
that filmmakers create movies with strong story lines, “with hard-boiled
dialogue and multifaceted, often duplicitous characters. Noir may be
formula, but it is one with room for compelling flesh-and-blood charac-
ters.”4 So neo-noir films continue to be turned out in Hollywood, and, as
225
Richard Jameson puts it, “film noir is still possible, and has no apologies
to make to anybody.”5
Dashiell Hammett’s name is inextricably linked with neo-noir since
his influence on the detective film and on neo-noir remains strong. Neo-
noir movies like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, with their hard-boiled
detectives, “draw strength from the honorable cinematic tradition” of the
noir detective film dating back to The Maltese Falcon.6
Naremore declares that “neo-noirs are produced by Hollywood with in-
creasing regularity. Consider such big-budget television productions” as The
Dain Curse (1978), based on a Hammett novel. Both The Dain Curse and
Hammett (1982), a theatrical film that features Dashiell Hammett himself
as a private eye, have been rediscovered in recent years and belong to the
trend in neo-noir. Naremore concludes that noir is never going to go away.7
Foster Hirsch, author of Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-
Noir, has told the New York Times that “audiences remain intrigued by
neo noir for essentially the same reasons they always were. There is the
appeal of a story about characters who are thrown into a kind of nightmare
scenario.” There is a timeless attraction to characters who are dogged by
cruel circumstances and fate.8
Hammett published his second novel, The Dain Curse, in 1929. It
centered on the Continental Op, that is, an operative of the Continental
Detective Agency. He works out of the agency’s San Francisco office. The
Op appears in Hammett’s first two novels and most of the short fiction
Hammett published in Black Mask. (The Op would be replaced by Sam
Spade in The Maltese Falcon.)
Hammett scholar Robert Gale believes that the Op survives “because
he is quick-witted, skillful at his job, cynically disillusioned, and consistently
amoral”—he will bend the rules when he feels he has to in order to solve a
case.9
Moreover, the Op shares with Sam Spade, who was to some extent
modeled on the Op, the character of a lone wolf, who is driven by a
personal sense of mission. Thus the role of the police force is marginal
in The Dain Curse, as it is in The Maltese Falcon, because both the Op
and Sam Spade sometimes question the competence of the police, not
to mention their integrity. Just when the cops expect that the Op should
cooperate with them in an investigation, he is apt to take over the entire
case and solve it himself. As LeRoy Panek observes in Reading Early
226
Hammett, the police ultimately “don’t make any difference to what goes
on in The Dain Curse.”10
In the novel, the Op is called upon to investigate the theft of some
unset diamonds of negligible worth from the wealthy Leggett family.
What starts out as a routine robbery case turns deeply serious when Ed-
gar Leggett, head of the clan, is murdered; then his daughter Gabrielle
becomes involved in a sinister religious cult centered at the Temple of the
Holy Grail. What’s more, her new husband, Eric Collison, is slain in due
course by a hit man. In short, it becomes increasingly apparent that the
Op moves in a threatening world of conniving clients, dead-end hoods,
and crafty conspirators.
The Dain Curse was serialized before publication in book form in
Black Mask, from November 1928 to February 1929. If The Dain Curse as
a novel seems to lack sufficient narrative coherence at times, the reason
is that Joseph Shaw, the editor of Black Mask, insisted that Hammett
make “each of the four installments self-contained. . . . Although linking
passages were provided,” the shift from one installment to the next was
awkward.11 Hammett did make an effort to improve the story’s narrative
continuity when he revised it for publication as a book, but the complex
plot is still difficult at times to follow.
While composing the novel’s story line, he recalled the American
fascination with spiritualism that had developed in the 1920s, and in-
troduced it into the novel. Moreover, Arthur Conan Doyle late in life
was “an avid believer in the spirit world.” Conan Doyle even took to the
lecture circuit to defend spiritualism and spoke in California in 1923.
Hammett personally thought evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson,
with her Foursquare gospel, were charlatans.12
Hammett accordingly depicts in The Dain Curse Joseph and Aaronia
Haldorn, who preside over the Temple of the Holy Grail in San Fran-
cisco, as con artists engaged in a spook racket. They employ technicians
like Tom Fink to rig the ghostly gimmicks used in the services at the
temple to impress their gullible clientele. The Haldorns’ vulgar religious
sideshow is, in the Op’s estimation, just another example of the manner
in which phoniness had penetrated almost every sector of modern life. Yet
Gabrielle becomes one of the Haldorns’ fervent followers. In fact, Gabri-
elle takes refuge in the Temple of the Holy Grail because she claims to
experience bizarre spiritual apparitions.
227
228
to do with the radio,” he said at the time; “it’s a dizzy world—makes the
movies seem highly intellectual.”16 Television also proved subsequently to
be a source of income; Lillian Hellman, the executor of Hammett’s estate,
pocketed $175,000 for the TV rights to The Dain Curse.17
229
Tom Fink (Brent Spiner) is confronted by Hamilton Nash (James Coburn) in the neo-noir
television adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Dain Curse.
230
Nash investigates in turn Edgar Leggett, his daughter Gabrielle, and his
second wife, Alice, with the help of his novelist friend Owen Fitzstephan,
who knows the Leggetts. In brief, Edgar Leggett had initially been friends
with the two sisters, Lily and Alice Dain.
While Nash is looking for the stolen diamonds, Gabrielle, a mor-
phine addict, disappears. Nash traces her to the Temple of the Holy
Grail, which is presided over by Joseph Haldorn and his wife Aaronia.
Nash finds Gabrielle there and takes her home, only to learn that Edgar
Leggett has apparently committed suicide. Edgar leaves behind a letter,
confessing to the murder of his first wife, Lily—who is Alice’s sister and
Gabrielle’s mother.
Nash decides in a powwow with the Leggetts that Edgar’s letter was
not a suicide note; he more than likely intended to flee the country for
distant climes, not to kill himself. It seems that Edgar took the blame
for Lily’s murder because Alice had blamed Gabrielle, who—as a child
of five—allegedly shot her mother while hypnotized by Alice. Nash
rightly suspects that Alice herself shot Lily, so she could wed Edgar, a
millionaire; and that Edgar, in turn, assumed the blame for Lily’s demise
to protect his daughter. Alice Leggett, Nash contends, then killed Edgar,
in order to become a wealthy widow, eligible to pursue younger men like
Owen Fitzstephan.
Alice, distraught over Nash’s accusations, endeavors to escape; but
she is shot by Owen Fitzstephan, as they struggle on the staircase, before
she can make her getaway from the Leggett mansion. Alice, who exits the
story at the close of the first of the miniseries’s three installments, turns
out to be a bona fide femme fatale, since Nash’s accusations against her
prove true. As LeRoy Panek comments, the narrative “characterizes Alice
quite literally as a predator.”19
In the miniseries’s second installment, it is clear that Gabrielle is all
too aware that the Leggetts are descendants of the Dain clan, which, leg-
end has it, is accursed. She accordingly believes that she is marked by the
Dain curse; that is, Gabrielle sees herself as a jinx and warns Nash not to
get involved with her, “or the Dain curse will get you.” In addition, she is
convinced that her drug addiction is the result of the Dain curse.
Gabrielle moves into the Temple of the Holy Grail, a converted office
building in downtown San Francisco. She is seeking spiritual solace from
Joseph and Aaronia Haldorn, Nash notes, by way of their hocus-pocus.
231
232
233
fronted for him, from behind the scenes. Fink then admits in open court
that he planted the homemade bomb in Owen Fitzstephan’s hotel. He
did so because Owen owned the temple and Fink feared that Owen would
turn state’s evidence, thereby implicating him and the whole temple gang
in his diabolical schemes. In short, Fink wanted to keep Owen from tes-
tifying against him and the others working at the temple.
District Attorney Jason McNally has built up an impressive case
against Owen Fitzstephan, largely through the exhaustive investigations
of the intrepid Hamilton Nash. To begin with, Nash maintains, Owen
shot Alice on the staircase of the Leggett mansion, but not to keep her
from eluding the long arm of the law from killing her sister Lily. His pur-
pose was to ditch her as his mistress, since he now lusted for Gabrielle. As
Gabrielle herself states in her testimony in court, “Owen Fitzstephan was
the lover of my stepmother, Alice Leggett.” After her death, “he switched
his affections to me.”
Owen then hired a contract killer to liquidate Eric Collinson, Gabri-
elle’s young husband. He was determined to have Gabrielle as his exclu-
sive property, but she consistently spurned his advances. LeRoy Panek,
the best commentator on The Dain Curse, writes, “At the root of all of
the evil in The Dain Curse lies Fitzstephan’s appetite for Gabrielle and her
rejection of him.” In brief, Owen was driven by a dark “sexual ardor” for
a woman he could not have.22
Fitzstephan during his trial enters a plea of “not guilty by reason of
insanity.” Nash testifies that Owen believes himself to be a sane man; but
he wants the jury to declare him insane so that he will be sent to a mental
institution and not executed for his crimes. “Yet,” Nash concludes, “I be-
lieve he really is insane! He is mad as a hatter!!”
Nash adds in a voice-over on the sound track, “The jury took pity
on Owen Fitzstephan and sent him to an asylum.” Aaronia Haldorn,
one of Owen’s former mistresses, declared that she would take care of
the disabled Owen when he got out; he was in fact discharged two years
later. But Owen did not get off scot-free; as a result of Fink’s makeshift
bomb, Owen was a crippled wreck for the rest of his days. Dennis Dooley
reflects, Fitzstephan “in some ways received a fitting punishment for his
sins.”23 As I have had occasion to state before, in film noir there are no
dispensations; one pays for his sins. Nash’s final words are, “The Dain
curse was over; I had done my job.”
234
Hammett (1982)
Joe Gores, like Hammett himself, had been a private investigator before
turning to crime fiction as a career. In Hammett (1975) Gores has “the
father of modern detective fiction rise from his typewriter to hunt down
a murderer.”25 Gores has won three Edgar Awards for his mystery novels;
and his seventeenth detective novel, Spade and Archer (2009), is a prequel
to The Maltese Falcon.
The murder case that Hammett solves in the novel Hammett was
derived by Gores from Hammett’s short story, “Dead Yellow Women,”
published in Black Mask in 1925. In the short story the Continental Op
is assigned by the Old Man to Lillian Shan, a Chinese client living in a
house on the shore on the outskirts of San Francisco. When Lillian, an
expert in the occult, returned to her home unexpectedly from a research
trip, she was met by the leader of a small band of Chinese thugs, who had
her bound and gagged before he and his gang departed. When she finally
broke free, she found that her maid and her cook had been slain.
The Op soon learns of the involvement of Chinatown overlord
Chang Li Ching in the murder case, and that he is in cahoots with Neil
235
Conyers, a con man. Lillian in due course explains to the Op that Chang
and Conyers are smuggling contraband guns to China for patriots who
are preparing to resist the impending Japanese aggression in China. She
confesses that the weapons are stored in her coastal home while awaiting
transportation to China.
The Op counters that he has discovered that the cargo on the re-
turn trip to San Francisco is opium, smuggled into the United States by
Conyers and his cohorts. Consequently, when Lillian arrived home pre-
maturely, Conyers arranged to have Chinese hoodlums bind and gag her
so that she would not find out that he was using her house for smuggling
drugs into San Francisco, as well as to transport arms to China. The Op
adds that Lillian’s loyal servants were probably killed so that they could
not tell Lillian that her house was involved in drug traffic. Soon after,
Conyers is slain by a rival gang of drug dealers in Chinatown.
Lillian is not arrested for drug trafficking because she steadfastly
claims that she knew nothing about Conyers’s drug dealing; and the
police believe her. The slick Chang is not charged with drug trafficking
because he has effectively covered his tracks. What’s more, neither Lillian
nor Chang are prosecuted for sending contraband weapons to China for
lack of evidence.
When Lillian Hellman included “Dead Yellow Women” in The Big
Knockover, her collection of Hammett’s short fiction, it was “praised for its
careful construction, skillful plot, and accurate depiction of Chinatown’s
rabbit-warren layout.”26 Indeed, it was Hellman’s resurrection of the story
from Black Mask for her collection that very likely brought it to the atten-
tion of Gores, who made it the spine of his novel Hammett.
Francis Ford Coppola decided to produce a film version of Gores’s
novel, when the book was brought to his attention by one of his staff.
Coppola had maintained his own independent production company,
American Zoetrope, in San Francisco since 1969; he operated the facility
as an independent production unit, producing films in partnership with
major Hollywood studios. In 1978 Coppola invited the respected German
filmmaker Wim Wenders to the United States to make his first American
movie, an adaptation of Gores’s novel Hammett, in which Dashiell Ham-
mett, master of the penny dreadful, solves a real-life mystery. Coppola
asked Wenders to direct the film, because Wenders was an internationally
known German director who wanted to make a film in America.
236
237
Frederic Forrest as Dashiell Hammett in Hammett; he loads his gun as he sits at his typewriter.
This is the only time the novelist was portrayed on the screen.
238
regular, had edited films like Godfather II; he served as supervising editor
on Hammett. As an “in joke,” one of the hoodlums in the film is called
“Blackie” Malkin.
Philip Lathrop replaced the original director of photography, Joseph
Biroc, who was not available for the reshoot. Lathrop was an impec-
cable craftsman, who had photographed The Black Bird, David Giler’s
1975 send-up of The Maltese Falcon, with George Segal as Sam Spade.
Inexplicably, Lathrop received no screen credit for his extensive work on
Hammett.
Composer John Barry, best known for his scoring of several of the
James Bond pictures, provided a jazzy score for Hammett, all wailing clari-
nets, sultry strings, and tinkling piano. The score was very appropriate for
a film set during the Jazz Age.
The plot of Hammett was much simplified by Ross Thomas, in
comparison to the scenario originally worked up by Wenders and his col-
laborators. Nevertheless, the story line still requires the sort of detailed
exposition for the reader that I present here.
The film begins with this printed prologue: “This is an entirely imagi-
nary story about the writer Dashiell Hammett, who, in the words of one
of his most gifted contemporaries, helped get murder out of the Vicar’s
rose garden, and back to the people who were really good at it. The detec-
tive story has never been the same since.”
The prologue paraphrases an observation by Raymond Chandler (who
is unnamed), cited above, about Hammett’s contribution to hard-boiled
detective fiction. Chandler’s point was that “Hammett gave murder back
to the kind of people who commit it for a reason, not just to provide a
corpse.”30 In sum, Hammett’s tough, hard-edged crime fiction was a depar-
ture from the more refined, genteel detective stories of Doyle and Christie.
After the prologue, the camera roams around Hammett’s cramped,
cluttered flat in a seedy apartment building in a back street of San Fran-
cisco. Hammett is pounding away at his typewriter, as he finishes a short
story for Black Mask that is already long overdue. Jimmy Ryan, his former
boss at the local Pinkerton office, pays him a visit. Ryan quit the agency
(“Long hours, short pay,” is all he would say about his departure) and now
works as a private eye.
Ryan asks Hammett’s aid on his current case: he is attempting to lo-
cate Crystal Ling, a missing Chinese girl, whom Ryan has failed to find.
239
Crystal has fled from a notorious nightclub operated by Fong Wei Tau, an
overlord in Chinatown; indeed, she has vanished without a trace.
While searching for Crystal, Hammett is driven around Chinatown by
a cabbie named Eli, an old-timer played by Elisha Cook, Jr. (The Maltese
Falcon). Gary Salt, who says he collects gossip for a local newspaper, stops
Hammett on the street. Salt explains that he is familiar with Hammett’s
stories in Black Mask and thinks “Dead Yellow Women” (the story that in-
spired Joe Gores’s novel Hammett) is one of his best. Salt ominously warns
Hammett to give up desperately seeking Crystal, without saying why.
Undaunted, Hammett’s investigation takes him to a refuge for stray
waifs in Chinatown called the Mission. The venerable actress Sylvia
Sidney (Dead End) does a cameo as Donaldina Cameron, the director of
the Mission. She informs Hammett that Crystal had been staying at the
Mission but has since disappeared once more. Unexpectedly Crystal Ling
herself (Lydia Lei) shows up at Hammett’s apartment; she insists that she
is all right and entreats Hammett to convince Ryan to stop looking for
her: “I am not lost!”
Crystal recounts that she was in the employ of Fong Wei Tau as a
party girl at his Chinatown casino, where C. F. Callaghan, a prestigious
local businessman, had become infatuated with her. But when his business
failed, Callaghan took his own life and she took refuge in the Mission.
In short, Crystal passes herself off to Hammett as a misunderstood young
woman down on her luck. She then evaporates once more into the Frisco
fog, leaving Hammett to ponder how much truth there was in her tale.
Hammett goes to see Fong at his gambling den, and Fong tells Ham-
mett flatly that he wants Crystal back. Hammett encounters Ryan at the ca-
sino; in fact, Fong assumes that Hammett and Ryan are in cahoots and that
they know Crystal’s whereabouts. Fong accordingly threatens both of them
with dire consequences if they fail to deliver Crystal to him. Hammett and
Ryan escape from Lang’s clutches by fleeing through the opium den in the
basement of the casino, and Hammett and Ryan part company on the street.
The hapless Hammett is then accosted by Lt. O’Mara, a crooked cop who
warns him—somewhat belatedly—not to meddle in the Crystal Ling case.
Not to be dissuaded by threats, Hammett follows a lead to Gary Salt’s
lair, and searches the place in Salt’s absence. Hammett learns that Salt is not
a newspaperman of any stripe, but a purveyor of pornography, and that his
featured attraction is Crystal Ling. Suddenly Hammett hears Salt coming
240
into his studio, and Hammett quickly hides in Salt’s dusty storeroom. Salt is
accompanied by Funk, a henchman of mobster “English Eddie” Hagedorn.
Funk demands at gunpoint that Salt hand over to him the negatives of some
photographs that Salt took; Salt claims to no longer possess the negatives.
Funk does not believe him and summarily shoots him dead on the spot.
Funk escapes down a flight of stairs before Hammett can nail him.
In ransacking Salt’s den of iniquity, Hammett had discovered indi-
vidual photos of six rich and powerful business tycoons, each of whom is
shown frolicking with Crystal. Hammett rightly infers that Funk wanted
the original negatives of these photos and that Salt really did not have them.
He decides to visit Funk’s boss, “English Eddie” Hagedorn, played by Roy
Kinnear, who patterned his performance after that of Sydney Greenstreet
in The Maltese Falcon as a corpulent, refined criminal like Kasper Gutman.
Hagedorn, who is Fong’s silent partner in Fong’s vice ring, takes Ham-
mett to a private conference presided over by Hagedorn himself. Fong is
also in attendance—along with six prominent Frisco citizens, each of whom
Salt had photographed in a sex romp with Crystal. Hammett confronts
the six tycoons present with his interpretation of the information he has
amassed. Someone stole the negatives of the compromising photos Salt had
snapped. The blackmailer then demanded a total of $1 million from the six
blackmail victims, in exchange for the negatives. Fong was involved in the
blackmail plot and wanted his cut; hence he was bent on finding Crystal,
who he assumed knew the whereabouts of the negatives.
Matters have come to a head on this night—which is why Hagedorn
has brought Hammett to this meeting. The blackmailer wants the $1 mil-
lion payoff this very night, and Hammett is delegated to meet the black-
mailer on a deserted wharf to deliver the cash in exchange for the negatives.
Hammett is driven to the wharf by his faithful taxi driver Eli, who is armed
with an antique firearm that he is carrying to protect Hammett.
When Hammett arrives for the showdown on the pier, the black-
mailer is revealed to be none other than Crystal herself. She materializes
out of the swirling fog on the dock; but Hammett is not surprised to find
out that Crystal Ling is behind the blackmail plot. After all, he never did
quite buy her self-portrait as a pathetic refugee, more sinned against than
sinning, that she had drawn for him the day she came to his apartment.
Crystal, who is a bona fide femme fatale, admits in her conversation
with Hammett on the pier that Callaghan did not kill himself; his jealous
241
wife shot him when she learned of his torrid romance with Crystal. The
whole affair was hushed up by the Callaghan clan, who had the clout to
have his death ruled a suicide, in order to spare his wife the scandal of a
sensational murder trial. Meanwhile, Crystal took off for parts unknown.
Hammett may not have been shocked to learn of Crystal’s duplicity,
but he is genuinely stunned at this point to see Jimmy Ryan appear on the
scene and identify himself as Crystal’s partner in crime in the blackmail
scheme. For Lt. O’Mara to be a crooked cop is one thing; for Jimmy
Ryan, Hammett’s old companion in arms, to be a corrupt private detec-
tive is quite another. Ryan obviously engaged Hammett to find Crystal
because he wanted to get his share of the blackmail money. Lt. O’Mara,
who is in the pay of Fong, is on hand on the wharf to see to it that Crystal
surrenders the negatives of the porno pictures of the local tycoons.
But Crystal is not willing to share the loot with Ryan; she accordingly
puts a bullet in him. Hammett’s eulogy for his old buddy is terse: “In his
heyday he was one of the best.” Hammett then warns Crystal that the rich
and powerful men she has blackmailed will spare no expense in having her
tracked down and liquidated in reprisal for her endangering their reputa-
tions in Frisco’s high society. Crystal shrugs off his threat; she is envel-
oped in the fog over Frisco as she walks away from the dock and vanishes.
As for Hammett, he heads back to his apartment and his typewriter to
bat out this tale for Black Mask. He will, of course, change the names of the
participants in the blackmail plot in his story in order to protect the guilty.
The film does not depend much on the source story, “Dead Yellow
Women,” for its plot; but Ross Thomas’s screenplay does make good use of
the short story’s cast of characters, as they turn up in Gores’s novel. Thus
Lillian Shan in the short story and Crystal Ling in the film both mislead
a private investigator about their illegal activities. Lillian in the story does
not confess to the Op that she is helping to smuggle contraband weapons
to Chinese loyalists who plan to resist Japanese imperialism when Japan
endeavors to invade China. By the same token, Crystal in the movie does
not divulge to Hammett that she is implicated in blackmail and murder.
Chang Li Ching in the short story is clearly the model for Fong Wei
Tau in the film: both are crime lords in Chinatown; each of them oper-
ates a den of vice and is involved in a variety of sordid rackets. Moreover,
neither of them is prosecuted for their criminal activities because they pay
bribes to police officials who are on the take. It goes without saying that
242
243
Maltin in his Movie Guide calls Hammett “a real treat for detective buffs.”
In his rave review Maltin declares, “You couldn’t ask for a more faithful
re-creation of the 1930s studio look, a magnificent looking (and sound-
ing) film!”33
Admittedly, the plot of Hammett has some loose ends. After years of
toiling as an honest private eye, Jimmy Ryan does a complete about-face
and becomes a dishonest one. This dramatic change in his character is
never adequately explained.
Seeing the film on DVD today, however, one notices an effective
performance by Forrest as Dashiell Hammett. And the picture is further
enhanced by Philip Lathrop’s moody cinematography. With all its short-
comings, “Hammett is nonetheless a genuine contribution” to film noir, as
Foster Hirsch emphasizes.34
Furthermore, it is heartening to see the favorable notice of Hammett
in the 2010 Film Noir Encyclopedia: “Wenders pays homage to noir’s hard-
boiled literary roots,” writes noir scholar Glenn Erickson. “Hammett is an
affectionate homage that doesn’t embarrass its origin” in the fiction of
Dashiell Hammett.35 A much earlier tribute to the writers of hard-boiled
detective fiction like Hammett and Chandler came from Alistair Cooke,
who stated, as early as 1949, that “they would be remembered when lots of
what we now regard as our literary greats are buried in the school books.”36
Notes
1. Alain Silver, “Introduction: Neo-Noir,” in Film Noir: The Encyclopedia,
350.
2. Everitt, “The New Noir,” sec. 2:29.
3. Schwartz, Neo-Noir (Lanham, Md.; Scarecrow Press, 2005), xii.
4. Holden, “Neo-Noir’s a Fashion That Fits Only a Few,” sec. 2:15.
5. Richard Jameson, “Son of Noir,” Film Comment 10, no. 6 (November–
December 1974): 33, Special film noir issue.
6. Jameson, “Son of Noir,” 30.
7. Naremore, More Than Night, 10.
8. Everitt, “The New Noir,” sec. 2:28.
9. Gale, A Dashiell Hammett Companion, 198.
10. LeRoy Panek, Reading Early Hammett: The Fiction Prior to the Maltese
Falcon (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004), 151.
11. Symons, Dashiell Hammett, 52.
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ANTHONY MINGHELLA:
THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY
LILIANA CAVANI: RIPLEY’S GAME
H
ighsmith never got the breaks of the blue-chip authors of her
time,” writes New York Times columnist Frank Rich. Her first
novel, Strangers on a Train, lays out the theme of The Talented
Mr. Ripley, including class envy, the transference of guilt, and homoerotic
infatuation. Strangers on a Train was made into a classic Hitchcock film.
“But the screenplay’s famous co-writer, Raymond Chandler, got more
credit for what was on the screen than did the obscure author of the novel
that was its source.”1 Strangers on a Train was dealt with above primarily
as a Hitchcock film. In taking up the two films in this chapter, we shall
focus more on their being adaptations of novels by Highsmith.
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, to
parents who were soon divorced. Patricia’s mother, Mary, later admitted
that, since her first marriage was a total failure, she attempted to abort the
pregnancy by drinking turpentine. Mary fared better with her second mar-
riage to Stanley Highsmith; when Patricia was six years old, she moved,
with her mother and stepfather, to New York City, where she grew up.
After publishing Strangers on a Train, Richard Corliss states, High-
smith left for Europe, “where she was welcomed as an important novel-
ist, not just a thriller writer. From this pleasant remove,” she wrote of a
“ruthlessly imaginative expat, Tom Ripley,” who has been called one of
the great creations of American literature.2
Her novels continued to be more popular in Europe than in her native
land. “Her amoral exploration of perverse behavior” did not endear her
247
fiction to the American reading public, who often found it too gruesome.3
Not surprisingly, most of the movies made from her work were European
films, made in France or Germany. Anthony Minghella’s The Talented
Mr. Ripley was the first Hollywood studio production derived from a
Highsmith novel since Strangers on a Train.
Highsmith devoted five novels to Tom Ripley, her gentleman rogue
and likeable psychopath, between 1955 and 1991. She always approached
Ripley with an unblinking and nonjudgmental authorial stance, as she
traced his “rake’s progress from callow kid to elegant arriviste.”4
In a rare TV interview she granted to Melvin Bragg on London’s
South Bank Show, Highsmith defended Tom Ripley, her favorite cre-
ation. “He could be called psychotic,” she told Bragg; “I consider him a
rather civilized person who kills when he absolutely has to,” that is, when
someone gets too close to his secrets. She continued, “There are people
like Ripley and Bruno in Strangers on a Train, characters who succumb to
temptation. But I don’t look down on them for that reason.”5 It is signifi-
cant that Highsmith paired Tom and Bruno, since Bruno Antony was the
prototype for Tom Ripley.
As for Tom being homosexual, Highsmith vacillated; to Bragg she
conceded only that he was never queer. He was “a little bit homosexual,
. . . not that he’s ever done anything about it.” Rich thought Highsmith
somewhat disingenuous about Tom’s homosexuality. He comments wryly
about Tom: “In the later Ripley books, she none-too-convincingly marries
him off.”6 In Ripley’s Game Tom and his French wife inhabit an elegant
French country house, Belle Ombre (Beautiful Shadow, which is the title
of Wilson’s biography of Highsmith). Tom supports his affluent lifestyle
by peddling forged paintings and by other equally shady activities. In es-
sence, Tom is a refined con man and a fraud, an amoral individual who is
convinced that he is entitled to his ill-gotten gains.
That Tom is a sociopath, without a conscience, who continues to
thrive unpunished, did not unduly concern his creator: “I rather like
criminals and find them extremely interesting, unless they are monstrously
and stupidly brutal.”7
When The Talented Mr. Ripley won the 1956 Edgar Allan Poe Award
bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America, Highsmith believed that
the prize really belonged to Tom Ripley, whom she considered her alter
ego. What’s more, she attributed the book’s success to “the insolence
248
and audacity of Ripley himself.” She added, “I often had the feeling that
Ripley was writing it, and that I was merely typing it.”8 There is no ques-
tion that Highsmith identified with Ripley, whom she called her “favorite
hero-criminal.” Indeed, she sometimes signed letters to friends, “Pat H.,
alias Ripley.”9
Tom Ripley survived his creator, who died February 4, 1995, in
Locarno, Switzerland, where she lived the last fourteen years of her life.
Although the five Ripley novels were written over a period of thirty-five
years, Tom ages only ten years from the first book to the last. Presumably,
he went on living at Belle Ombre. (Ripley seems to be eternal.)
Graham Greene celebrated Highsmith as “the poet of apprehension.”
She was “a writer who created a world of her own. . . . This is a world
without moral endings.” Even though Greene much admired Highsmith’s
novels, he still felt uneasy that some of her evildoers never pay for their
crimes. “It makes the tension worse that we are never sure whether even
the worst of them, like the talented Mr. Ripley, won’t get away with it.”10
Considering some of the nasty villains in Highsmith’s fiction, I think for
Greene to call Tom the worst of them is going some.
Highsmith never made any bones about Tom Ripley’s status as an
unrepentant criminal. When she began her first Ripley novel, she wrote in
her notes in capital letters that the subject was “EVIL.” She further noted
that the novel would show “the triumph of evil over good,” because Tom’s
crimes did not lead to punishment.11
In the first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom murders
Dickie Greenleaf, with whom he has been obsessed, and assumes his
identity. Then he must commit another murder to cover up the first one.
He is never charged with either killing. (As a matter of fact, two possible
titles for the book that Highsmith considered at that early stage were The
Pursuit of Evil and The Thrill Boys.12 Highsmith once said, “I find the
public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor
nature cares whether justice is ever done or not.”13
The Talented Mr. Ripley was greeted with largely good reviews when
it was published in 1955. In the United States the New Yorker termed
the book “a remarkably immoral story very engagingly” told.14 Anthony
Boucher, in a notice entitled “Criminal at Large,” in the New York Times
Book Review, deemed the novel “a more solid essay in the creation and
analysis” of character than Strangers on a Train.15 Highsmith would never
249
again garner glowing reviews like that in the American press. To most
American literary critics Highsmith remained a cult figure.
Most movies made from Highsmith’s novels were European in origin,
since she was better appreciated there. Thus the first film of The Talented
Mr. Ripley was made in France by René Clément as Purple Noon in 1960.
Highsmith liked Alain Delon as Ripley, “but hated the film’s altered end-
ing.”16 In Purple Noon Tom is ultimately revealed as the murderer of the
Dickie Greenleaf character when his corpse is discovered by the police.
The moral ending that Clément grafted onto the narrative was antitheti-
cal to Highsmith’s intentions.
250
past, then built a fortune . . . , all in the mistaken faith that he could find
happiness by being someone else.”18
In the opening credit sequence, the movie’s title is presented imagi-
natively, as Minghella explained. “The word Talented ” evolves as the final
adjective in a rosary of descriptions that have preceded Ripley’s last name:
mysterious, unhappy, lonely, and so on.19 This is “an attempt to identify
the contradictions surrounding this complex character.”20
After the opening credits, Tom Ripley is seen sitting in his cabin aboard
ship. The film returns to this shot of Tom at the close of the movie—we
are to assume that the story unfolds on the screen as Tom remembers it.
The story begins in Manhattan in 1958, with Tom, a fastidious young
man with Clark Kent glasses, borrowing a Princeton blazer to accompany
a singer on the piano at a high society reception. Shipping magnate Her-
bert Greenleaf inquires if Tom knew his son Dickie at Princeton. Tom
replies in the affirmative, although he never went to Princeton; at present
he is a men’s room attendant in a concert hall, a fact not in the novel.
Herbert Greenleaf hires Tom on the spot to go to Mongibello, an Ital-
ian resort village, to persuade his son Dickie, who is living an aimless life
there, to return to New York and the family business.
When Tom’s ship docks in an Italian port, he meets Meredith Logue,
an heiress, on the pier and, on a whim, introduces himself to her as Dickie
Greenleaf. Tom moves on to Mongibello, where he meets up with Dickie
Greenleaf on the sun-drenched beach. Tom is dazzled by Dickie, the
blond-haired golden boy, and his “luscious indolence.” He is also im-
pressed by Dickie’s rich American girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth
Paltrow), an aspiring writer.21 Dickie doubts that Tom ever knew him at
Princeton, but Marge, at least for now, takes him at face value and wel-
comes him to their Ivy League clique.
In brief, Minghella’s script follows Highsmith’s novel rather closely from
the outset. Once Minghella’s shooting script was approved by the front office,
he proved himself very adroit in choosing the actors. He cast Matt Damon,
who had played romantic leads in films like Minghella’s own Mr. Wonderful
(1992), as Tom. Damon was cast against type as a furtive sociopath on the
rise. Minghella picked Jude Law for the part of Dickie Greenleaf. Law gave
a breakthrough performance as the bronzed, handsome, but somewhat ma-
levolent Dickie. Philip Seymour Hoffman was perfect as the untidy, slightly
overweight, yet well-bred Princeton pal of Dickie’s, Freddie Miles.
251
Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) are not aware that Tom
Ripley (Matt Damon) is a sociopath in Anthony Minghella’s neo-noir film of Patricia Highsmith’s
The Talented Mr. Ripley.
252
much the fabric of the story—not so much that Tom was gay, but that he
was in love with Dickie,” and Dickie’s lifestyle.23
Tom in due time reveals to Dickie that he is in the pay of Dickie’s
father; but he agrees to be a “double agent” by stringing Herbert Greenleaf
along, despite the fact that Dickie is dead set against ever going home.
Dickie accordingly invites Tom to share his bachelor flat in the village,
since he views Tom as an ally in his tug of war with his father.
Tom and Dickie solemnize their friendship by spending an evening
in the local jazz club, where Dickie plays his sax with a jazz combo.
He invites Tom onstage to join in singing an Italian ditty, “Tu Wo Fa
L’Americain,” a hymn to American culture. The filmgoer resonates with
Tom as he enjoys a sense of camaraderie with Dickie at this exhilarating
moment.
The closest Tom and Dickie come to forging a deep personal rela-
tionship “is an early nocturnal scene in a smoky Naples jazz club, where
Dickie’s sultry sax” joins with Tom’s tentative rendition of “My Funny
Valentine.” Tom vocalizes the bittersweet lyrics that express tragic long-
ing. “By the time he takes a wrong turn in pursuit of his fantasy” to be
part of Dickie’s social circle, “we’re already along for the ride,” Rich writes;
“to our extreme discomfort we find ourselves in our secret heart-of-hearts”
rooting for Tom to succeed in his greedy and ambitious con game.24
Tom desires to model himself on Dickie, his golden boy, to the point
where he can pass for someone to the manor born. As Tom expresses his
personal creed, “It’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.” One
night Dickie comes back to his apartment to find that Tom has donned
one of his jackets and bow ties. Dickie is miffed that Tom is wearing his
clothes. For his part, Tom is embarrassed that Dickie has caught him
impersonating him.
But Dickie gets over his irritation with Tom and invites him to go
sailing with him, Marge, and Freddie. In the course of the excursion,
Dickie takes Marge below deck so they can make love. Freddie catches
Tom, who pretends to be reading a book on deck, peeking in a mirror at
the foot of the stairs, which reflects the naked couple’s gyrations. Freddie
christens him “Peeping Tom” with a smirk. When Dickie hears about
Tom’s voyeurism, Tom attempts to mollify him by reaffirming the bond
between them: “You are the brother I never had, and I am the brother you
never had.” Dickie is not impressed.
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254
255
Greenleaf is disappointed in his son’s wayward life and gives up the search
for him. He decides to disinherit his son and transfer the income from
Dickie’s trust fund to Tom’s bank account, since Dickie is either dead or
hiding out somewhere. So Herbert disowns Dickie.
Only Marge, who has known Tom since he arrived in Mongibello,
puts two and two together and sees through “Ripley’s game,” and sus-
pects him of killing Dickie. But Herbert Greenleaf and his private eye
both disregard her suspicions and hustle Marge off to a ship bound for
America. Fate seems to have conspired to cover up Tom’s guilt for two
murders.
By this time Tom has fallen in love with Peter Smith-Kingsley, who
knows him as Tom Ripley, and they board a luxury yacht for a vacation
cruise to Athens. On board Tom meets Meredith Logue, who knows him
as Dickie Greenleaf. Because Peter would interfere with Tom’s promising
relationship with Meredith, who can give him an entrée to her elite social
set, Tom determines to eliminate Peter. At film’s end we return to Tom
sitting alone in his cabin, as we saw him at the beginning of the movie.
On the sound track we hear what Tom now recalls: his strangling Peter
in this very same cabin.
Then we see Tom sitting in his cabin, staring blankly into space. He
regrets having to kill the only person who has ever loved him for him-
self. But he could not risk Peter giving “Ripley’s game” away. Minghella
contended that, in killing Peter, Tom loses “the person who means the
most to him.” He is accordingly punished sufficiently for his crimes to
satisfy the traditional standards of conventional morality.30 At this point
the camera photographs Tom through the cabin doorway, until the door
swings shut and the screen fades to black.
My own reading of the film’s ending differs from Minghella’s. We
recall that, for Highsmith, Tom is a confirmed sociopath. Hence he does
not feel guilty about ending Peter’s life. Minghella’s diplomatic declara-
tion that Tom is punished for slaying Peter by losing his true love appears
to be designed to appease the industry censor by suggesting that Tom has
not eluded justice after all.
In fact, some critics saw the movie’s ending as indicating that “grisly
crimes do not necessarily lead to punishment.” What’s more, in the final
scene of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom has no more stirrings of conscience
than mob boss Michael Corleone experiences at the close of Godfather II.31
256
257
258
John Malkovich as Tom Ripley in Ripley’s Game, based on a later Ripley novel by Patricia
Highsmith.
Fire (1993), with “stealthy malice,” was good preparation for his play-
ing Ripley.42
Scottish actor Dougray Scott was selected to play Jonathan Trevanny in
the wake of playing superbly a renegade spy in Mission Impossible II (2001).
The present film was shot on location in Italy, France, and Germany.
Gary Indiana is pleasantly surprised that Cavani’s script is so in tune
with Highsmith’s novel, hitting every story point with precision, so that
“the many alterations she’s made in the story seem perfectly unobtrusive,
logical, and justified.”43 For example, Cavani, a native Italian, moved the
story from the French village of Villeperce, where Tom lived in Belle Om-
bre, to the northeast region of Italy, where Tom has taken up residence in
a Palladian villa with his wife, Luisa, a harpsichord virtuoso.
Cavani chose Ennio Morricone, the Italian film composer, to score Ri-
pley’s Game. The majority of his musical scores have been for Italian movies
like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Il Guno, il Butto, il Cattivii, 1966). But
he had also written music for some Hollywood films like The Untouchables
(1987), which the pulse-pounding score for Ripley’s Game resembles.
From the moment Malkovich steps onto the screen there is little
doubt that Tom Ripley is “a role he was born to play,” a noir antihero,
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260
and when I was young that troubled me. But it doesn’t bother me any-
more. I don’t worry about being caught because I don’t believe anyone is
watching. The world is not a poorer place because these people are dead.”
After Tom expresses his self-righteous “philosophy” to Jonathan, they fly
back to Italy together.
Members of the Russian Mafia, intent on revenge, inevitably track
down Reeves and slay him. Realizing that he is now in danger, Tom, who is
known to them, sends his wife away and, with Jonathan at his side, waits for
the assailants to invade his home. Gregor and another gangster soon appear.
Tom kills Gregor, and Jonathan murders the other mobster. Tom dumps
the two corpses in the trunk of their car and sets it on fire in a nearby wood.
Tom is euphoric while he watches the blaze. As Highsmith writes at this
point, “Life afforded few pleasures tantamount to disposing of Mafiosi.”46
Tom drives Jonathan back to his home and drops him off; before
departing he notices a car outside Jonathan’s house that is definitely not
Jonathan’s. He bursts into the house and finds Jonathan and his wife
both held hostage by two Mafiosi, demanding to know Tom’s where-
abouts. When they recognize Tom, one of them draws a bead on him;
Jonathan steps in front of Tom and takes the bullet aimed at him. Tom
asks Jonathan, “Why did you do it?” But Jonathan expires before he can
answer. Presumably Jonathan, who thought his days were numbered, died
in Tom’s place because he was grateful to Tom for helping him provide
financial support for his wife and son.
Tom attends a harpsichord recital given by his wife, where he recalls
images of Jonathan stopping the bullet intended for him. “With the corrup-
tion and death of an innocent, the transgressive deification—the transition
of Ripley from self-invented man to amoral omniscient—is complete.”47
Ripley’s Game was not widely reviewed in the United States because it
had no theatrical release; but the critics who did review it when it made its
debut on DVD were mostly favorable. Andy Webster termed the movie
“spare and largely true to the novel in story and tone, not the least because
of Malkovich’s exquisite detachment and understatement.”48 Gary Indiana
states that “Cavani has crafted the most enjoyable and subtly textured Rip-
ley film.” He continues, “Cavani’s film sets the bar for future Highsmith
adaptations extremely high.”49
Demetrios Matheou, who reviewed the film at the time of its Eu-
ropean release, notes, “As casual about murder as he is about fine art,
261
Notes
1. Frank Rich, “American Pseudo: The Talented Mr. Ripley,” New York Times
Magazine, December 12, 1999, 85.
2. Richard Corliss, “The Talented Ms. Highsmith,” Time, December 27,
1999, 159.
3. Rich, “American Pseudo,” 86.
4. Corliss, “The Talented Ms. Highsmith,” 159.
5. Patricia Highsmith, interviewed by Melvin Bragg. The South Bank Show,
March 1975.
6. Rich, “American Pseudo,” 86.
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OUT OF THE SHADOWS, BACK TO
THE FUTURE, NOIR MARCHES ON
A
nd now, for something different, involving, perhaps, an awkward
shift in voice and tone, for which, we, of course, apologize. Fa-
ther Phillips originally intended to conclude this volume with an
epilogue entitled “The Dark Mirror,” but events conspired otherwise and
he was interrupted by a medical intervention. Not wanting in any way to
delay production of this book, Father Phillips asked me to complete in
this “afterword” what he would have put into his epilogue. In order that
I might do so effectively, we corresponded closely over several weeks, to
the extent that I believe that I have been able to conclude the book much
as Father Phillips might have done himself. I do know he liked the above
title I conjured up to introduce these observations. Meanwhile, I am
grateful to be able to share these observations about neo-noir and honored
to be included in these pages.
Readers might reasonably wonder why America needs yet another
book dealing with film noir, that murky, pseudogenre of crime films that
emerged “out of the shadows” both before and after World War II and
became a dominant visual style thereafter. Film noir, unlike the western or
265
John Huston (director of The Maltese Falcon) as Noah Cross and Jack Nicholson as private eye
Jake Gittes in Roman Polanski’s neo-noir Chinatown.
266
267
268
269
Kevin Spacey could pass for Jack Webb (namesake for the film character,
it would seem), even if he were not an actor.
The characters all seem to be genre prototypes, but they are developed
counter to expectations. Basinger’s femme fatale, for example, turns into a
call girl with a heart of gold, seeking to redeem herself. The “good” cop is
as much a manipulator as his evil twin, a hero twice over, who can survive
only if he betrays his principles. A sleazy judge is at heart a pervert who
will look the other way when his homosexual lover’s throat is slit after the
boy hears too much and becomes a threat. The cynicism and the casting,
moreover, bring the film very much into the present time. Director Cur-
tis Hanson used several actors from Australia (Guy Pearce, for example,
later to play King Edward VII in the 2010 Academy Award–nominated
The King’s Speech) and New Zealand (Russell Crowe, later to become a
really major Hollywood star), because, Hanson told the New York Times:
“I wanted actors about whom the audience has no preconceived notion. I
wanted the audience to accept these two characters at face value and not
to make assumptions about them based on roles the actors had played
before.” That same logic applied to the casting of Australian actor Simon
Baker Denny as Matt Reynolds, a sympathetic bisexual, who is caught in
bed with Kim Basinger before he is later murdered. That same actor, now
known as Simon Baker, went on to become quite popular, starring as an
ironic sleuth-hypnotist in the CBS television series, The Mentalist (first
aired in 2008 but still going strong in 2011).
A nasty noir resurgence that began in the 1970s overflowed into the
1990s, and involved many of the talents of the so-called new Hollywood.
Blood Simple (1984), for example, the first inkling of genius from the
Coen brothers, developed from noir characters and concepts, and Miller’s
Crossing (1990) demonstrated the Coens’ mastery of the crime films of
the 1930s and their style and the legacy of such “classics” as The Glass
Key (1931) and Red Harvest (1929). Noir accents also helped to catapult
Quentin Tarantino to success in his first feature, Reservoir Dogs, which
was much admired in Britain, to be followed by Pulp Fiction, a sort of
minor masterpiece of stylish noir nastiness.
Yet another earlier paradigm neo-noir was The Usual Suspects (1995),
one of the most accomplished film noir “caper” films ever made, writ-
ten by Christopher McQuarrie and directed by Bryan Singer. The Usual
Suspects follows the lead of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp
270
271
from below, in profile, and Kujan cannot see the smile that crosses Ver-
bal’s face. Later on Verbal plays into Kujan’s perception by describing
himself as a “stupid cripple.”
What is most impressive about The Usual Suspects is the fact that
the filmmakers give their audience credit for being able to follow a
highly textured and difficult story. Nothing is dumbed down in a plot
that is both challenging and interesting. Much of the story is obviously
fabricated by the “Verbal” narrator, but even if the truth remains veiled,
Verbal is an excellent storyteller. Most importantly, however, The Usual
Suspects created an impressive talent pool of noir actors. Steven Spiel-
berg, who cast Pete Postlethwaite as a racist prosecutor for Amistad
(1997), called Postlethwaite “probably the best actor in the world,”
for example. He also played the philosopher-hunter Roland Tembo in
Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), but the actor’s obituary
singled out only two key roles: The Usual Suspects and In the Name of the
Father (starring with his stage-acting colleague Daniel Day-Lewis in
1993 and earning an Academy Award nomination for his performance
as Giuseppe Conlon).
Now, even as important though Postlethwaite may be to the criminal
ensemble of The Usual Suspects, he is overshadowed by the other suspects,
genre stars in their own right. Gabriel Byrne, for example, had swaggered
through Miller’s Crossing (1990) before being picked for the lineup in The
Usual Suspects, and Kevin Spacey, a natural actor and a very “Verbal” Kint,
would move on to a starring stint in L.A. Confidential.
“In an age when all movie genres are being subverted, postmodern-
ized, [and] deconstructed,” Jack Kroll wrote of The Usual Suspects, film
noir “is the key American movie type, and the most fun when it’s done
right.” If Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs was “out to deconstruct the film noir,
to create the ultimate parody of the metaphysical gangster film,” Kroll
continued, director Bryan Singer “wants to respect its classic form.” Kroll
concluded by calling The Usual Suspects “the best, most stylish crime movie
since Stephen Frears’s 1990 The Grifters. But Frears was British, born in
Leicester in the Midlands, educated at Cambridge, and trained at Lon-
don’s Royal Court Theatre. It would be up to American-born directors
like Quentin Tarantino, Curtis Hanson, the Coen brothers, and Bryan
Singer, trained at the University of Southern California, to reclaim noir
and to bring it home. Bravo!
272
273
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294
Academy Awards, 127, 160, 171 prize, 215; Edgar Awards, 235,
Act of Violence, 178–84, 182, 198, 248; Emmys, 229
280
adultery, 31 Babener, Liahna, 160
After the Thin Man, 57 Badge of Evil (Masterson), 206, 207
Agee, James, 87, 127, 141, 179 Baker, Simon, 270
Alpi, Deborah, 134 Ballard, Lucien, 188
ambiguous endings, 171 Barnes, George, 89
The American Friend, 258 Barry, John, 239, 268
America’s Film Legacy (Eagan), 42 Barson, Michael, 206
Anatomy of a Murder, 159, 160, 161– Basinger, Jeanine, 163, 168
72, 178, 214–15, 282 Bazin, André, 18
Andrews, Dana, 153, 160 Beeding, Francis, 88
Angel Face, 160 Bendix, William, 51, 55
Another Thin Man, 57–58 Bennett, Joan, 77
Archer, Eugene, 159 Berg, Charles, 36, 41
Arnold, Edward, 47 Bergman, Ingrid, 88, 91
Arthur, Paul, 178, 179 Bergman, Paul, 167, 169
Asimow, Michael, 167, 169 Biesen, Sheri, 198
Asphalt Jungle, 187 Bigwood, James, 92
Astor, Mary, 34, 37, 38, 181 Biroc, Joseph, 237
awards: Academy Awards, 127, 160, Black Mask, 7–10, 30, 227, 235–36
171; Brussels World Fair grand Block, Harry, 228
295
296
297
Street, 77; The Song of the Thin Thin Man, 58–59; Spellbound, 92;
Man, 58–59, 61; U-Turn, 268–69 Stranger on the Third Floor, 22–23;
Ferguson, Perry, 201 Strangers on a Train, 101; The
film noir: epitaph of, 207; genre Talented Mr. Ripley, 254–55
boundaries, 266; proto-noir, 21; German fatalism, 184
terminology, 14–15. See also neo- The Ghost Writer, 225
noir Giannetti, Louis, 83
Film Noir (Kirgo), 81 Gilmore, Art, 189
Film Noir (Silver and Ursini), 206 The Glass Key (1935 film), 42, 47–49
Film Noir Encyclopedia (Erickson), The Glass Key (1942 film), 48, 49–55,
244 276
Fiorentino, Linda, 268 The Glass Key (Hammett novel), 42,
Fisher, Steve, 58–59, 62 45–46
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 250–51 Goetz, William, 152, 198
Fleishman, Avram, 121 Going Steady (Kael), 187
Flippen, Jay C., 187, 188 Golden Age of British detective
Flora, Joseph, 132 fiction, 3–4
Fonseca, M. S., 38 Golitzen, Alexander, 77, 209
Forrest, Frederic, 235, 238, 243, 244 Goodrich, Frances, 57
Foy, Bryan, 153 Gordon, Ruth, 111, 117
Frank, Nino, 14, 41–42, 156 Gores, Joe, 42, 235–37, 267
Frank, Sam, 117 Grahame, Gloria, 58–59
Frears, Stephen, 272 Granger, Farley, 96–98, 103
Freeman, David, 122–23 Grant, Kathryn, 168, 169
French naturalism, 18–21, 135 Gray, Coleen, 190
French reviewers, 14 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 250–51
Fried, Gerard, 188 Greene, Graham, 69–70, 249
Greenstreet, Sydney, 34–35
Gale, Robert, 226 Gross, Charlie, 230
Gale, Steven, 40 Gulager, Clu, 146
gangster pictures, 138, 148 Gunning, Tom, 76
gangsters’ dialogue, 132 “The Gutting of Couffignal”
Gardner, Ava, 136 (Hammett), 30
Gates, David, 42
Gazzara, Ben, 165 Hackett, Albert, 57
German expressionism, 16–18; Hammett, Dashiell, 8; After the Thin
Anatomy of a Murder, 167–68; The Man, 57; Another Thin Man,
Glass Key, 51; The Killers (1946), 57–58; background, 4–7, 273;
135, 137; The Maltese Falcon, 37; Black Mask stories, 7–10, 30, 227,
The Ministry of Fear, 71; Song of the 235–36, 240, 242–43; Cooke’s
298
299
138, 199; The Stranger, 199. See also L.A. Confidential, 225, 226, 269, 284
The Maltese Falcon (1941 film) La Bete Humaine, 20
Huston, Walter, 39 La Chienne, 18–20, 76
Ladd, Alan, 48, 48–49, 55
illusion and reality. See A Double Life Lake, Veronica, 48, 48–49, 55
Indiana, Gary, 261 Lancaster, Burt, 136
Ingster, Boris, 21, 24 Lang, Fritz: background, 16–19;
Clash by Night, 23; Human Desire,
James, P. D., 4 20; M, 71, 75; Ministry of Fear,
Jameson, Richard, 226 69–76, 73, 198, 277; Scarlet Street,
jazz, 214–15, 230, 239 17, 18, 19, 76–83, 277–78; Spione
Jensen, Paul, 72, 99 (Spies), 117
Johnson, Diane, 46 The Last Seduction, 268
Jones, Malcolm, 106 Latimer, Jonathan, 49–50, 55
Judeo-Christian environment, 5 Laura, 152–61, 155, 162–63, 276–77
Laurents, Arthur, 96
Kael, Pauline, 76, 94, 99, 187, 194, Law, Jude, 251, 252, 257
258 Leavitt, Sam, 165
Kalat, David, 79 Legion of Decency, 78–79, 166
Kanin, Garson, 111, 112, 117 Lehman, Ernest, 104
Kaper, Bronislau, 181, 202 Lei, Lydia, 240, 243
Keaton, Buster, 122 Leigh, Janet, 208
Kehr, Dave, 112–13 Lenski, Robert, 229
Keller, Harry, 213–14 Lethem, Jonathan, 134–35
Kennedy assassination, 147–48 Levene, Sam, 137
The Killer Inside Me (Thompson), 186 lighting: Act of Violence, 179–80, 181;
The Killers (1946 film), 132–42, 136, Anatomy of a Murder, 163; The
148, 195, 199, 278–79 Killers (1946), 137; The Killers
The Killers (1964 film), 132, 142–48, (1964), 143; The Maltese Falcon,
145, 282 37; Ministry of Fear, 71; Scarlet
“The Killers” (Hemingway), 131–34 Street, 17; The Song of the Thin
Killer’s Kiss, 185 Man, 58–59; Spellbound, 89; Touch
The Killing, 184, 185–95, 188, 281 of Evil, 210
Kinnear, Roy, 241, 243 The Lineup, 144
Kirgo, Julie, 81 locations, 162
Kiszely, Philip, 34 Loeffler, Louis, 165–66
Klawans, Stewart, 269 Lorre, Peter, 21–24, 22, 34, 37
Krasner, Milton, 77, 113 Loy, Myrna, 56–57, 62, 63
Kroll, Jack, 271, 272 Lubitsch, Ernst, 76
Kubrick, Stanley, 184, 185–95 Lyons, Arthur, 185
300
301
302
303
304
305
Gene D. Phillips is the author of over twenty books dealing with litera-
ture, drama, and film, including Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of
David Lean (2006), Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films
of Billy Wilder (2009), and The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia (2010),
coauthored with Jim Welsh and Rodney Hill.
307