* Force of Evil (1947)
Wall Street: “What do you mean ‘gangsters’? It’s business.” *
* Force of Evil (1947)
Category: Articles
The Leopard Man (1943): Dated and Over-rated
An escaped leopard is linked with the grisly murders of three young women in a small New Mexico town. (1943 RKO. Directed by Jacques Tourneur 96 mins)
Produced by Val Lewton
Based on the novel ‘Black Alibi’ by Cornell Woolrich
Film Editing by Mark Robson
Original Music by Roy Webb
A low-budget thriller from Val Lewton’s horror production unit at RKO based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, The Leopard Man, despite a strong film-making team and spooky noir lighting, looks dated and apart from the famous expressionist sequence, where a young latino girl is sent out into a dark night with a leopard on the loose, to buy corn-meal for her mother, is visually flat. But even the scenes with the terrified young girl are inferior to a similar sequence in Tourneur’s earlier and far superior Cat People (1942) from the same production unit.
The Leopard Man lacks tension and the drama is muddied by a soppy romantic angle, and any viewer who is half-awake will pick the culprit very early on.
Overall, The Leopard Man is disappointing and over-rated.
This is some background and an alternate take from Mayer and McDonnell, ‘Encylcopedia of Film Noir’:
RKO bought the rights to Woolrich’s next novel, Black Alibi (1942), for $5,175 and gave it to producer Val Lewton, who had just completed two memorable low-budget horror films, Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Lewton, working with screenwriter Ardel Wray, proceeded to change the setting of Woolrich’s novel from Latin America to New Mexico. They also altered the story line and the title of Woolrich’s book was changed to The Leopard Man (1943). Woolrich’s five sequences involving different women who are stalked by a killer jaguar and, subsequently, a man, were changed to two deaths, with only the first one caused by a black leopard, instead of a jaguar. However, the first killing, a young girl sent by her mother into the night to buy bread for the family, remains one of the most frightening moments in the cinema as Tourneur blends silence, natural sounds, and stylized lighting with images that capture the terror of the young girl as she moves through the darkness toward her house, only to discover that her mother has locked the door. Her death is presented mainly by the use of sound and lighting.
Richard Corliss on the World of Cornell Woolrich
La Mariée était en noir (1968 The Bride Wore Black)
Woolrich not only dislodged the detective from his traditional pedestal — as the solver of the puzzle, the good guy who nabs the bad guy, the knight on the mean streets, the arbiter of ethics, the reader’s surrogate whose very presence is a guarantee of narrative clarity and the restoration of order in the chaotic world of crime — but challenged the very notions of hero and quest. Now the hero could be the villain, or the dupe; the quest itself could prove to be deranged, as the moral moorings of standard detective fiction fall away. That dark view was reflected in the humid nightscapes of film noir cinematography, just as Woolrich’s tilt of perspective was mirrored in the movies’ oblique camera angles and paranoid worldview.
Back in December 2003 Richard Corliss published a two-part article on the life and works of Cornell Woolrich on TimeCNN, which is a fascinating introduction to the life and fiction of this seminal noir writer:
Desert Fury (1947): Technicolor Noir
The young daughter of a lady casino operator falls for a racketeer
(1947 Paramount. Directed by Lewis Allen 96 mins)
Despite the use of lavish technicolor and high production values, Desert Fury only has any spark in the last 20 minutes culminating in a three-car car chase across the Nevada desert at dusk, which is made even more exciting by great musical scoring from Miklós Rózsa.
The big name stars are wasted and the screenplay from the otherwise dependable A. I. Bezzeridis and Rober Rossen lacks punch, and the dialog is sadly pretty sappy. But the story did hold my interest to the end.
The debut performance of Wendell Corey as the possessive homme-noir to Lizabeth Scott and her racketeer boy-friend is impressive: his relationship with the racketeer played by John Hodiak has an undertone of sublimated homoerotic obsession, and it this that sustains the drama and is the trigger for the final denouement.
Noir Lighting and Analepsis: The Motley View
The Motley View blog has two very erudite and concise articles on chiaroscuro lighting and analepsis in film noir referencing Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944):
Jean Gabin Retrospective
Thanks to the mysterious Dark City Dame for a heads up on these screenings.
The American Cinematheque will this weekend (Sept 6-7) at The Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, screen four films starring French screen legend, Jean Gabin, under the banner Jean Gabin: The World’s Coolest Movie Star:
The Sicilian Clan (Le Clan Des Siciliens), 1969, 20th Century Fox, 118 Min
Moontide¸ 1942, 20th Century Fox, 94 Min
House On The Waterfront (Port Du Désir), 1955, 94 Min. Dir. Edmund T. Gréville
Grisbi (Touchez Pas Au Grisbi), 1954, Rialto Pictures, 88 Min. Dir. Jacques Becker
The full schedule and trailers are available here.
Apropos Jean Gabin – my favorite French tough guy – he starred in most of the poetic-realist French movies of the 30s, which were really the pre-cursors of Hollywood noir. As Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell say in their book, Encyclopedia of Film Noir (Greenwood Press 2007): “in these movies an ironical poetry was found in the everyday: hence the term poetic realism. The iconography of the cycle included the shiny cobblestones of nighttime Parisian streets (the faubourgs), the shadowy interiors of neon-lit nightclubs, and the moody, haunted, doom-laden faces of actors such as Jean Gabin. As well as inspiring Hollywood film-makers, who viewed them admiringly, some of these French films were actually remade as American noirs, for example, Le Chienne (1931) was remade as Scarlet Street (1945), La bête humaine (1938) as Human Desire (1954), Pépé Le Moko (1937) as Algiers (1938), Le Jour se lève as The Long Night (1947), and Le Corbeau (1943) as The Thirteenth Letter (1951).”
I saw La bête humaine a few years back and it is everything we would expect in a film noir of the 40s with a really downbeat ending.
Noir Novelists and Screenwriters
With the valuable assistance of Fanglei from China, who provided the names of screenwriters, I have revised my earlier post of noir novelists to produce a new post which includes screenwriters. Again, I welcome revisions.
The listing has been transferred to a permanent page: Film Noir Writers Listing
The Good Die Young (UK 1954): British Noir
The Good Die Young (UK Remus Films 1954 Directed by Lewis Gilbert 100 minutes)
The Good Die Young is an interesting British noir that employs the unusual homme-noir motif and the more common disillusioned war veteran theme in an original treatment.
“Four men with four guns” the voice-over narrator intones as four guys in a stolen car prepare for a heist on the dark streets of London, before a series of flashbacks traces how each of these four men, with no priors, find themselves in a stolen car, each with a gun in their hand. All four are WW2 vets in financial straits, with three in need of some quick cash and easy targets for the fourth, a wastrel toff cum homme-noir: a man so venal he is loathed and despised by his own father.
While an uneven film, the actual heist and denouement are very strong with deep focus location night-for-night shooting on dark sombre London streets, the London underground, a symbolic sequence in a grave-yard, and expressive tilted framings that break the linearity of the narrative. The opening scene, which regrettably is obscured by the credits, coupled with a dramatic musical score, is evocative of US noirs of the period with the heist car speeding towards the camera on a rainy London night .
The strongest of the four stories are that of a washed-up boxer played beautifully by English actor Stanley Baker and that of the wastrel played with suave menace by a young Laurence Harvey. The other two men are Americans whose stories are less convincing, and Gloria Grahame as the cheating starlet-wife of one of them is wasted in a tacky role. The ‘seduction’ scene where the toff connives to get the others into the caper is marred by redundant and silent-era close-ups of Harvey’s exaggerated facial expressions and arch eye movements.
Interesting historically, and it is worth wading through the first 80 minutes to get to the final action-packed 20 minutes.
The Tortured Psyche of Cornell Woolrich
The most prolific noir novelist during the classic film noir cycle was Cornell Woolrich. From Convicted (1938) to No Man of Her Own (1950) 15 of his stories were adapted for the screen. Woolrich’s tales were darkly paranoid and played out in a brutally malign universe filled with existential dread and entrapment.
His nihilism was deeply personal. A repressed loner he died a lonely death in 1968 at the age of 65. After his death, a telling literary fragment was found in his personal papers:
I was only trying to cheat death… I was only trying to surmount for a while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me one day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone. To stay in the light, to be with the living, a little while past my time.
Woolrich’s writing was not in the hard-boiled tradition, but intensely descriptive and, you could say, richly cinematic:
We went down a new alley… ribbons of light spoked across this one, glimmering through the interstices of an unfurled bamboo blind stretched across an entryway. The bars of light made cicatrices across us. He reached in at the side and slated up one edge of the pliable blind, made a little tent-shaped gap. For a second I stood alone, livid weals striping me from head to foot.
– From Woolrich’s 1944 novel The Black Path of Fear, which was made into the film The Chase in 1946.
These are the major noirs based on Woolrich’s novels and short stories:
Street of Chance (1942) – based on the novel titled The Black Curtain
The Mark of the Whistler (1944) – based on the short story Dormant Account
The Leopard Man (1943) – based on the novel Black Alibi
Phantom Lady (1944)
Deadline at Dawn (1946)
Black Angel (1946)
The Chase (1946) – based on the novel The Black Path of Fear
Fall Guy (1947) – based on the short story C-Jag
Fear in the Night (1947) – based on the short story And So to Death (Nightmare)
The Guilty (1947) – based on the short story He Looked Like Murder
I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948)
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)
The Window (1949) – based on the short story The Boy Cried Murder
Convicted (1950) – based on the novel Face Work
No Man of Her Own (1950) – based on the novel I Married a Dead Man
Nightmare (1956) – based on the short story And So to Death (Nightmare)
The Bride Wore Black (France 1968)
Reference:
Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell, Encyclopedia of Film Noir (Greenwood Press 2007)
Noir Novelists
Elsewhere I recently became embroiled in a discussion where a reviewer of a film noir who had not the read the novel was admonished for not crediting the significant contribution of the writer of the original novel.
This has spurred me to put together a list of the major “noir” novelists whose works underpinned the genesis and flowering of film noir in the 1940s and 1950s.
The list is not exhaustive and features works that were adapted for the screen in notable films noir.
A.I. Bezzerides 1908-2007
They Drive by Night (1940) – screenplay of his novel Long Haul
Desert Fury (1947) – co-wrote screenplay of Ramona Stewart novel Desert Town
Thieves’ Highway (1949) – screenplay of his novel Thieves Market
On Dangerous Ground (1952) – screenplay of the novel “Mad with Much Heart” by Gerald Butler
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) – screenplay of Mickey Spillane novel
W. R. Burnett (1899–1982)
Little Caesar (1931)
High Sierra (1941)
Nobody Lives Forever (1946)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
James M. Cain (1892–1977)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Mildred Pierce (1945)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
Time to Kill (1942) – based on the novel The High Window
Double Indemnity (1944) – co-scripted screenplay based on the James M. Cain novel
The Big Sleep (1946)
The Blue Dahlia (1946) – original screenplay
Farewell, My Lovely (aka Murder, My Sweet) (1944)
The Brasher Doubloon (1947) – based on the novel The High Window
Lady in The Lake (1947)
Strangers on a Train (1951) – original screenplay
Playback (1949) – un-produced screenplay
Playback (1959) – novelisation of un-produced screenplay
The Long Goodbye (1973)
Steve Fisher (1912–1980)
I Wake Up Screaming (1941)
Johnny Angel (1945) – original screenplay
Lady in the Lake (1947) – original screenplay
Roadblock (1951) – original screenplay
City That Never Sleeps (1953) – original screenplay
36 Hours (1953) – original screenplay
David Goodis (1917–1967)
Dark Passage (1946)
The Unfaithful (1947) – original screenplay
Nightfall (1957)
The Burglar (1953)
Shoot the Piano Player (1960) – based on the novel Down There
Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
The Glass Key (1935)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Glass Key (1942)
Jonathan Latimer (1906–1983)
The Glass Key (1942) – original screenplay
Nocturne (1946)
They Won’t Believe Me (1947)
The Big Clock (1948) – screenplay based on the Kenneth Fearing novel
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) – screenplay based on the Cornell Woolrich novel
The Unholy Wife (1957)
Horace McCoy (1897–1955)
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950)
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)
William P. McGivern (1918-1982)
The Big Heat (1953) – based on Saturday Evening Post serial
Shield for Murder (1954)
Rogue Cop (1954)
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)
Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968)
Street of Chance (1942) – based on the novel titled The Black Curtain
The Mark of the Whistler (1944) – based on the short story Dormant Account
The Leopard Man (1943) – based on the novel Black Alibi
Phantom Lady (1944)
Deadline at Dawn (1946)
Black Angel (1946)
The Chase (1946) – based on the novel The Black Path of Fear
Fall Guy (1947) – based on the short story C-Jag
Fear in the Night (1947) – based on the short story And So to Death (Nightmare)
The Guilty (1947) – based on the short story He Looked Like Murder
I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948)
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)
The Window (1949) – based on the short story The Boy Cried Murder
Convicted (1950) – based on the novel Face Work
No Man of Her Own (1950) – based on the novel I Married a Dead Man
Nightmare (1956) – based on the short story And So to Death (Nightmare)
The Bride Wore Black (France 1968)
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