It got darker. I thought; and thought in my mind moved with a kind of sluggish stealthiness, as if it was being watched by bitter and sadistic eyes. I thought of dead eyes looking at a moonless sky, with black blood at the corners of the mouths beneath them. I thought of nasty old women beaten to death against the posts of their dirty beds. I thought of a man with bright blond hair who was afraid and didn’t quite know what he was afraid of, who was sensitive enough to know that something was wrong, and too vain or too dull to guess what it was that was wrong. I thought of beautiful rich women who could be had. I thought of nice slim curious girls who lived alone and could be had too, in a different way. I thought of cops, tough cops that could be greased and yet were not by any means all bad, like Hemingway. Fat prosperous cops with Chamber of Commerce voices, like Chief Wax. Slim, smart and deadly cops like Randall, who for all their smartness and deadliness were not free to do a clean job in a clean way. I thought of sour old goats like Nulty who had given up trying. I though of Indians and psychics and dope doctors.

Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940, ch.34 par.3

“Renoir’s second talkie, La Nuit du carrefour (1932)— my all-time favorite French noir, and the sexiest movie he ever made…  his edgy adaptation of Georges Simenon’s Maigret at the Crossroads, filmed in a foggy suburb that vibrates with off-screen sounds and a mysterious Danish heroine (Winna Winifried), cries out for discovery.” - Jonathon Rosenbaum

In 1931 Georges Simenon’s crime novel La Nuit de Carrefour was published by the French pulp magazine Police Magazine:

In 1932 Jean Renoir in his second film adapted the story for the screen:

There is a certain irony in this excerpt from the novel by Italo-American Pietro Di Donato, Christ in Concrete (1939), a story of Italian immigrant building workers and their families in Brooklyn during the Depression. In 1949 a film adaptation of  the novel by director Edward Dmytryk, featured teeming tenements and residential streets shot with a provocatively gritty realism and film noir atmospherics. A powerful leftist denunciation of capitalism, the picture had to be filmed in the UK, and was buried a few days after its US release by a reactionary backlash. The film is the closest an Anglo-American movie ever got to the aesthetic and socialist outlook of Italian neo-realism. My review of the movie last Easter is here.

“Yet the darkest of Chandler now appears clean-cut. Chandler evoked the spirit of noir through mood-setting and language, not cheap graphic gore. Now work that is hailed as ‘dark’ often seems close to putrid, almost unreadable…”
- Mick Hume, ‘Watching the Detectives’, AIR Magazine, March 2010, p18.

Last Friday marked the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s death.  The passing of the man who wrote detective stories with poetic prose like this,  “The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find”, from The High Window (1942).

Today most noir fiction reads like Spillane on crack.  Many so-called noir writers are misappropriating noir by depicting violence, including sexual violence, so graphically you wonder who is the real psychopath.

I am reminded of these lines in Chandler’s Playback, where Marlowe narrates: “I picked a paperback off the table and made a pretense of reading it. It was about some private eye whose idea of a hot scene was a dead naked woman hanging from the shower rail with the marks of torture on her… I threw the paperback into the wastebasket, not having a garbage can handy at the moment.”

The Film Noir Encyclopedia (new editon)
Alain Silver; Elizabeth Ward; James Ursini; Robert Porfirio
Release Date: May 13th, 2010  Pre-Order

Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood (Working in the Americas)
Prof. Dennis Broe
Release Date: April 1st, 2010  Pre-Order

Historical Dictionary of Film Noir
Andrew Spicer
Release Date: April 15th, 2010  Pre-Order

David Goodis… To A Pulp, a film biography of noir writer David Goodis, premieres this Friday, March 5, in Philadelphia. For film-maker Larry Withers making the movie was a peak into the once-hidden life of his mother, Elaine Astor, who had previously been married to Goodis.  Read all about it at Mike Lipkin’s Noir Journal.

“I was left alone there a long time. I could see, all right, and know the things about me. My car was there at the curb, glistening in the dark, with a thin ripple of wet orange paint running down its hood in one place where the light from the doorway struck out at it. A ripple that never moved, and yet was warped and liquid as running ripples are. I even shifted once, from where she had left me standing, and moved over to it, and stood up close beside it, my hands pressing down tight upon the top of the door, as if I were unsteady and needed something to cling to in order to remain upright. My head inclined, as if peering intently at the upholstery of the seat backs.

Yes, the car was real, it was there. My hands could feel it, my eyes could see it, I had but to touch a button to make light shoot out of it, light that no shadows could withstand; but yet the shadows had the best of it, it was powerless to rive this pall that blanketed the eyes that looked at it, the mind that considered it. It could not take me out of the shade, it was I who had brought it into the shade with me; its powers of contrast were lost, it became one with the other Gothic shadows about me. For the shadows came from within, and so anything they fell upon was shadowed. Just as if you front your eyes with a piece of smoked glass, the most sparkling sunlight will become somber.

Each unto himself has his own world that he looks out upon, and though someone else were to stand on the very selfsame inch of ground your feet were placed upon, guided by chalk marks, he would not see the same things you did. There would have been two different views there, not just one. Or is there any world at all, I wondered, out there before us as we look upon it; may it not be inside, behind the eyes, and out front nothing, just a blank infinite? But madness lurked along that trail, and I quickly turned aside.”

- Cornell Woolrich, Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945)