“RAYMOND CHANDLER ” LOS ANGELES TIMES

Raymond Chandler wrote his publisher Alfred Knopf in February 1943:

“I hope the day will come when I don’t have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things but because they do it in a dirty way.” – Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler, 1978, p101)

Those dames on the Avenue.  Wrapped and decorated exotic empresses. Ice-cold blondes and raven-haired goddesses loping from privileged canopies to long black limousines purring at the road-side. Glimpses of the dream. Full breasts dark hidden valleys of lush abandon. Ivory skin and golden tans. Long languid legs. Heaven between their thighs and a come-on swank to their hips. Curves sublime sheathed in gossamer. Perfumed gardens of blissful delight. Soft caresses and sweet moans. Eyes deep as emeralds and as hard.

“The headlight-beams of his car kept slashing up the road ahead of them like ploughshares, seeming to cast aside its topsoil of darkness, reveal its borax-like white fill, and spill that out all over the roadway.  Then behind them the livid furrows would heal again into immediate darkness.

It seemed hours they’d been driving like this, in silence yet acutely aware of one another. Trees went by, dimly lit up from below, along their trunks, by the passing reflection of their headlight-wash, into a sort of ghostly incandescence.  Then at times there weren’t any trees, they fell back, and a plushy black evenness took their place—fields or meadows, she supposed—that smelled sweeter. Clover. It was beautiful country around here; too beautiful for anyone to be in such a hell of suffering in the midst of it.

Roads branched off at times, too, but they never took them. They kept to this wide, straight one they were on.”

- Cornell Woolrich, I Married A Dead Man (1948)

“And I see you now, you woman of that night – I see you in the sanctity of some dirty harbor bedroom flop-joint, with the mist outside, and you lying with legs loose and cold from the fog’s lethal kisses, and hair smelling of blood, sweet as blood, your frayed and ripped hose hanging from a rickety chair beneath the cold yellow light of a single, spotted bulb, the odor of dust and wet leather spinning about, your tattered blue shoes tumbled sadly at the bedside, your face lined with the tiring misery of Woolworth defloration and exhausting poverty, your lips slutty, yet soft blue lips of beauty calling me to come come come to that miserable room and feast myself upon the decaying rapture of your form, that I might give you a twisting beauty for misery and a twisting beauty for cheapness, my beauty for yours, the light becoming blackness as we scream, our miserable love and farewell to the tortuous flickering of a gray dawn that refused to really begin and would never really have an ending.”

John Fante – The Road to Los Angeles (1933)

A Colt is My Passport, a wide-screen b&w movie from the prolific Hikkatsu studio, is a hip acid noir with a 60s patina and a surreal spaghetti-western score.  A twist on a classic noir  motif has a hit-man as existential hero, committed to an austere private code that elevates him above the yakuza hoods that want him dead after a mob hit goes wrong.

Director Takashi Nomura fills the screen with elegantly composed flowing senarios that pan and follow the action, giving movement to even establishing placement shots.  The mis-en-scene is austere yet perversely satirical.  While the planning and the mechanics of preparing for the hit are slowly paced and meticulous, the bland assured peregrinations of the hit man and his young apprentice, who are both dressed like loyal company men, and in one scene are seated in an office behind a desk,  have an unnerving quotidian ambience.  These guys are cold and distant, almost effigies.

However, the mood changes when the staging of the hit backfires and the two are on the run.  They hole up in a sea-side hotel and are aided by a young waitress attracted to the older man, whose bravery and protective loyalty to his young buddy take on a mythic dimension.  Here a mood of fatalism takes hold, and the inevitable final denoument  is telegraphed by their  entrapment in a closet-like room.  After a final desperate bid to shake-off the mobsters, the classic western theme of redemption emerges, with the hero returning to face his pursuers after parlaying his fate for the escape of his buddy, who learns of the pact too late.  The girl is left forlorn and bitter. The finale is a cinematic tour-de-force staged with mannered precision but hinging on a chaotic precipice of climactic violence and retributive justice.

You start by seeing the protagonist as a cousin of Melville’s  inscrutable Samouri but by the end of the film he has been transformed into an avenging angel.  Uber cool.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Your Ghost (1994) – Kristin Hersh

If I walk down this hallway, tonight,
It’s too quiet,
So I Pad through the dark
and call you on the phone
Push your old numbers
and let your house ring
til I wake your ghost.
Let him walk down your hallway
it’s not this quiet
slide down your receiver
sprint across the wire
follow my number
slide into my hand.

It’s the blaze across my nightgown
it’s the phone’s ring.

I think last night
you were driving circles around me.

I can’t drink this coffee
til I put you in my closet
let him shoot me down
let him call me off
I take it from his whisper
you’re not that tough.

After some recent reading on film noir, I am re-focusing my approach to film noir, and this re-appraisal will influence my coming film noir reviews.

If we go back to the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, we find protagonists who are essentially outsiders with personas concerned not with redemption but with maintaining a stasis that is outside the mainstream in an existential sense.  Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are not concerned with money or status, conventional relationships, or necessarily following the letter of the law.  These guys are loners. Independent men above banal striving and ambition, but loyal to a code that not only guides but defines them.  While the PI works at the perimeter of convention, his realm goes beyond the dark sordid recesses of criminality to the rotten core of polite society.  Death-in-life is their métier, and integrity their salvation.  But this integrity and independence casts them adrift. They are of society but not anchored in it. Their alienation is knowing and desperate:  capitulation is existential death.  These guys are subversives as film noir is subversive:  a losing battle against chaos. Nietzche was wrong: superman is a ‘loser’. The loser is outside society, his alienation is a positive reverse-psychosis, he maintains his sanity in a crazy urban nightmare only by his detachment, yet he despairs of it.  Ambivalence and entrapment the cost.

I will be reviewing a big backlog of noirs this year, and widening my focus to include reviews of noir fiction and books of commentary.  Reviews will generally be shorter than in the past, with an emphasis on a particular feature of interest.

Movies slated for review include:

A Colt is My Passport (1967 Japan)
The Amazing Mr. X (1948)
Asphalt (1929 Germany)
La Chienne (1931 France)
Harikomi (aka Stakeout 1958 Japan)
The Las Vegas Story (1952)
Leave her to Heaven (1946)
The Long Night (1947)
The Mask Of Dimitrios (1944)
Obsession (1948 UK)
Obsession (1949)
Odd Man Out(1947 UK)
Of Missing Persons (1956 Argentina)
Out of the Past (1947)
Phantom Lady (1944)
The Phenix City Story (1955)
Private Hell 36 (1954)
Pursued (1947)
Railroaded (1947)
Raw Deal (1948)
Scandal Sheet (1952)
The Second Woman (1950)
The Sleeping City (1950)
The Sound of Fury (1950)
Strange Illusion (1945)
The Strange Love Martha Ivers (1946)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Tread Softly Stranger (1958 UK)
The Unfaithful(1947)
The Unsuspected (1947)
The Web (1947)
The Well (1951)
The Woman On the Beach (1947)
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)
World For Ransom (1954)