Straight Down the Line: Noir Dialogue [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Name some striking lines of noir dialogue that stick with you?

Suzanne Lummis:

Some might see this coming, since it’s shown up a couple times--in my poem called “Venetian Blinds: Ghazal-like Noir” and in one my of my They Write by Night installments—maybe the one that featured you [David Lehman].  It’s in The Maltese Falcon, when Sam Spade opens the door and a thug comes through with a firearm. Spade just laughs, “My, my, my! Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.” Immortal line, and truer now than ever. Every time I hear it I think, no freakin’ kidding. If I knew how to do needlework, I’d stitch that on a sampler.  The rest of his line goes, “You know, you're the second guy I've met today that seems to think a gat in the hand means the world by the tail.” I love what it says, and I envy Spade’s cool in the face of danger. He’s got a gun on him but he’s cracking jokes. That’s some French Existentialism slipping in, though the Existentialists weren’t much good for laughs.  But mix it with hardboiled American lingo…    

And I like another one, not spoken as a line of dialogue but by a woman in life, outside of any movie script – but referencing one of the most famous films noir.

Rita Hayworth, married five times, talked about the difficulty of living up to the femme fatale fantasy and her most unforgettable character, “Men go to bed with Gilda but they wake up with me.” (It was either that, or “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me,“ or “Men fall in love with Gilda but wake up with me,” depending on the biography or newspaper story.) It’s a snappy line but, also, there’s wisdom in it. And disappointment. A loneliness. And the savvy to sum up her life in one crackerjack line.  Real life noir. 

David Lehman:

From DOA, the two-word interrogative sentence that informs all film noir is spoken by Bigelow (Edmund O’Brien): “Why me?”

From Out of the Past
Kathie (Jane Greer): I think we deserve a break.
Jeff (Robert Mitchum): We deserve each other.

From Laura:
Clifton Webb as celebrity critic Waldo Lydecker: “I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” And I don’t remember the exact words, but in a restaurant scene, doesn’t he tell Gene Tierney that she seems “to be completely disregarding something more important than her career.” What? “My lunch.”

Dana Andrews: “A dame in Washington Heights once got a fox fur out of me.”

From Double Indemnity:

Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck): There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.
Neff (Fred MacMurray): How fast was I going, officer?
Phyllis: I’d say about ninety.
Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Neff: Suppose it doesn’t take.
Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.
Neff: That tears it.

“Straight down the line.”

This is the thirteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.

Comments

[Michael Shepler]

Another favorite Noir dialogue tidbit is from Joseph Mankiewicz's 1950 "House of Strangers"--

Richard Conte : "It's 1932. New York City. It's dog eat dog and the first bite counts!"

[Suzanne Lummis]

Richard Conte! I like him in The Big Combo (but hate the character he plays--I want to slap him all over the room. The character, not the actor). Meanwhile, few in the American West have more film noir info packed into their head than Michael Shepler.