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.

Additions and corrections are welcomed and are highlighted.

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) - original screenplay
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)

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

Home Media Magazine has featured a press release from Sony Pictures announcing that Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation has partnered with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to bring a variety of classic films to DVD. Films will be released under the “Collector’s Choice” banner and include restored and remastered transfers of previously unreleased titles from the Sony catalog. Hollywood talent will contribute commentaries and introductions in films that have inspired their own work.

The fist DVD set to issue on Nov 4 will be The Films of Budd Boetticher - a boxed set of five Westerns.

The article goes on to say that the alliance will follow-up with “several upcoming DVD sets, including a Michael Powell double feature as well as Rita Hayworth, Frank Capra, William Castle and film noir collections.”

The previously moribund Film Noir Foundation web site has added some topical content:

• FNF NEWS
• FILM NOIR AND NEO-NOIR IN THE THEATERS
• UPCOMING ON DVD
• FILM NOIR AND NEO-NOIR ON TV

VinceKeenan.com also reports that “The Dark Knight receives a lengthy, glowing review in the latest issue of the Noir City Sentinel, house rag of the Film Noir Foundation, in which it’s compared favorably to genre classics like Touch of Evil.”

The Dark Knight as noir: I don’t buy it. There are no super-heroes in the noir universe - only the usual flawed humans that stumble through a dark night (pun intended). The Dark Knight is just a comic with movement and a lot of noise. Orson Welles must be spinning…

A repressed woman is pushed into the abyss of schizophrenia by unrequited love
(1947 Warner Bros. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt 108 mins)

A tour-de-force performance from an aging Joan Crawford impresses, but the gestalt of this movie rarely strays beyond melodrama - more a soap-opera on steroids than film noir.

The use of flash-back and dark moody lighting make it look noirish, but the deranged protagonist is not responsible for the consequences of her delusions, and there is no redemption, only the hope of recovery.

Visually the opening scenes on the streets of LA and in the corridors of a hospital are stunning, but this virtuosity is not sustained, and the only visual interest in the rest of the film is the brutal and visceral murder at the end.

“I’m Miss Vermilyea, Mr. Umney’s secretary,” she said in a rather chintzy voice.
“Please come in.”
She was quite a doll. She wore a white belted raincoat, no hat, a well-cherished head of platinum hair, booties to match the raincoat, a folding plastic umbrella, a pair of blue-gray eyes that looked at me as if I had said a dirty word. I helped her off with her raincoat. She smelled very nice. She had a pair of legs—so far as I could determine—that were not painful to look at. She wore night sheer stockings. I stared at them rather intently, especially when she crossed her legs and held out a cigarette to be lighted.
“Christian Dior,” she said, reading my rather open mind. “I never wear anything else. A light, please.”
“You’re wearing a lot more today,” I said, snapping a lighter for her.
“I don’t greatly care for passes this early in the morning.”
“What time would suit you, Miss Vermilyea?”
She smiled rather acidly, inventoried her handbag and tossed me a manila envelope. “I think you’ll find everything you need in this.”
“Well—not quite everything.”
“Get on with it, you goof. I’ve heard all about you. Why do you think Mr. Umney chose you? He didn’t. I did. And stop looking at my legs.”
I opened the envelope. It contained another sealed envelope and two checks made out to me. One, for $250, was marked “Retainer, as an advance against fees for professional services.” The other was for $200 and was marked “Advance to Philip Marlowe for necessary expenses.”
“You will account for the expenses to me, in exact detail,” Miss Vermilyea said. “And buy your own drinks.”
The other envelope I didn’t open—not yet. “What makes Umney think I’ll take a case I know nothing about?”
“You’ll take it. You’re not asked to do anything wrong. You have my word for that.”
“What else do I have?”
“Oh, we might discuss that over a drink some rainy evening, when I’m not too busy.”
“You’ve sold me.”

From Raymond Chandler’s last competed novel Playback (1958)

Pitfall

But does she really love him? That’s always the question about these heroines-obsessive to the hero, central to the movie. De Carlo’s Anna [Criss-Cross], for example, is willing enough to betray her racketeer husband for love of Lancaster, but not willing to stay with him once the husband catches up with them. Not when she can take the money and run…  It’s one of the noir heroine’s most invariable features that she is motivated by greed: she is poor and wants to be rich, or else she is rich and wants to be richer. She may inspire romantic dreams, but she doesn’t have them herself. Not like he does, anyway. That’s one of the advantages she has over him.

- James Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties

NPR has posted under its You Must Read This feature, an interesting excerpt from Harvey’s book on the femme-fatale from  the early 40’s to the late 50’s, with nicely drawn portraits of the femmes-fatale from The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Killers, Criss-Cross, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Pushover, Pitfall, Gun Crazy, The File on Thelma Jordan, The Locket, and Where Danger Lives.