Roses Are Red, Dahlias Are Blue

“If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.” So spaketh Ray Chandler (right), who wasn’t overly enamoured, to put it mildly, by his experience of working as a screenwriter in La-La Land. Still, the movies are crackers, and the Irish Film Institute in Dublin is hosting a mini-festival of Chandler-related flicks in September, which kicks off with Farewell, My Lovely (1944) on September 5 and includes The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Marlowe, Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Long Goodbye and Double Indemnity.
  My favourite, I have to say (usually while ducking rotten fruit and eggs of a similar disposition), is The Long Goodbye, probably because if I was a private eye, I’d be closer in spirit to Elliott Gould’s Marlowe than Bogart’s, or even Dick Powell’s. But hey, imagine if Mitchum had played Marlowe thirty years earlier …
  Speaking of Sleepy Bob, I watched Out of the Past the other night, yet again – it’s almost 20 years since I wrote a college essay on Out of the Past as the quintessential, and damn near perfect, film noir. Maybe there’s more important noirs, tauter and darker noirs, more noir-ish noirs – but Out of the Past is noir in a nutshell, right down to its US title. Build My Gallows High is too melodramatic, regardless of what the novel was called.
  Anyway, here’s a quick take on The Long Goodbye’s transition from novel to movie:

“The realist in murder,” wrote Raymond Chandler (right) in 1950, “writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities . . . It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.” Originally a man of action in taut, streamlined plots in novels such as The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Long Goodbye (1953) finds PI Philip Marlowe ruminating at length on the relevance of his attitude and philosophy. Plot had never been Chandler’s strength but in The Long Goodbye the plot becomes a rambling, shambolic paean to the tattered grandeur of a man out of time, whose idiosyncratic sense of morality has outlived its usefulness and relevance …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Flick Lit # 21: Build My Gallows High / Out Of The Past

“He didn’t hear the gun when Guy shot him because he was dead.” – Geoffrey Homes, Build My Gallows High

Build My Gallows High (1946) opens as fly-fisher Red Bailey is joined by his fresh-faced amour, Ann Miller, high in the idyllic Rocky Mountains. Within three pages, however, blackmailed into repaying a favour to an ex-cop gangster, former PI Bailey is prowling the shadowed canyons of New York and San Francisco. There he encounters more of his old associates: the partner he duped, the gangster he double-crossed, the woman who left him for dead. Quickly realising that the gangster, Whit Sterling, is framing him for murder, Bailey struggles to escape. But there is no escaping the past: “Even if he was a worthy citizen full of good deeds and honours, it wouldn’t matter.” Geoffrey Homes’ (aka Daniel Mainwaring) terse prose represents the epitome of pulp fiction’s hard-boiled style. The laconic delivery and fatalistic tone encompass the existential ennui employed by the genre’s writers as a perverse counterpoint: that of the futility of action in a milieu defined by action. Jacques Tourneur (Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and Nightfall (1956)) and his cinematographer Nick Marcuso invested the 1947 movie with the ominous, unsettling undertones of a nightmarish hallucination. The flashback sequences, for which the film is justifiably famous, were already an essential element of Homes’ novel; the writer – with uncredited help from James M. Cain – adapted his own story to screenplay format. As was the case with Casablanca, Out of the Past was a routine B-movie, made on a small budget by a team working under contract, in this case to RKO. That team included Tourneur, Marcuso and Jane Greer as femme fatale Kathie Moffit (nee Mumsie McGonigle); it also included Kirk Douglas, who played Bailey’s nemesis Whit Sterling, and the peerless Robert Mitchum. The role of Red Bailey catapulted Mitchum into superstardom; with the possible exception of his role as the depraved preacher in Night of the Hunter (1955), it remains Mitchum’s finest performance. The combination of his nonchalant delivery, minimalist exposition and droopy-eyed, world-weary expression remains the template for the role of a man sleepwalking his way into hell. Out of the Past boasts a labyrinthine, complex plot, described by Time Out as “one of the most bewildering and beautiful films ever made.” It also features some of the sharpest dialogue in movie history, a textbook example of the oft-ridiculed voice-over narration, three masterful performances, and – in a scene involving death by fishing-rod – one of the most improbable murders you’ll ever see.- Michael McGowan