What about film noir first appealed to you, and has that changed over the years? Or not?
Suzanne Lummis:
Initially, it wasn’t film noir that hooked me—it was classic crime fiction, the hardboiled stuff of the early years, particularly the poet of crime fiction, Raymond Chandler. That hard wit, both mocking and self-mocking, Chandler’s extraordinary eye for detail, and that voice, Philip Marlowe’s, stripped of all sentimentality and self-pity and yet deeply human—that’s what I loved. No writer in any language ever sounded like Raymond Chandler, except for his forebears, who had elements of his style but weren’t as good, and those who came after, his imitators, never as good.
I was a young poet studying at Fresno State (now CSU Fresno) and absorbing that sensibility and approach to poetry and language that’s now recognized as the Fresno signature style. And I liked that just fine, but it wasn’t quite…I don’t know. Enough? All that down-to-earthedness didn’t lend itself to mischief and dark humor. And mischief and dark humor was what I’d begun to feel. I found a model for that not in poetry but prose like this:
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The first sensation was that if anybody spoke harshly to me I should burst out crying….I rolled over gently and sat up and a rattling noise ended in a thump. What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Someone who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Someone who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could’ve been the same person. People have moods.
[from Playback by Raymond Chandler]
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From there I found my way to the movies. That tone of detachment and, in some movies, a sort of offhand wit, together with the stark black and white patterns created with lowkey lighting, gave me what I needed to pull off certain challenging poems—poems that were at risk of being melodramatic or just plain predictable. I could not have pulled off “Letter to My Assailant” without the influence of crime fiction and film noir.
David Lehman:
In my senior year at Columbia, I went one night with David Anderson, a brilliant writer, to the old New Yorker theater on Broadway and 88th Street, to see a double bill of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. That double-bill did it. The characters, the women, the "dingus" in the former and the real and fake bookstores in the latter, Joel Cairo and the Fat Man on the one hand, and the casino owner and hit man on the other. David gave me a book of Chandler's stories, "Trouble Is My Business," which was great.
A few months later, studying at Cambridge, England, homesick for New York, I read as many murder mysteries and saw as many noirs as possible. Every college in Cambridge had its own film society, and the Arts Cinema on Rose Crescent was also devoted to great movies of any era in any language. I saw Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, Dark Passage, Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet and Robert Montgomery in the role in The Lady in the Lake, Clint Eastwood and Lee J. Cobb in Coogan’s Bluff, and a bunch of Hitchocks, including Vertigo, Stage Fright, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, and Shadow of a Doubt. At the time, Vertigo was out of circulation, and I have no idea how the film society got their hands on a copy of this amazing movie.
In my second year at Cambridge, I decided to devote my master's thesis on Hammett and Chandler. This was at a time when detective novels were not considered literature worthy of study. Some of the dons wrote detective novels, really good ones like those of Michael Innes, but always under a pseudonym, to protect thereby their more serious selves. During that year four movies came out that fit in the category of murder mystery or crime story: The French Connection, Klute, Dirty Harry, and The Godfather.
Finishing my thesis did nothing to diminish my interest in murder mysteries, espionage, thrillers, and the movies based on them. It was only later that I made a proper study of the subject.
The effect of that double-bill of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep was matched only when, two years later, a month before finishing up at Cambridge, I saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat and Swing Time, another double-bill that changed my life. Leaving the theater that evening my friends Charlotte, Rob, and I danced on the pavement. It was the first time I heard those scores by Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.
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