Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Review by Mike Dennis

From the moment you see Richard Widmark running through dark alleys in the opening scene of Jules Dassin’s 1950 classic, Night And The City, you know he’s totally screwed. If only he knew it.

But such is the lot of film noir protagonists. Caught up in the backwash of their own bad choices, they can only hope to put off, not avoid, what inevitably awaits them. And they’re always the last to know.

Night And The City, adapted from the 1938 Gerald Kersh novel of the same name, takes a look at the London demimonde of the era, where Harry Fabian plies his trade as a nightclub hustler. He periodically “borrows” money from his girlfriend to finance his big dreams, not the least of which is setting up a life of ease and plenty without having to work. Standing in his way are the sinister fat man, played by Francis L Sullivan, pursuing a personal vendetta against Fabian, and the East End godfather, played by the dark-suited Herbert Lom, whose intense presence fires up the proceedings every time he walks onscreen.

This is truly one of the greatest films, not only of the noir genre, but of all cinema. Dassin’s direction is flawless, capturing perfectly the seedy filth of London’s underbelly, while telling the riveting story of one man’s misplaced dreams.

Max Greene, the Director of Photography, is superb, never allowing the viewer to get comfortable. The expressionist look of the film is all sharp black-and-white contrast and angular shadows, and this, along with his off-center camera angles, produces an unsettling effect throughout. This is never more evident than in a nightclub scene, where a mirrored disco-type ball casts its little gleaming points over the oddly-lit club, bleeding into the office above. Toward the end, as Fabian’s reckoning approaches, dawn breaks over London, and suddenly the film takes on a pasty, grayish cast. By then, I felt like I was covered with dirt and needed a shower.

Meanwhile, the stressful score of Franz Waxman pumps up the adrenaline in all the right places. As Fabian runs deep through the back streets of London, the music pulls you to the edge of your seat.

But most of all, this is Widmark’s tour de force. Fabian is a complex character, driven by his own twisted ambitions, and beset by deep emotions. When he whines to Gene Tierney, “I just want to be somebody,” he injects a whole new feeling, a real truth, into that tired line that has been uttered by countless lesser actors. Widmark makes it all look so easy, so real, that he pulls you with him, deep inside Harry Fabian’s head and heart, as he’s sucked down into the whirlpool. Never again would he be given a role so challenging, showing us how he was so tragically wasted through his long career.

Okay, so I’m browsing the blogosphere and I come across Linda Lou, Live from Las Vegas. I know Linda and I check in with her humorous blogs every now and then, but tonight I was stopped cold. I had found a soul mate. Someone who doesn’t think that Cirque du Soleil represents the ultimate, unsurpassable form of human entertainment in the entire history of the universe.

I started coming out to Las Vegas in 1998 to play poker, and by the time I moved here in 2006, I was coming for two weeks every month. And I can say without hesitation that the number one topic of conversation that I encountered in this town during all those years was the awesomeness of Cirque du Soleil, and the number two topic was how said awesomeness was not to be questioned.

At first, I didn’t know what Cirque was, but then it was explained to me. It sounded like just a bunch of acrobats jumping around to flashy lighting and edgy music, but no, I was told. It’s much more than that. It’s awesome. What a spectacle! You have to see it! Like, I’ve seen Mystere and O four times each. Oh, and Zumanity! So sexy!

I couldn’t put it together in my mind why an acrobat show would affect otherwise rational people in such a way. I mean, hadn’t they ever seen that stuff on Ed Sullivan? (Of course, then I remembered, most of them weren’t around for Ed Sullivan) But I wondered how the whole concept ever got a foothold in Las Vegas to begin with. Then I figured out the probable scenario.

Steve Wynn opens the Mirage in 1989 to great fanfare. He hates traditional Las Vegas entertainment. He wants desperately to break with the Jewish comedian/Italian singer syndrome that had the Las Vegas Strip locked in a choke hold for decades. Realizing that much of his high-end business will be coming from non-English speaking countries (ie, Asia), he searches for a form of entertainment which these people can appreciate (read: where they don’t have to understand English). Siegfried and Roy fit the description, and they become a hit, but then Presto! Along comes Cirque du Soleil and Wynn has reached Nirvana. Just use the same concept of acrobats jumping around over and over again in different shows with different lighting and music, and he’s struck gold!

So, I resisted these shows for years, but like Linda Lou, I was presented with the chance to see Love at no cost. Ooh, this one’s different, the Cirquers all said.  You’ll love it! This one is the Beatles! And it’s just…it’s just so different!

The Love sound system, which was the greatest I’ve ever heard, was truly the star of the show. But basically, it was what I had feared:  acrobats jumping around and flying through the air to Beatles music and flashy lighting. The live presentation drew absolutely no connection whatever to the Fab Four, despite their very left-handed, European attempts to do so. I’m quite sure the upcoming Viva Elvis show will be more of the same.

I know that, as Las Vegans, we’re all supposed to genuflect at Cirque’s altar, spending $150 each time out. We’re supposed to bring all of our out-of-town friends there, and then we must dutifully spread the gospel of how we very nearly saw God at the Ka show, or how our lives were totally, awesomely nourished and renewed at O. But like Linda, I just don’t get it.

Sorry, everybody.

Not long ago, I spotted a blog which ruminated about politics and fiction-writing.  The question was whether or not an author’s personal political views belong in a novel.  The blogger, a successful published author, felt they should belong, that he shouldn’t be restrained from making his views known. He claimed to “lean left”, and said that as long as the story is compelling, the writing is good, and the characters breathe, well then, what’s the difference if a little politics gets thrown in?

Here’s what I see is the problem. Most people really don’t admit to the extremities of their own political views. Not that this author (or any other) could rightfully be called an “extremist”, but that someone who “leans” left is likely to be quite a bit farther to the left than the centerish word “lean” would imply. Ditto with those who “lean” right.

Not only that, but this author was basically saying that his writing is so good, he can get away with preaching politics and those readers who “lean right” will just have to sit there and take it. In fact, I think what they’ll take is a permanent vacation from the novel, and tell all their friends not to bother with it.

Lost: many readers just because an author couldn’t resist the opportunity to preach.

I also think that most people who “lean left” tend to regard anyone to the right of Olympia Snowe as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Likewise, those who claim to only “lean right” quite likely believe that anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman is a communist radical. And neither one realizes how out-of-whack his/her perception really is.

It’s these kinds of misperceptions that can slice great chunks from an author’s readership, causing them to disappear into the mist, if he/she gets political. And like the author in the blog who thinks he’s being quite reasonable not only in his politics, but in his decision to trumpet them, he completely misunderstands the perceptions of his “right-leaning” readers, who will probably regard him as a disciple of Stalin. I also have the sneaky feeling that he would himself put down any book written by a proselytizing author who “leans right”.

Contrary to popular myth, we don’t really live in the Information Age. We live in the Perception-Of-Information Age, and we would all do well to beware its many pitfalls.

Today I saw an intriguing post by Russel D McLean on the Do Some Damage blogspot regarding the creation of characters.  Seems he’d written some PI short stories, which were published in national mystery magazines. Feeling he had something going with this character, he wrote a novel around him, which his agent promptly rejected, saying the character had too much backstory.

So Russel peeled away all the backstory, changed the character’s name, and took away his support network, including his one true love. This resulted in a much tougher, darker figure. Russel saw the humanity in this new character, he got into it, and presto! A novel, and probably a series, was born.

Like Russel, I’ve had characters spring from nothing more than whole cloth. The central character in my upcoming novel, The Take, was born one night in a New Orleans bar. I saw a guy who looked like a young Jack Palance sitting there with a gorgeous date. Overeager, he did everything to try to impress the girl–bought her expensive drinks, danced with her, etc–but all to no avail. She basically blew him off right to his face. The guy had “loser” written all over him. I remember wondering what his story was, what he did for a living, his background, and so on.

I wasn’t even writing at the time, but I never forgot that guy. So when I sat down to write The Take, he leapt to the front of my mind, and Eddie Ryan came to life. As every situation in the book arose, each time the stakes were raised on Eddie, I asked myself, “What would that guy in New Orleans do?”

One night, my girlfriend forced me to watch The Nanny From Hell on TV. Said nanny was up against a family with two girls and a boy, all between the ages of five and eight, with the boy being the oldest. The girls played horrendous tricks on him, blaming him for their own misdeeds, setting him up for punishment, and other awful things. The mother believed everything the girls said, and mercilessly chastised the boy every time, reducing him to a whimpering little blob, while the girls sat by, smiling wickedly. Watching this in disbelief, I thought to myself, “this is how a rapist-murderer is born”.

Next short story I wrote, I told the story of a guy who had these kinds of childhood experiences and grows up a psycho.

Another one of my novels was based on a friend of mine who was a best-selling author. He was very rebellious against his upper-crust family, and this led him perversely into a long life of crime before he discovered that he could write. He never resolved his family conflict, and killed himself as his first novel reached the NYT best-seller list. I changed him from an author to a 1950s rockabilly singer with similar lower-crust family problems, who did plenty of drugs and alcohol before committing one big crime. I found him to be every bit as human as his real-life counterpart, and every bit as tragic.

Anybody out there got any unusual tales of how their characters sprang into being? I like these stories, and I think others like them, too.

FIRES THAT DESTROY by Harry Whittington (1951)

Review Copyright 2009 by Mike Dennis

Some guys have all the luck.  Blondes have more fun.  You’ve heard the cliches.  But at the faceless corporation where Bernice Harper works, pretty girls get all the promotions.

And it pisses her off.

That’s the central theme in Fires That Destroy, a tight little noir novel from 1951 by Harry Whittington.

Year in and year out, she watches through her thick-lensed glasses as sexy babes in tight skirts use their attributes to glide effortlessly up the ladder while Bernice, plain and stringy-haired, stays mired in the steno pool.

She builds up a reservoir of resentment, which eventually morphs into self-hatred when her boss recommends her for the position of private secretary in the home of an important client.  Problem is, he’s blind.

She knows they foisted her off on a blind man, almost as a joke, and she doesn’t like it.  Things are made worse when she learns he’s a heavy drinker who never tires of making passes.  This intensifies her hatred, as she knows that he wouldn’t come near her if he could see.

And so begins her descent into hell.

The novel opens with Bernice looking down a staircase at the blind man’s twisted corpse.  She’s just pushed him down the stairs to his death.  In the dark silence of the house, a grandfather clock chimes, freaking her out.  She thinks, “The sound of a clock and I’m paralyzed.  How will I stand the rest of it?”

Not very well, actually.  Whittington ratchets up the stakes for Bernice in nearly every scene.  But she’s so consumed by her hateful obsession with the world she inhabits that she can’t rescue herself.  Her unraveling forms the spine of the story.

In a masterful stroke, Whittington takes the reader deep into Bernice’s mind, as she slowly disintegrates into “the most depraved and sinful woman on the face of the earth”.  Her interior dialogue with herself evokes Jim Thompson at his most dangerous.

Whittington wrote over 170 novels in his astonishing career, hopping around through various genres.  Most of his work, unfortunately, is out of print, but noir aficionados should make a point of locating a copy of Fires That Destroy.

I hadn’t seen the movie Detour for quite some time, so I pulled it out the other night and gave it a look. And I’m glad I did. It’s even better than I remembered it.

For those who are unfamiliar with this 1945 classic film noir (and I hope there aren’t too many), it’s all told in flashback by an unshaven, despondent Tom Neal, who laments everything that has happened to him in recent weeks. All he wanted was to hitchhike from New York to Los Angeles to be with his cutesy-poo girlfriend who was trying to “make it in pictures”, but wound up slinging hash instead. That’s all he wanted.

But what he got was Ann Savage. I’ll just leave it at that.

Detour was directed by Edgar G Ulmer, and was made at PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation) Studio, the last stop on poverty row in 1940s Hollywood. Filmed in six days on a budget of $30,000, and using the cheapest sets and production values imaginable, Ulmer crafted a haunting tale of people at the bottom of society’s pyramid. To put this budget into perspective, Avatar, the new James Cameron bloatbuster, cost 10,000 times as much.

Drowning in desperation, the characters try to hold on to what they have, and never seem to have enough. When these people are confronted with extraordinary circumstances and emotions, they, like all of us, will alter their mode of behavior. Some will even cross the line, the line that separates legal from criminal, moral from immoral, good from evil, Tom Neal from Ann Savage.

Film noir is generally associated with sinister characters moving through shadowy lighting. Much of Detour takes place under bright light: sunny rides in an open convertible, a well-lit apartment, and so on, but Ulmer’s direction and the interplay between the two leads give the film a very claustrophobic feel, like it was shot in a phone booth. The relentlessly grim story line follows Neal’s character as his life spirals ever downward to the unusual finale.

While Detour might be considered classic crime fiction, it’s important to note that no crime was ever committed during the movie. There’s a scene where Neal takes money and clothes from a dead man, but you know that if he didn’t take the dough, the cops would when they found him. I don’t put that in the crime category.

This is definitely a movie that’s worth another look, noir fans. A great story, with both Neal and Savage delivering unforgettable performances in what has to be the finest hour for each of them. And if you haven’t seen it, by all means buy it. You can get it online for six or seven dollars. You won’t be sorry.

And you’ll never pick up another hitchhiker again.