Noir — From Book to Screen: Two Examples and Bumps on the Way

UPDATE: I pulled this from my post on Ride the Pink Horse because it is more relevant here since this is where I went off the rails.

Since this post on the topic of film noir and noir fiction I realize that I've been looking at this subject all wrong. You shouldn't use a work of noir fiction determine a film's noirness. I really knew better and don't know what I was thinking.

I'm from the school that holds that film noir isn't a genre. Film noir can encompass pretty much any story line, be taken from any established genre: gangster, police drama, romance (particularly Gothic), etc. Rather, film noir embraces a visual style or mood. There is no common definition or agreement as to what constitutes for film noir and if you want to call a film, noir, you can. For the classic period of film noir — where this film falls — we tend to think in terms of black and white and low key lighting, low angles, and other techniques.

Somewhere on the interwebs I read that noir is like pornography — I might not be able to define it but I know it when I see it. I like that.

So, I shouldn't expect that a noir film will match the noir book from which it derives. There are exceptions of course. I think James M. Caine's noir books translate very well into noir films — The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce. As for Dorothy B. Hughes' Ride the Pink Horse, forget it. I don't see how it could be translated to film as she wrote it. On the other hand, another of Hughes books, In a Lonely Place, could easily be turned into a noir film as written if you don't mind your leading man seen as a misogynistic psycho serial killer.

We have to accept that noir means something different in print and on film.

/UPDATE

I have set aside a few books for which I also have the DVD or Blu-Ray and several fall into the noir category. I previously published my look at what is and isn't noir fiction here and this comes into play here.

I have two examples to present. In the first, I conside whether a book of noir fiction can result in a non-noir film.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The Woman in the Window (1944)
Starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, and Dan Duryea.
Directed by Fritz Lang
Based on the book, Once Off Guard by JH Wallis published in 1942

With a cast like this and with Fritz Lang directing you figure this film is naturally going to live up to its noir designation. Let's see what happened.

Brief Summary: Richard Wanley is a psychology professor on his own after sending his family on vacation. Next door to his club where he has gone for the evening, Wanley sees a striking portrait of Alice Reed. Standing near the window is the subject herself, observing passers-by look at her portrait. She strikes up a conversation with Wanley and gets him to go for drinks at her place. While there, a jealous lover arrives and is killed by Wanley after a struggle. Things get worse for Wanley as there is a lot of evidence pointing at him and he finds himself being blackmailed by an associate of the dead man. Wanley attempts to poison the blackmailer and when that fails he takes the remaining poison himself and is seen slumped over in a chair, apparently dead. But, in a film technique called a match cut,  Wainley wakes up and we find that everything has been a dream and club employees were characters in the dream. Outside the club, by the window with a portrait, Wanley is asked for a light by a woman. Startled, Wanley refuses and runs down the street in a panicked reaction to the possibility of his dream coming true.

Until the moment Wanley wakes up, I was enjoying The Women in the Window as a pretty decent little noir film. You have a hapless protagonist who gets involved with a femme fatale which leads to his destruction. He is doomed from the moment he agrees to go for drinks.

After all was revealed to be a dream, ,I wanted to toss the DVD in the microwave on high power. and watch the sparks. What a cheat! Apparently the studio wanted a lighter touch which they got with the slapstick running down the street scene.

What about the book?  Wanley succeeds in killing the blackmailer with a poison that makes the death look like a heart attack. He decides that the only way to preserve his reputation is to kill himself which he does with the same poison he used on the blackmailer. thus making his death appear natural. The ending has a physician friend approached by a woman while standing on the street in front of the portrait. He pegs her as a woman on the hustle, rebuffs her advances, and strolls off down the street.

Verdict: If you stop the film with Wanley slumped in has chair, then you have a pretty good noir film. As far as I'm concerned, the 'it's all a dream" ending takes the film out of the noir category. Film is not noir for me.

In a Lonely Place (1950)
Starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Based on the book In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes published in 1947

Brief Summary: Dix Steele is a Hollywood screenwriter who hasn't had a hit since before the war. He has serious anger issues resulting in violent outbursts. He takes a hatcheck girl, Mildred, home to discuss a book he has been asked to adapt to the screen and which Mildred has read. After Dix decides the book is worthless, he sends Mildred on her way. His arrival with Mildred and her later departure are observed by a neighbor, Laurel. When Mildred turns up dead, Dix is a suspect but Laurel gives him an alibi havind seen Mildred leave.

He and Laurel begin a relationship and Dix appears to be reinvigorated by having Laurel assist him. But Dix's history of violent behavior makes people wonder if Dix might have killed the girl and doubt is sown in Laurel's mind as well. Dix finds out what people are saying and becomes increasing erratic in behavior. In the end, he has a blackout rage moment and he nearly kills Laurel when he finds out that she intends to leave him. Just as he regains control, the police call to tell him that the Mildred's boyfriend has confessed and he is no longer a suspect. Unfortunately, his rage has destroyed his relationship with Laurel.

The film version of this story carries with it a strong incitement of the Hollywood studio system.

What about the book? Dix Steele is a returning WWII pilot who was never happier than when he was in the war. He is also a misogynistic psychopath, serial killer, and rapist. Also, he has killed a Princeton classmate from before the war, moved into his flat, wears his clothes, and drives his car.  He tells everyone he is a writer. As in the film, there is the neighbor Laurel with whom he develops a relationship. Laurel was also a fried of the previous occupant of the flat who was murdered by Dix. A friend from the war is on the police force and investigating a serial killer. Dix arrogantly volunteers to assist in the investigation using his writerly observations to give insight into the killer. Dix sees himself as a superior intellect, toying with the police. But Laurel, and the wife of the detective friend begin to suspect Dix and set a trap for him. As the book ends, Dix is being charged with multiple murders and breaks down and confess to a murder he committed in England during the war.

Hughes wrote beautifully, even poetically, and was able to get into the mind of a serial killer. She shows the psychological cat and mouse game Dix sees himself playing with the police.

Verdict: Both film and book are noir. With the film, Dix is doomed by his uncontrollable rage and finds himself left with nothing. In the book, Dix is doomed by his arrogance and feelings of superiority and lack of self-awareness that others might see through him. So both are noir but I think the book is more noir. Personally, I wish they had given the film a different title, it is so different from the book.

Keywords: noir, crime fiction, film noir

Nonfiction Review: Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir by Nick Triplow

Ted Lewis (1940 - 1982) was a British creative genius: musician, artist, animator, screen writer, and, above all, a crime fiction writer. As with his protagonists, he was doomed and, like many creative people, he was ultimately brought down by drugs. In his case, the drug of choice was alcohol. If his name is recognized today , it is probably as the author of Jack's Return Home —otherwise known as Get Carter —which was the source of the Mike Hodges film Get Carter staring Michael Caine. as Jack Carter. For a crime fiction reader such as myself, Ted Lewis is the author who inspired Brit Noir and gave us one of the best noir novels and noir protagonist ever written. Maybe the best.

 I knew nothing about Ted Lewis outside of Jack's Return Home and the film Get Carter and was immediately interested when a Facebook posting alerted me to Nick Triplow's book, Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir.  Nick's chronicling of Lewis' very short 42 years on earth is an impressive accomplishment and for those of us who appreciate Lewis' writing very welcome. There isn't much in the way of documentation available about Lewis but Triplow was able to draw on the memories of those who know Lewis and extrapolate from the environment in which Lewis grew up and what was happening around him.

I give some of the book's highlights below but you really need to read Getting Carter in the whole. Tripow's book is is an uncompromising looks at Ted Lewis, a deeply flawed genius, doomed like one of his noir characters.

Lewis grew up around Barton-upon-Humber in Lincolnshire, UK. These northern locals — Hull, Doncaster, Scunthorpe, Mablethorpe — figured in Lewis' writing. What emerges from his schoolboy years is that Ted was obsessed with jazz, films, comics, and crime magazines. His interest in music led him to learn jazz piano and play in local bands. After grammar school he attended art school where he was an accomplished if unstructured student where drinking, music, films, and chasing girls took precedence over completing assignments in a timely fashion. These predilections, particularly the drinking, followed Lewis throughout his life. The drink led to two failed marriages.

Ted's interest in film stayed with him. He worked as an illustrator for a while but got into animation, working on episodes of a Lone Ranger cartoon. He also had an important role on the animated feature, Beatles' Yellow Submarine (1968), where he had the important role of clean-up supervisor. It was especially important because of the number of animators hired to do bits of the production. Lewis and his team brought consistency to the work.

Though he had no experience as a screen writer, Lewis was later hired to write scripts for the gritty crime drama, Z Cars. He didn't write for the later series, The Sweeney, but he felt it ripped him off. The two main characters in The Sweeney are Jack Regan and George Carter which Lewis took as a reference to his character Jack Carter. I've watched all the seasons (series if you British) of The Sweeney and it would have benefited from Lewis' writing. He was also commissioned to write a story arc for Doctor Who and completed three scripts. The scripts were never filmed because they didn't quite match the mood the BBC was going for at the time.

Lewis' first book was the autobiographical All the Way Home and All the Night Through which was met with some critical success. But it was with the 1970 publication of Jack's Return Home that made Lewis a bestselling author and, importantly, for us crime fiction readers, created the British noir school of writing. Jack's Return Home is set in [unnamed] Scunthorpe and is a staggering counter to the traditional British crime story. Jack Carter is an enforcer for a London mob family. He returns home after the death of his brother. The circumstances of the death are suspicious and Jack starts to look into it. In this he runs afoul of the local criminal element who are allied with his London bosses. He is warned off but can't let go. Jack Carter isn't a nice person. He's amoral, violent, ruthless, and misogynistic and quite unlike any protagonist preceding him. He is a classic noir protagonist, ultimately doomed by his own actions. Seriously, if you appreciate noir and haven't read Jack's Return Home/Get Carter you need to get a copy.

Ted wrote two more Jack Carter books, prequels: Jack Carter's Law and Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon. Jack Carter's Law was well received but Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon is considered a much lesser book, written to pay the bills.

Lewis's last book is GBH (grievous bodily harm) which is a masterpiece of disturbing, stomach churning noir writing. The doomed noir protagonist is George Fowler, a London pornographer. Pornography also features in Jack's Return Home. Fowler is a paranoid psychopath who;s story is a descent into into madness. It is set in Mablethorpe, a seaside town where Lewis and his second wife lived for a time. Reading a description of their home in Mablethorpe I immediately saw Fowler's house in GBH.

For me, Jack's Return Home and GBH are essential noir reading and not just for Brit noir, I mean noir as a whole.

There is an interesting section in Getting Carter on the filming of Getting Carter. Lewis' contribution consists of noting that it is based on his book. It moves the action to Newcastle, an area the directors knows well amd makes other changes to the story but you know you are watching Jack's Return Home. Michael Caine is brilliant as Jack Carter though he doesn't much resemble the book's .Jack Carter. Lewis had hoped to write the screenplay but apparently was never considered. Given that this was Mike Hodges' first feature film and was produced in a very short time (10 months from concept to completion) it probably couldn't have handled a new director and new scriptwriter at the same time. It wasn't promoted very well but has since become acknowledged as a masterwork of noir film. As with the book, if you haven't seen the film and like film noir, you need to see it immediately.

Getting Carter has inspired me take down Derek Raymond's Factory series that have been gathering dust on my TBR shelf. Raymond (Robin Cook is his real name) is another Brit Noir author. He knew Lewis and owes a debt to him for his nameless detective in the Department of Unexplained Deaths, aka The Factory. David Peace, a Brit noir author known for his gritty noir Red-Riding Quartet, also acknowledges Lewis, calling Get Carter "the finest crime novel I've ever read". The Red-rRding Quartet is one of the most difficult series to get through I've ever read and I'm not sure I'm up to a second reading

Research: What is Noir and What it Isn't

My search for a definition of noir arose after I read the first books by two authors who appear on lists of Nordic noir. While perfectly acceptable crime stories, I didn’t find anything in them noir. When I started looking at what constitutes noir I discovered almost immediately that I was guilty of putting hard-boiled and noir stories as the same sub-genre. In fact, I was pretty liberal as to what I called noir.

One of the first articles that popped up in my internet search—see links below for much better and more detailed analysis— was Otto Penzler’s “Noir Fiction is About Losers, Not Private Eyes”. Now Penzler has some serious credentials. He is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan which, according to Wikipeida is…”the oldest and largest mystery specialist bookstore in the world”. Penzler “is regarded as the world’s foremost authority on crime, mystery and suspense fiction” and has edited a huge number of crime fiction books.

Penzler pretty much engraves in stone what noir fiction is and isn’t thus his isn’t a opinion that can be dismissed easily. Indeed, I realized I had felt this all along even if I didn’t know enough to voice it.

Noir fiction has attracted some of the best writers in the United States (mostly) and many of its aficionados are among the most sophisticated readers in the crime genre. Having said that, I am constantly baffled by the fact that a huge number of these readers don’t seem to know what noir fiction is. When they begin to speak of their favorite titles in the category, they invariably include a preponderance of books and short stories that are about as noir as strawberry shortcake.

“Like art, love, and pornography, noir is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. For the purposes of the book and my longtime working understanding and definition of it, noir stories are bleak, existential, alienated, pessimistic tales about losers--people who are so morally challenged that they cannot help but bring about their own ruin.”

― Otto Penzler, The Best American Noir of the Century

Noir evolved from the hard-boiled detectives that Dashiell Hammett defined in Black Mack Magazine in the 1920s. The hard-boiled detective might be tough and use questionable means but at the end of the day has a moral center, a code of ethics. Even Sam Spade, who is a bit morally ambiguous, recognizes that when someone kills your partner you do something about it even if you are sleeping with your partner’s wife. Chandler famously wrote about the detective:

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

For Penzler, “noir is about losers”. Noir stories are existential and nihilistic and the characters doomed because they lack morality. “Pretty much everyone in a noir story (or film is driven by greed, lust jealousy or alienation, a path that inevitably sucks them into a downward spiral from which they cannot escape.”

Penzler unequivocally says that the hard-boiled and noir sub-genres of crime fiction are philosophically opposed to each other.

One is dependent on its hero maintaining the ethical high ground while most everyone with whom he interacts lies, charts, steals and kills. The other features people who wallow in the sty that is their world.The machinations of their lust, whether for money or love (which in noir fiction is a four-letter word for sex), will cause them to be blinded to rudimentary decency as they become entangled in the web of their own doom.

There are no happy endings in noir.

By now you might be having unsettling thoughts about our beloved crime fiction, what have I been reading. Hammett’s Maltese Falcon and the Continental Op stories and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, as dark as they might be, are not noir. I’d always thought it incongruous that these books appeared on the same lists with books by Jim Thompson and James M. Cain. Walter Neff in Double Indemnity and Lou Ford in The Killer Inside me are noir figures, not Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

Dave Zeltserman sums it up nicely:

What makes these noir novels such fascinating reads are the ways in which they open up the human psyche and leave bare the dark impulses that can drive us to do the unthinkable. What makes them such exhilarating and dread-inducing reads is being sucked into the noir protagonist’s private hell, and hoping he can somehow escape the abyss waiting for him while knowing there’s no escape.

Given all this, did two of my favorite crime writers, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, write noir, since the term is often ascribed to their works? Simple answer, no. They wrote tough, hard-boiled crime fiction, and while there’s a darkness to their book and stories, none of it is noir. In Chandler’s case, Philip Marlowe might uncover others’ sins, but he always lives to fight another day.

You might be asking, as I did, wait, isn’t it possible to have a noir detective? It seems like their must be but I can only think of one from recent reading. PI Jake Blake in Charles Williford’s Wild Wives begins his downward spiral because of a woman and money. Ray Banks suggests the PI Harry Angel in William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel which features which features murder, mystery, and the occult and maybe a crossover with horror. He also thinks that Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor novels constitute a noir cycle.

In his article, 'Writing in the Darkness: the World of Cornell Woolrich', Eddie Duggan further distinguishes between hard-boiled and noir:

The main difference between the ‘classic’ hard-boiled writers and the ‘noir-writers’ — although James M. Cain has a foot in each camp — can probably be characterized by two tendencies: a tendency in hardboiled writing to paint a backdrop of institutionalized social corruption; and a tendency in noir-writing to focus on personal psychology, whether it is despair, paranoia or some other psychological crises. These two schools—if we can call these tendencies ‘schools’—are by no means mutually exclusive: hard-boiled writing can display elements of noir, and noir writing can be hard-boiled.

This actually reinforces my feelings about Philip Kerr’s first book in his Berlin Noir trilogy, March Violets: definitely hard-boiled but with noir elements as you might expect in a book set in pre-WWII Nazi Germany.

Here are links to the resources all of which I consulted and some shamelessly copied from:

• Ardai, Charles–The Dark Heart of Noir.

• Banks, Ray–Noir is for Losers.

• Defective Yeti–The Difference Between Noir and Hardboiled.

• Duggan, Eddie–Writing in the Darkness: The World of Cornell Woolrich. (requires a Google or Facebook login)

• Escribano, Jose Ignacio–A first approach to the difference between hardboiled, noir fiction and crime fiction in Spanish

• Escribano, Jose Ignacio–Notes on Noir Fiction

• Jones, Howard Andrew–Hardboiled or Noir?

• Penzler, Otto–Noir Fiction is About Losers, Not Private Eyes.

• Zeltserman, Davene–One Crime Writer's Thoughts on Noir.

Retro Review: A Bullet for Cinderella by John D. MacDonald

If you mention John D. MacDonald (JDM), people, if they know the name at all, immediately think of the 22 books in the Travis McGee series, the first of which appeared in 1964 and the last in 1985. This is certainly a good thing to be known for since these are excellent mystery/crime/thrillers that are still readable today.

But JDM has a long list of standalone thrillers beginning with The Brass Cupcake in 1950. More often than not every year since 1950 saw a new JDM book published. He even ventured away from thriller to write three science fiction novels. As good as the Travis McGee books are, JDM's standalone thrillers represent some really fine writing. Ed Gorman has a nice article on JDM and his standalones on the Mystery Scene website: My Ten Favorite John D. MacDonald Standalone Novels.

A Bullet for Cinderella isn't on Gorman's list of favorite standalones but it is a good, solid thriller. My Kindle copy identifies it as one of the "noir masters" but it really isn't noir so don't be misled. It would be more noir if it was told from the viewpoint of the villain of the story, Earl Fitzmartin. The cover and cover blurb are also a bit misleading. Mind you, I like the cover but it represents a small part of the book. I really can't explain the cover without spoiling the story.but I will say that it's worth getting there.

Tal Howard comes to the town of Hillston looking for treasure. His cover is that he is writing a book about the men who died during the Korean War in the Chinese camp where Tal was also a prisoner. While in the prison camp Tal was friends with Timmy Warden who made a deathbed confession that he had embezzled $60,000 from the family business. His only clue to the location of the buried money is the enigmatic clue, "Cindy would know". Being a POW changed Tal and nothing about life after repatiation satisfied him, not the job or girl that waited for him. Restless, he took of for the treasure hoping it would fill the emptiness within him.

When Tal arrives in Hillston, he finds that he has been preceded by Earl Fitzmartin who was in prison camp with Tal and Timmy and who overheard Timmy's confession. He wants the $60K. Tal has no love for Fitzmartin, in fact he and other prisoners vowed to track him down and kill him after the war more for what he didn't do than anything he did do.

Using his cover as a writer, Tal begins his search for the mysterious Cindy all the while shadowed by the menacing Fitzmartin. One of the people he "interviews" is a former girlfriend of Timmy's, Ruth Stamm to whom he is strongly attracted.

Tal not only has to contend with Fitzamartin dogging his steps but the local police aren't too happy with him either. They think he might be a private detective looking into the disappearance of the wife of Timmy's brother George who apparently left town with a salesman in the dark of night.

For someone who is not a detective, Tal does a pretty good job of trying to track down the elusive Cindy and I would say that his approach is logical but with lots of dead ends and frustrations to keep the tension up.

One of the characteristics of JDM's writing are his observations on society, people, and behaviors. Personally I enjoy this aspect of his writing. In the first chapter he describes Tal's reaction upon driving through Hillston:

Standardization had given most of our small cities the same look. Plastic and glass brick store fronts. Woolworth's and J.C. Penney and Liggett and Timely and the chain grocery. The essential character of Hillston had been watered down by this standardization and yet there was more individuality left than in many other cities. Here was a flavor of leisure, of mild manners and quiet pleasures. No major highway touched the city. It was in an eddy apart from the great current.

MacDonald wasn't a great fan of homogenization. I love that last sentence. It's simple but conveys much.

Later in the book, JDM describes a shack where his investigation has led him:

It had a sagging porch, auto parts stamped into the mud of the yard, dingy Monday washing flapping on a knotted line, a disconsolate tire hanging from a tree limb, and a shiny new television aerial.

You have 4 signs of poverty and despair then he finishes with the incongruity of the television aerial. It is this kind of writing the makes JDM appeal to me.

So, to wrap up, it's a solid, nicely plotted story. It's not the best nor the worst and it isn't noir but it is a good read. I recommend looking a Gorman's article, cited above, for outstanding examples of MacDonald's standalone thrillers.