I am currently reading a fascinating book on the career of activist Hollywood writer and producer,  Adrian Scott,  ‘Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood’,  by Jennifer E. Langdon (2008 Columbia University Press),  which focuses on the production by Scott of three seminal RKO noirs, Murder, My Sweet (1944), Cornered (1945), and Crossfire (1947).

In a chapter on the making of Crossfire, Langdon relates that one of the most radical changes Scott and screenwriter John Paxton made in the adaptation of Richard Brook’s source novel, ‘The Brick Foxhole’, was the use of flashback.  Langdon goes on to expound a profoundly interesting take on the nature of the flashback in film noir:

flashbacks are a key narrative strategy in film noir, contributing to the genre’s existential exploration of truth and falsehood.  Historian William Graebner, suggesting the ways in which film noir prefigured postmodernism, explains, “By interrupting a traditional, linear narrative, the flashback challenged the form strongly identified with progress: the story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and open to all possibilities.” Explicitly connecting the ruptured narrative strategies of film noir to the pervasive postwar sense of contingency and doubt, he argues:  “In the context of a military victory that seemed to have been won at the cost of demonstrating the inhumanity of humankind, and of a cold war that called for eternal vigilance, the ability of a cultural text to produce a conclusion consistent with, and implied in, everything that had gone before—what literary scholar Frank Kermode calls ‘the sense of an ending’ —withered and died.” * (p 85)

More on Langdon’s book in a future post.

________
* William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 54, 145.

“Mister… What does it mean when a man crashes out?”
“Crashes out? That’s a funny question for you to ask now, sister. It means he’s free.”
“Free… free”

High Sierra (1941)
Screenplay by John Huston and W.R. Burnett based on the novel by  W.R. Burnett

Orson Wells in 1939 under contract to RKO developed a screenplay for a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899) , which sadly was never made.

Film scholar James Naremore in an on-line article discusses the book and the development of  Welles’ script, which sets the  story in the present day and makes Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, an American.

“The screenplay opens in New York on the Hudson river, with Marlow’s voice speaking of a ‘monstrous town marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in the sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars’, while a series of lap dissolves show lights being turned on across Manhattan at dusk—the bridges, the parkways, the boulevards, the skyscrapers. The camera tours the length of the island accompanied by a montage of sounds—snatches of jazz from the radios of moving taxis; dinner music from the big hotels; a ‘throb of tom-toms’ foreshadowing the jungle music to come; the noodling of orchestras tuning up in the concert halls; and finally, near the Battery, the muted sounds of bell buoys and the hoots of shipping. Next we enter New York harbor, where we find Marlow leaning against the mast of a schooner, smoking a pipe and directly addressing the camera. ‘And this also’, he says, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth‘.”

John Huston’s 1941 screenplay was the first serious attempt to bring the hard-boiled nature of Hammett’s fiction to the screen. The 1931 version may have more closely followed the story of the novel, but it did not carry the hard-boiled spirit of Spade to the screen, and the 1936 version, Satan Met a Lay, with Bette Davis played the story as broad comedy.

David Spicer wrote in his book Film Noir (2002) that Huston’s film “was much closer than previous versions to the cynical tone of Hammett’s hard-boiled novel, retaining as much of Hammett’s dialogue as possible”.  William Luhr, in his book on the 1941 version says that: “Spade does not happily juggle a plethora of women but is bitterly involved with only two… For him, sexuality is not carefree but dangerous and guilt-ridden. The mystery and the evil world it reveals dominate the mood of the movie, and this sinister atmosphere does not entirely disappear at the end. Such an atmosphere presages film noir.”

The Spade of Hammett’s novel is deeply cynical, and at the end of the novel, but not in Huston’s film, he is ready to resume his affair with Archer’s wife. Mayer and McDonnell in The Encyclopedia of Film Noir (2007), say this about the final scenes in Huston’s screenplay: “Huston replaces Hammett’s cynicism with a more romantic gesture from Spade as he tells Brigid, ‘Maybe I do [love you]‘. While Ricardo Cortez’s Spade in 1931 is more or less resigned to handing Wonderly over to the police, Huston extends this sequence by accentuating the psychological disturbance within the detective. His torment is palpable, especially when he shouts into her face that ‘I won’t [fall for you] because all of me wants to, regardless of the consequences’. While this is not an existential moment, as some claim, it does represent a significant moment in the development of film noir. Unlike the novel, where survival is all that matters to the detective, Spade’s torment in the 1941 film nearly destroys him.”

When researching my previous post on The Seventh Victim (1943), I came across the site The Val Lewton Screenplay Collection, which has many of the scripts produced by Lewton and other interesting Lewton resources.

A reminder too that on Amazon you can get the Val Lewton Horror Collection DVD Box Set with nine movies: Cat People, The Curse of the Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead, Bedlam, The Leopard Man, The Ghost Ship, The Seventh Victim, and Shadows in the Dark for only  US$37.49 new and from US$29.99 used.

For those of you interested in the writers of noir fiction and the Hollywood screen-writers who penned the movies of the classic noir period, a visit to Woody Haut’s Blog is strongly recommended. Woody Haught is a journalist and the author of Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction, and Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood.

His essays are well-written and provide some fascinating insights. These sample posts should be of direct interest to readers of FilmsNoir.Net:

• John Fante: Between Two Worlds
• Daniel Fuchs: From Proletariat Fiction to Film Noir
• Tabloid Noir: Samuel Fuller’s Films and Fiction
• Steve Fisher’s I Wake Up Screaming
• A Thin Line Between Poetry and Pulp: David Goodis’s Short Stories
• Between Hell’s Highway and The Big House: Robert Tasker and Those Who Knew Him

A documentary, Trumbo (2007),  on HUAC-blacklisted screenwiter, Dalton Trumbo, who penned the noirs, The Prowler (1951) and The Brothers Rico (1957), opens in NY and LA on June 27. Scripted by Trumbo’s son, and based on letters from his father, this movie is said to be a highly emotive account of the years Trumbo spent in exile:

A number of celebrities take turns narrating from the script, including [Nathan] Lane, Paul Giamatti, Brian Dennehy, Donald Sutherland and others. As a visual accompaniment, the film intercuts home movie footage from the Trumbos’ lives, incisive interview material with Trumbo, his family, friends and collaborators; and haunting glimpses of the HUAC trial hearings with the Hollywood Ten, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; as well as extracts from The Sandpiper, Johnny Got His Gun, Spartacus and other productions authored by Trumbo. Peter Askin, who helmed the stage play, directs. – Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Update 27 June 2008: In today’s NY Times Stephen Holder reviews Trumbo in an interesting article that looks basck at the dark days of the HUAC in the early 50′s:

Trumbo emerges as a fervently resolute, highly literate man of principle who, along with the other members of the Hollywood Ten, cited the First Amendment, protecting free speech, and not the Fifth, protecting self-incrimination, as his defense…If only the movers and shakers of Hollywood…  had stood together like the slaves in “Spartacus” and all claimed to have been Communists, the blacklist might have been averted. But they didn’t. Fear can make people instant cowards and informers. Resisting it may be the ultimate test of character. Today few would dispute Trumbo’s assessment of that very dark period: “The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil.”

The final draft of the screenplay of Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler in the Motion Picture Academy Library in Los Angeles – download from here – includes a final prison execution chamber scene and a line of dialog that was spoken by Walter Neff, just after he said “I love you.” to Barton Keyes. With sirens wailing in the background, Neff says: “At the end of that trolley line, just as I get off, you be there to say good bye. Will you, Keyes?” The story then shifts to the execution.

This sequence was filmed but cut (by the studio?) from the production release.

James Naremore in his 1998 book on film noir, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, offers this penetrating analysis and critique:

… the execution described in the longest version of the script greatly increases our sympathy for Walter, all the while raising questions about the criminality of the state. It also provides a tragic recognition scene for Keyes, who is shaken out of his moral complacency. This last point is especially important, because Keyes functions as a representative of the insurance company. Although he approaches his work with the intuitive flair of an artist and the intellectual intensity of a scientist, he remains a loyal agent of industrial rationality—a talented bureaucrat who, in effect, has helped to create the office building, the drive-in restaurant, the supermarket, and all the other landmarks of modern Los Angeles that the film relentlessly criticizes… One of the many virtues of Wilder’s original ending is that this complex, brilliantly acted character would have been made to confront his inner demon and to experience poetic justice. Keyes would have been brought face-to-face with the culminating instance of instrumental reason, the “end of the line” for industrial culture: the California gas chamber… For the original version of Double Indemnity, Paramount built an exact replica of the [San Quentin]  gas chamber, depicting it as a modern, sanitized apparatus for administering official death sentences. At considerable expense, Wilder photographed the step-by-step procedure of execution, emphasizing its coldly mechanical efficiency. There was no blood, no agonized screaming, and, for once in the movie, almost no dialogue. Much of the sequence was shot from Walter’s point of view, looking through glass windows at the spectators outside the chamber—an angle creating a subtle parallel between the chamber and the “dark room” of a movie theater. When the fatal pellets dropped, clouds of gas obscured the windows, and we could barely make out Keyes standing amid the witnesses, turning his head away. Soon afterward, a doctor entered the chamber to pronounce Walter dead. According to the script, the original film ended as follows:

… All the witnesses have now left except Keyes, who stares, shocked and tragic, beyond the door. The guard goes to him and touches his arm, indicating to him that he must leave. Keyes glances for the last time towards the gas chamber and slowly moves to go out. CORRIDOR OUTSIDE THE DEATH CHAMBER CAMERA SHOOTING IN THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR AT KEYES , who is just turning to leave. Keyes comes slowly out into the dark, narrow corridor. His hat is on his head now, his overcoat is pulled around him loosely. He walks like an old man. He takes eight or ten steps, then mechanically reaches a cigar out of his vest pocket and puts it in his mouth. His hands, in the now familiar gesture, begin to pat his pockets for matches. Suddenly he stops, with a look of horror on his face. He stands rigid, pressing hand against his heart. He takes the cigar out of his mouth and goes slowly on toward the door, CAMERA PANNING with him. When he has almost reached the door, the guard stationed there throws it wide, and a blaze of sunlight comes in from the open prison yard outside. Keyes slowly walks out into the sunshine, a forlorn and lonely man.

Until someone rescues this scene from the Paramount vaults, we will never know if it is superior to the current version, and even then there may be room for debate. One thing, however, is clear: Keyes’s lonely walk out of the prison would have thrown a shadow over everything that preceded it. It was not until Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole that Wilder would produce such a savage critique of modernity. Although the released version of his famous thriller remains an iconoclastic satire that challenges the censors, it is a lighter entertainment than the original and a much easier product for Hollywood to market. (According to the Paramount press book, photographs of Barbara Stanwyck in her wig and tight sweater were circulated to American soldiers overseas, and Edward G. Robinson’s performance enabled the studio to obtain a tie-in from the Cigar Institute of America.) No matter how much we admire the film that was exhibited in 1944, the form of cinema that the French described as noir is probably better exemplified by another Double Indemnity, which we have yet to see.

The rare (Spanish?) poster featured at the top of this post features a rendering of Neff from the gas chamber scene. Note also the nightmarish imagery which has a definite surrealist quality, making this perhaps one of the most intriguing film noir posters ever. I am unsure of its origin or the artist. Perhaps a reader of filmsnoir.net can help in tracing its origin? The signature seems to be “Lopez Riem”?