David Goodis: Master of Noir Fiction

In 1947, Humphrey Bogartand wife Lauren Bacall starred in the film adaptation of David Goodis‘s noir novel DARK PASSAGE (1946). The book also served as inspiration for the television series THE FUGITIVE (1963-1967) starring David Janssen.

David Goodis — who never achieved the status of fellow noir writers Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett — has been called “The Poet Laureate of the Bleak.” He died in 1967 at age 49.

With his work often out of print, the prestigious Library of America decided to solidify Goodis’s place as a top noir stylist by in 2012 issuing GOODIS: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. The Library of America states as its mission “to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.”

Here’s an example of Goodis‘s prose — the opening passage to his 1947 novel NIGHTFALL:

It was one of those hot, sticky nights that makes Manhattan show its age. There was something dreary and stagnant in the way all this syrupy heat refused to budge. It was anything but a night for labor, and Vanning stood up and walked away from the tilted drawing board. He brushed past a large metal box of water colors, heard the crash as the box hit the floor. That seemed to do it. That ended any inclination he might have had for finishing the job tonight.

Heat came into the room and settled itself on Vanning. He lit a cigarette. He told himself it was time for another drink. Walking to the window, he told himself to get away from the idea of liquor. The heat was stronger than the liquor.”

Venetian Binds, limerick by Hilary Barta

VENETIAN BINDS
by Hilary Barta

In darkness this duo’s defined
by light through the slats of a blind
The pair was condemned,
by shadows were hemmed,
the moment insurance was signed.

In blackness the couple’s confined
Like bars in a cell they are lined
They’re not playing straight,
each eying their mate,
awaiting a fate that’s unkind.

Credit: “Venetian Binds”  © 2013 Hilary Barta

Photo: Still from Double Indemnity (1944) directed by Billy Wilder, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwick.

Editor’s note: You’d have to know the plot of Double Indemnity for this limerick to make sense. Read a synopsis of the film at wikipedia.org.

It Was Hotter Then, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

“Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o’clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There’s no hurry, for there’s nowhere to go and nothing to buy…and no money to buy it with.”  HARPER LEE, To Kill A Mockingbird (J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1960)

Photo: Author Harper Lee pushes actress Mary Badham (Scout Finch) during production of the 1962 film version of her novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed in Southern California, and some sharp-eyed viewers have noticed mountains in the background of the “mad dog” scene — geographic features that don’t occur in the story’s setting (Maycomb, Alabama).

Moby Dick (1956 film), screenplay by John Huston and Ray Bradbury

Yesterday (August 1st), we celebrated Herman Melville‘s 194th birthday with a few Moby-Dick erasure poems. We continue exploring all-things-Melville today by taking a look at Moby Dick, the 1956 movie directed by John Huston — with a screenplay by Huston and Ray Bradbury.

In a 2010 interview in The Paris Review, Bradbury offers some fascinating background about how he developed the script. Here is an excerpt…

INTERVIEWER: Why did you do Moby Dick?

BRADBURY: …he [Huston] called me up and said, Do you have some time to come to Europe and write Moby-Dick for the screen? I said, I don’t know, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing…I’ve had copies of Moby-Dick around the house for years. So I went home and I read Moby-Dick…I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry about the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit’s spout. And I came upon a section toward the end where Ahab stands at the rail and says: “It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.” I turned back to the start: “Call me Ishmael.” I was in love! You fall in love with poetry. You fall in love with Shakespeare…  I was able to do the job not because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.

…read Sam Weller‘s 2010 Paris Review interview with Ray Bradbury at parisreview.com

Frank Capra Gets Caught Reading Hemingway

In the above photo, author Ernest Hemingway (left) dines with director Frank Capra at the Paramount Studio commissary in 1941. Capra holds a copy of Hemingway’s then-latest novel — FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (1940). Set during the Spanish Civil War (1933-1939), the book became the basis for the 1943 film of the same name starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman — actors that Hemingway selected for the roles.

Whether or not Capra was pitching his services during this lunch with Hemingway, he did not end up with the director’s slot — instead, Sam Wood assumed the role because shortly after this photo was taken, the United States entered WWII. Frank Capra served as a Colonel in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he remained during the war years (1941-1945) making a variety of military films, including many shot during combat. Hemingway spend much of WWII as a war correspondent in various parts of the world.

After the war, Capra’s first Hollywood assignment was to direct James Stewart in the now-classic IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946). Hemingway did not release another major novel until 1952, when he published THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 and was cited for “his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

OPENING PASSAGE FROM FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS: 

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.”

What Type of Car Did Gatsby Drive?

Photo: Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) rides with Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the 2013 film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby.

Here’s how Nick Carraway describes Gatsby’s car in Fitzgerald’s novel:

It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town..”

While Nick describes Gatsby’s car as “cream colored,” other characters in the book describe it as “yellow” — which, as most of us learned in high school, symbolizes Gatsby’s pursuit of the gold, of the American Dream.

Photo: Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) drives with Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford) in the 1974 film version of Fitzgerald‘s novel.

But what make and model of car did Gatsby drive — in the novel and the various film versions? A recent article in the New York Times by Jerry Garrett offers some interesting answers. Since the information gets a bit convoluted, I’m going to resort to bullet points — and, in movie parlance, cut to the chase.

• 1925 novel: Fitzgerald writes, “On weekends, his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight …” According to Garrett’s New York Times article (May 10, 2013), “The Rolls most likely would have been a 1922 Silver Ghost…”
• 1974 movie (starring Robert Redford): Redford drives a 1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom  — for a story set in 1922.
• 2013 movie (starring Leonardo DiCaprio): DiCaprio drives a 1929 Duesenberg Model J — again, for a story set in 1922.

Photo: Cars featured in the 1949 film version of The Great Gatsby starring Alan Ladd.

I also checked out Jerry Garrett’s blog, where he adds another interesting fact…

• 1949 movie (starring Alan Ladd): In this film version, as in the 2013 offering, Gatsby drives a Duesenberg (though I don’t know year or model). According to vintage car expert Jerry Garrett, “The point of having Gatsby owning a Rolls-Royce in the book, and having a closet full of clothes from England, was to help sell his fantasy girl Daisy Buchanan on his lie of having gone to school at Oxford. The original Duesenberg was made in Indiana. Would Daisy, a society belle from Louisville, Kentucky, have been impressed with a Hoosier?”

The Great Gatsby opens May 10 in Los Angeles

Billboards for THE GREAT GATSBY, director Baz Luhrmann’s take on F.Scott Fitzgerald‘s masterpiece, are popping up all over Los Angeles, citing a May 10 premiere. I’ve listened to Fitzgerald aficionados say that the movie does not appeal to them (okay, they put it in stronger terms), but I can’t wait to see it. One of the controversies about the film is Luhrmann’s use of modern music in the soundtrack of a period piece set in the 1920s. Bring it on!

I can’t wait to see a party on Gatsby’s estate done with a $100+ million dollar budget!

Photo: Daily Billboard, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Moving Target, Novel by Ross Macdonald

Yesterday, I finished reading The Moving Target, a novel by Ross Macdonald. I hesitate to label this multilayered book a “detective” novel — even though that’s its ostensible genre. The book — originally published in 1949 — features Lew Archer, an L.A. private investigator, who appears in a series of novels by Ross Macdonald.

While reading the work of this amazing wordsmith/poet, I was struck by its similarity to the best passages in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — and figured somebody somewhere must have written about this. A quick Google search revealed more than I’d hoped.

My research uncovered a fascinating article entitled “Ross Macdonald’s Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of Influence” by Robert F. Moss. In the article, Moss demonstrates how Macdonald learned from Fitzgerald on a variety of levels, including language, plot, structure, and technique. Macdonald is quoted as calling Fitzgerald “a dream writer,” “our finest novelist,” and “my master.” Read the entire article here.

To give a sense of Macdonald’s command of language, here is the opening paragraph from Chapter 4 of The Moving Target:

We rose into the offshore wind sweeping across the airport and climbed toward the southern break in the mountains. Santa Teresa was a colored air map on the mountains’ knees, the sailboats in the harbor white soap chips in a tub of bluing. The air was very clear. The peaks stood up so sharply that they looked like papier-maché I could poke my finger through. Then we rose past them into chillier air and saw the wilderness of mountains stretching to the fifty-mile horizon.

While researching The Moving Target, I learned (duh!) that it was made into Harper, a 1966 movie starring Paul Newman. Legendary screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men) adapted the novel for the screen — and considered The Moving Target his breakthrough script (it was his second screenwriting credit). Sounds like a great movie — can’t believe I’ve never seen it.  Newman also starred as Lew Harper (the screen name for Lew Archer) in the 1975 movie The Drowning Pool, based on Ross Macdonald’s novel of the same name.

For more about Ross Macdonald (and in case you missed it), see our article from a few weeks ago to commemorate the anniversary of Macdonald’s birth on December 13th.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S

(Excerpt from Novella)

by Truman Capote

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be. 

Review: “Truman Capote is the most perfect writer of my generation. He writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm.”

Norman Mailer

Find the book at Amazon.com.

Photo: Manhattan Girl, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Steinbeck On Screen

Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble members Gary Sinese and John Malkovich starred as George and Lennie in the 1992 film adaptation of John Steinbeck‘s Of Mice and Men.

With a pitch-perfect screenplay by Horton Foote — 30 years after winning an Oscar for adapting To Kill a Mockingbird — the film is a faithful adaptation of one of Steinbeck’s most moving books.

Other successful novel to film translations of Steinbeck’s work include The Grapes of Wrath (1940) starring Henry Fonda, Of Mice and Men (1939) with Lon Chaney, Jr., East of Eden (1955) featuring James Dean, and Of Mice and Men (TV Movie, 1981) with Robert Blake as George.