Death and Noir: Lummis Asks Lehman

Suzanne Lummis:

David, in your book forthcoming from Cornell University Press, A Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, you confront mortality, not just death in the abstract but --with your cancer diagnosis -- death as a more immediate threat.  This got me thinking of how many times in my life I thought I might die -- not eventually, but, like, Right Now. First time I was 18. I was over-reacting, sure. But it was an awful lot of blood. Out in the open air where it was not supposed to be. I don't think this is unrelated to my attraction to noir. How about you?  Did your immersion in film noir come into play when you got your diagnosis and had to think about the ultimate Noir? 

David Lehman: I am superstitious person and have had recurring nightmares in which I die because I misjudged my ability to cross the street and am struck by a car. Sometimes I fall down a steep flight of stairs because I forgot to hold the bannister. My superego is too strong for me to get into any real trouble, so I like going to noir valley for my dose of vicarious vice. When I was sick and didn’t have enough energy to get off the couch, I watched old movies – including a bunch of noirs with Dana Andrews. Laura, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, While the City Sleeps, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Fallen Angel.

In 1956 and ’57, when I was eight, my idea of the grown-up American male was Dana Andrews, whom I saw in such pictures as Zero Hour! and Comanche. Years later I saw his most successful pictures, Laura and The Best Years of Our Lives. I identified with his plight in the latter:  a returning war veteran who can’t get a job and is trapped in a bad marriage.

In the Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger noirs, he always communicates a certain nervousness – like a man who has suffered a nervous breakdown, a man who needs to play with a pocket pinball game to help control himself. There is a suppressed anger and energy, and at the same time he is capable, confident, handsome, and at ease in his body whether cast as a detective, a cop, or a newspaperman. Dana Andrews had the best poker face in noir. I read his obituary in 1992. He was an alcoholic.  Drunk or sober he never missed a word. And I thought: it figures.

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

Comments

[Michael Shepler]

Andrews was very underrated. One of his first notable roles was as the principal victim of the lynch mob in "Ox Bow Incident" (1943). He's great in well known classics like "Laura" & "Best Years" (the scene in the cockpit!) but remember him also in "Fallen Angel" & "A Walk in the Sun"? Terrific. Or the heel in Preminger's "Daisy Kenyon". He had a very good run of films at Fox. I don't know how much his drinking contributed to his slide into B's but no one could portray the quintessential tightly wired protagonist better than Dana Andrews.