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)
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Hi! Tony D’Ambra,
How very apropos that you mentioned Cornell Woolrich’s
1946 film “The Chase” because I just recently purchased and watched the “noirish~tinged” film “The Chase” for the first~time last week.
**SPOILER ALERT** is not needed!(Just in case, other readers didn’t watch the film the “Chase” and plan to do so in the very near future.)
(But,I kind of “wished” the ending …. and not so….)
“Woolrich’s writing was not in the hard-boiled tradition, but intensely descriptive and, you could say, richly cinematic”
“TD’A”…
…Yes Tony D’Ambra, I agree with you and Hitch’s “Rear Window,” and the 1949 film “The Window” comes to mind for me at least!
What about one of my favorite film(s) of all time Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.”(I think it was based on Woolrich’s “It had to be Murder.”)
For some unknown reason, I keep trying to fit this “square peg” film (“Rear Window”) into the “round peg” nightmarish film noir category.
and other “film noir fanatic” have told me it willn’t fit!…Because it fall more into the crime, drama and mystery category.
But, I must admit it really “sadden” me to read just how “dark,” “repressed,” and “lonely” he (Woolrich) was in his personal life. I wonder if his melancholy “mood” influenced his writing style?
dcd:)
I have seen a number of the films on this list Tony, and I must say that Woolrich’s original story that was used for THE LEOPARD MAN, was one that stayed with me through the years, as was atmospherically accentuated for one of Val Lewton’s classic low-budget thrillers of the 40′s. Admittedly, the ending kind of fell apart–and I’m not sure it was the same as the original Woolrich story–but the earlier set pieces, highlighted by the girl’s doomed trip home through a railroad yard after visiting a grocery story, is loaded with false alarms and realistic shocks, culminating with the blood flowing under the door. Again, like the others in the series, it what you don’t see that is really scary.
Yes DCD, Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) was based on Woolrich short
story, “It Had to Be Murder,” published in Dime Detective magazine in 1942. I did not include it in my list as, while it is a great movie, it is not generally regarded as a noir.
Great to hear from you Sam! Thanks for your insightful comments.
This is the background on Leopard Man provided by Mayer and McDonnell in their Encyclopedia of Film Noir:
“RKO bought the rights to Woolrich’s next novel, Black Alibi (1942), for $5,175
and gave it to producer Val Lewton, who had just completed two memorable
low-budget horror films, Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
Lewton, working with screenwriter Ardel Wray, proceeded to change the setting of Woolrich’s novel from Latin America to New Mexico. They also altered the story line and the title of Woolrich’s book was changed to The Leopard Man (1943). Woolrich’s five sequences involving different women who are stalked by a killer jaguar and, subsequently, a man, were changed to two deaths, with only the first one caused by a black leopard, instead of a jaguar. However, the first killing, a young girl sent by her mother into the night to buy bread for the family, remains one of the most frightening moments in the cinema as [director Jacques] Tourneur blends silence, natural sounds, and stylized lighting with images that capture the terror of the young girl as she moves through the darkness toward her house, only to discover that her mother has locked the door. Her death is presented mainly by the use of sound and lighting.”