Tag: film noir

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)

James M. Cain, who wrote the novels, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce, said in 1946 that the changes seen in Hollywood movies like Double Indemnity (1944):

“ [have] …nothing to do with the war [or any] … of that bunk… it’s just that producers have got hep to the fact that plenty of real crime takes place every day and that makes it a good movie. The public is fed up with the old-fashioned melodramatic type of hokum. You know, the whodunit at which the audience after the second reel starts shouting, “We know the murderer. It’s the butler. It’s the butler. It’s the butler.”

From Alain Silver and James Ursini (ed), Film Noir Reader 2,  pp 12-13

During 1948-49 Raymond Chandler completed a Philip Marlowe screenplay titled Playback for Universal Pictures, but for financial and other reasons the movie was never produced. After starting a novelisation in 1953, he put the draft aside until 1957 when at the age of 70 in a final Scotch-fueled effort he completed the novel. It was Chandler’s last completed work of fiction. Chandler suffered from depression in his final years and attempted suicide in 1955. He died in March 1959 from natural causes.

In Playback the book, Chandler makes his only cameo appearance in a Marlowe story, as an old hotel lobby-sitter who gives PI Marlowe some information.  In the persona of  Henry Clarendon IV, who like Chandler in his later years used a walking cane and wore white gloves to hide a skin ailment, he says to Marlowe:

“ …you may not question a man’s religious beliefs however idiotic they may be. Of course I have no right to assume that I shall go to heaven. Sounds rather dull, as a matter of fact. On the other hand how can I imagine a hell in which a baby that died before baptism occupies the same degraded position as a hired killer or a Nazi death-camp commandant or a member of the Politburo? How strange it is that man’s finest aspirations, dirty little animal that he is, his finest actions also, his great and unselfish heroism, his constant daily courage in a harsh world—how strange that these things should be so much finer than his fate on this earth. That has to be somehow made reasonable. Don’t tell me that honor is merely a chemical reaction or that a man who deliberately gives his life for another is merely following a behavior pattern. Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?”

References:

1.    The script for Playback is available here
2.    Gene D. Phillips, Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir (University Press of Kentucky, 2003) pp. 217-221