The B List: The low-budget beauties, genre-bending mavericks, and cult classics we love (Da Capo Press. $15.95. 288 pages), edited by David Sterritt and John Anderson, has been released as a paperback. The book is organised by genre - film noir, road movies, horror movies etc. Contributors include the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman, Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen, Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek, Roger Ebert and others.

The Noir section is fairly predictable, though The Well (1951) is a new one for me.  I see King Greole (1958) is included under a rock movies section, though it could also be seen as having noir elements, and for me is  Elvis Presley’s best movie (I am a closet Elvis fan).

You can check out the contents in full at Amazon.

A new book Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir by Paul Meehan has been published.

The publishers description:

This critical study traces the common origins of film noir and science fiction films, identifying the many instances in which the two have merged to form a distinctive subgenre known as Tech-Noir. From the German Expressionist cinema of the late 1920s to the present-day cyberpunk movement, the book examines more than 100 films in which the common noir elements of crime, mystery, surrealism, and human perversity intersect with the high technology of science fiction. The author also details the hybrid subgenre’s considerable influences on contemporary music, fashion, and culture.

The book has received a favorable review from film writer John Muir.

Thanks to Dark Cty Dame for advance details of the program for NOIR CITY 7, the 2009 San Francisco Film Noir Festival, to be held January 23–February 1, 2009, at the Castro Theatre, and which will have a newspaper theme:

Friday, January 23
Deadline USA (1952)
Scandal Sheet (1952)

Saturday, January 24
Matinee:
Chicago Deadline (1949)
Blind Spot (1947)
Evening show (with Arlene Dahl):
Slightly Scarlet (1956)
Wicked as They Come (1956)

Sunday, January 25
Ace in the Hole (1951)
Cry of the Hunted (1953)

Monday, January 26
Alias Nick Beal (1949)
Night Editor (1946)

Tuesday, January 27
The Harder They Fall (1956)
Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949)

Wednesday, January 28
While the City Sleeps (1956)
Shakedown (1950)

Thursday, January 29
The Big Clock (1948)
Strange Triangle (1946)

Friday, January 30
The Unsuspected (1947)
Desperate (1947)

Saturday, January 31
Matinee:
Two O’Clock Courage (1945)
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)
Evening show:
One False Move (1992)

Sunday, February 1
Shock Corridor (1963)
The Killers (1946) (newly restored)

Full details to be announced.

A gambler on the skids pulls a heist as a final gambit after adopting
a false identity in a small town and falling for a rich crippled woman
(1948 RKO. Directed by Robert Stevenson 81 mins)

Cinematography by noir veteran Harry J. Wild
Screenplay by Manuel Seff and Paul Yawitz (adaptation of play by Frank Fenton)
Art Direction by RKO stalwart Albert S. D’Agostino, and Alfred Herman

Starring Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli

Although Walk Softly, Stranger was made before The Third Man (1949), its release was said to have been held off until after The Third Man to leverage the star appeal of Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli.  But the movie was panned by very faint praise from Bosley Crowther in his New York Times review on the film’s release, and is a sleeper.

I have always had a soft spot for Joseph Cotten, the modest everyman with unflinching decency and incredible loyalty, and I always fall in love with Alida Valli, Italy’s sensuous incarnation of Ingrid Bergman. Both these actors bring depth to this essentially b-romance with a noir arc, and Spring Byington is superb as the landlady who takes Cotten under her wing. The story is unusual enough to sustain interest until the climax, which is brief but effective. The script is literate and elegant, while also peppered with witty throwaway lines. There is a beautifully sardonic scene on the cusp of the climax with a car crashing into a billboard displaying a pointed advert.

The theme of the past catching up with noir protagonist is integral to the resolution, and Cotten toughens his persona credibly when he has to deal with an accomplice on-the-run and in confronting his pursuers. When he brutally punches his accomplice it is truly shocking, as such a violent reaction is at odds with his sincere affection for his landlady and poetic romancing of Valli.

This is a slow-moving noir with a hint of the classic women’s picture in the wooing and in the final redemptive scene, but rewards you with an honest story and memorable characters.

If you want dark dames and city streets menaced by violence, look elsewhere.

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)

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