The Best American Poetry

"A Matter of Pride": on Gentleman's Agreement [by David Lehman]

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It’s funny to think of a movie that won an Oscar for Best Picture as underrated, but highbrow (and even middlebrow) critics have long looked down on Elia Kazan’s 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement, which screenwriter Moss Hart adapted from Laura Z. Hobson’s best-selling novel of the same name. The movie has its flaws—Kazan himself, looking back on the film 30 years later, described it as “patronizing”—but Hart’s script is powerful, and the movie packs a punch.

Gentleman’s Agreement is one of two late 1940’s pictures that wrestle with the ugliness of anti-Semitism. The other is Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, also from 1947, a noir featuring three Roberts: Robert Young as an investigator, Robert Mitchum as a friend of a suspect, and Robert Ryan as a demobilized soldier who brutally murders the hospitable Jewish man whom he and his army buddies meet in a bar. But while Crossfire centers on a homicide for which the only motive is drunken anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement deals with the sort of suburban, exclusionary anti-Semitism practiced by those who claim that “some of my best friends are Jews.”

In Gentleman’s Agreement, Gregory Peck plays Philip Schuyler Green, a widower who has moved from California to New York with his mother (Anne Revere) and his small son, Tom (Dean Stockwell). A talented writer with a degree from Stanford, Phil works for Smith’s Weekly, a liberal magazine, whose publisher, John Minify (Albert Dekker), wants him to write a series of articles on anti-Semitism. The assignment disappoints Phil, who thinks that the subject is old news. He agrees to do it only after Tom overhears him talking about the articles with his mother and asks, “What’s anti-Semitism?” and “What are Jews, anyway?” Phil has a dickens of a time explaining things.

Phil needs an angle for his articles and can’t find one until he thinks of his Jewish boyhood friend, Dave Goldman (played by John Garfield, a Jew whose real name is Julius Garfinkel), and imagines himself in his place. He decides to impersonate a Jew whose real name is Philip Greenberg and see what it’s like from the inside. (He’s even worked out the title for the series: “I was Jewish for six months.”)

For the ploy to work, it has to be clandestine. Besides his editor, his family, and Dave, the only person who knows that Phil is really a Christian is Minify’s niece Kathy Lacy (Dorothy McGuire), a divorcee who quickly becomes Phil’s girlfriend. Kathy has sold her uncle on the idea that combating anti-Semitism in print is a good and timely idea. Nevertheless, she recoils when Phil confides his plan to tell everyone that he’s Jewish. “Jewish? But you’re not, are you?” she asks, before quickly adding, “Not that it would make any difference to me.” It’s the first hint that for all her avowed liberalism, Kathy’s tolerance extends to genteel anti-Semites and the “gentleman’s agreement” among them to keep Jews out of their neighborhoods, hotels, and clubs.

At the editorial board meeting where Minify announces the series on anti-Semitism (“We’re going to call a spade a dirty spade”), Irving Weisman (Robert Warwick), a Jewish industrialist, voices his disapproval. He says it’s a “very bad idea” and may even be “the most harmful thing you could possibly do now.” Weisman stands for all the Jewish movie moguls who dodged this subject, preferring a strategy that Minify disparages as “a conspiracy of silence.” Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox, the studio that made Gentleman’s Agreement, was one of the few studio heads at the time who was not Jewish. He decided to take on this project when the Los Angeles Country Club rejected him, assuming that he was as Semitic as Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, and David Selznick.

At the meeting, Green lets it be known that he is Jewish, and by the time he gets back to his office, the news of his religious affiliation has spread like wildfire. Green’s secretary (June Havoc) reveals that she, Elaine Wales, has changed her name from Estelle Wilovsky. Otherwise, as a Jewish woman, she would never have landed her job.

Peck is sometimes denigrated as a wooden actor. But no actor is as good at being earnest and righteous (not to mention tall, handsome, and all-American) as Peck in fedora, suit, and pocket square, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. This is a terrific role for Peck—one that he took on despite his agent’s warning that doing so would endanger his career.

The love affair that develops between Kathy and Phil is marked less by romance than by their constant quarrels about Jews and Judaism. On the verge of breaking up, Kathy says that she’s sick of Phil’s “lessons in tolerance” and that she’s relieved he’s really a Christian. “It’s just a practical fact,” she says, “like being glad you’re good-looking instead of ugly, rich instead of poor, young instead of old, healthy instead of sick.” Moreover, she believes that “they”—Jews—“always make trouble for everybody, even their friends! They force people to take sides against them.”

In contrast, there’s Anne Dettrey (the radiant Celeste Holm, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). As the magazine’s fashion editor, she is Phil’s most sympathetic colleague. Though Green is chivalrous and doesn’t want to hear it, she tells him the truth: Kathy is a hypocrite. “She doesn’t rate you, Phil,” she tells him, capping her pitch with the best line in the movie.
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For the rest of this essay, click here for The American Scholar, which commissioned it as part of the "talking pictures" series. See also Lehman's columns on Robert Mitchum and William Holden.

On "The Bigamist" by Ida Lupino on her birthday [by David Lehman]

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the 
        same time and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas
       are Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

-- David Lehman

"William Holden, Model Prisoner" [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar 

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William Holden, arguably the model for American men of his era, plays a prisoner of war in two major motion pictures. The Germans hold him and other American airmen captive in the close confines of Stalag 17 (1953), and in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), he sweats it out in a Japanese POW camp. In both movies, Holden’s character makes a daring, even miraculous, escape. His getaway happens at the very end of Stalag 17, but in The Bridge on the River Kwai, it marks the beginning of our hero’s adventures.

Both films were celebrated. Playing Sefton in Stalag 17, the cynical POW with the smarts to profit by bartering with the camp guards and running gambling schemes to fleece his fellow prisoners, Holden won the Academy Award for best leading actor. The Bridge on the River Kwai won eight Oscars, including those for best picture and best director.

To some extent, the repetition illustrates the success principle: if at first you succeed, try, try again. Nevertheless, if you identify Holden with the masculine ideal of the postwar years, the coincidence is too keen to overlook.

Aside from Holden and the POW camps, the contrast between the two movies is striking. Stalag 17 is a black-and-white studio production directed by Billy Wilder, whose other masterpieces include Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Some Like It Hot. It’s set in late December 1944, and man, is it cold. References to Bastogne make it clear that the Battle of the Bulge is raging, and the Nazis are the enemy. The POW camp commandant (Otto Preminger) tells the prisoners they can forget about having a “White Christmas,” a song written, he says, “by one of your composers who stole his name from our capital” (Berlin). Later we hear “Jingle Bells” and “Adeste Fidelis” in the background.

To balance the surfeit of sentiment, we get the comic antics of two of the prisoners, Harry Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck) and his friend the “Animal” (Robert Strauss). There is essentially one set: the barracks housing the American POWs. It’s easy to tell that a Broadway play preceded the movie.

At one point in Stalag 17, the men improvise a Christmas party by marching around the barracks singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” When a couple of guys in a makeshift band play the old Harlan Thompson and Harry Archer tune, “I Love You,” some of the boys pretend to be girls. As they dance, Harry Shapiro is the stand-in for the Animal’s adored Betty Grable. Once, when I dropped in on my Miami-based mother, then in her 80s, she was watching Stalag 17 on television and we watched that particular scene together. A sweet number, I thought, and wondered if Sinatra had recorded it. When I returned from Miami to New York, I listened to “I Love You” sung by Sinatra on a Capitol Records compilation. That was an amazing moment. I recommend you do the same if you want an object lesson in the difference between a pleasing rendition of a song and a masterly performance.

Clocking in at 161 minutes, 41 minutes longer than Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai was shot in vivid color on location in Sri Lanka. Directed by David Lean, whose other movies, similarly epic in scope and length, include Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, the film follows U.S. Navy Commander Shears (Holden), one of the very few men who have not succumbed to disease or the sadism of the camp commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). It’s beastly hot, which gives the producers multiple chances to show William Holden without his shirt on: sweating as he digs a grave in the POW camp or sipping martinis as a free man on the beach. Here, the Japanese are the enemy and Allied victory does not yet seem inevitable.

In both movies, Holden displays great survival instincts, resourcefulness, guile, and the weary self-interest that Bogart expressed in Casablanca: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” He is very lucky, too, until his luck runs out. As Shears in The Bridge on the River Kwai, he manages to escape from the isolated prison camp that needed no gates or surveillance because there was no place to escape to—the camp is bordered by a steep promontory from which few would survive a jump or a fall.
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Click here for the rest of this essay.

 

"Film Noir" [by Sean Speers]

Why me?

Editor's Note: This is, I submit, the epitome of film noir in a two-word sentence. James Stewart says it in Vertigo, Edmund O'Brien says it in DOA, and Janet Leigh never gets the chance in Psycho. --DL

"Gentleman's Agreement" (1947): The Trailer

Highbrows have long condescended to this Academy Award-winning movie. They are wrong. Gregory Peck is great; do you remember the foul-mouthed comedian  in "Mad Men" who tells Don Draper "I loved you in Gentleman's Agreement"? Best line in the movie, delivered by Celeste Holm to Peck regarding Dorothy McGuire: "She doesn't rate you, Phil." And Peck to his mother: "You're quite a gal, Mom." 

In this photo you see Holm, Peck, and John Garfield.

"Cape Fear" (1962) [by David Lehman]

Here is the first of my monthly movie columns for The American Scholar. For my opening salvo I chose Cape Fear (1962), in which Robert Mitchum captures the very essence of threat, lust, rage, and menace.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-shadow-of-evil/#.Xeb13jNKiM8

A Brief Digression on Critics and Cops [by David Lehman]

Why do award committees pin the tail on the horse’s ass? Because award committees combine a universal truth (“everyone’s a critic”) with an old punch line (“the committee in charge of designing a horse came up with a camel”). What is a critic? According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, “the critic is one who knows the way but cannot drive the car.” According to Kierkegaard, the critic resembles a poet as one pea another except that he lacks the anguish in his heart and the music on his lips – that is, everything.

When Annie Get Your Gun opened on May 16, 1946, with Ethel Merman as Annie and one of the most glorious scores ever written for the stage, the critic Ward Morehouse of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote that la Merman was “in her best form since Anything Goes” but that “Irving Berlin’s score is not a notable one.” Brooks Atkinson of the Times seemed to concur, characterizing the songs – There’s No Business Like Show Business, They Say It’s Wonderful, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, and the rest – as “routine composing.”  Recall, too, the reviewer who left the theater after a performance of Roberta complaining that Jerome Kern’s score lacked tunes you can whistle. Maybe his mind was elsewhere when the orchestra played Yesterdays, Let’s Begin, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. But for dumbness after the fact, it is hard to top the assessment of Guys and Dolls that appeared in the London Sunday Times in May 1953 (three years after the show’s debut on Broadway). Quoth the critic: the show, “despite its striking, incidental merits,” is “an interminable, an overwhelming, and in the end intolerable bore.”

On the screen, the critic is depicted often enough as a venomous, haughty lout (Clifton Webb in Laura), a conniver (George Sanders in All About Eve) or sometimes a guy who needs a drink because he has to choose between telling the truth and keeping his job (Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane). But in song-and-dance movies with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly in them, the critic is transmuted into the figure of the cop who looks on the festive proceedings and glares skeptically (as at the end of Kelly’s performance of the title number in Singing in the Rain) or with amused toleration (as when Fred Astaire, sporting a boater, does his shoeshine number in The Band Wagon). The cop is the reviewer saying, You’re not supposed to be having such a good time. Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Don’t you realize that life is serious and art must be the same? Art has a moral imperative. Literature is a criticism of life. To which line of objection, the best answer is the movement of a dancer, the smile on Gene Kelly’s face as he wraps himself around a streetlamp and lets the rain pour on his face, and the recollection of the late John Simon's typically brutal and wrong-headed attack on that landmark movie, The Godfather

The Greatest Songs to Lose the Academy Award [by David Lehman]

In 1937 the award for best song went to "Waikiki Wedding." Nominated was "They Can't Take That Away From Me" by the Gershwin brothers, neither of whom ever won the award.

In 1941 the award went to a worthy song, "The Last Time I Saw Paris," music by Jerome Kern, lyrics Oscar Hammerstein. But "Blues in the Night" (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Johnny Mercer). "It was the only timer an Oscar [award] was stolen by an Oscar [Hammerstein]." Pictured at left is Harold Arlen, who could take solace in know that, with lyricist Yip Harburg (with an assist from Ira Gershwin) he wrote the music of the most popular of all Oscar-winning song, "Over the Rainbow."

In 1953 Harry Warren's "That's Amore" as delivered by Dean Martin should have gotten the nod over Sammy Fain's "Secret Love."

In 1954 "Three Coins in the Fountain" by Jules Styne and Sammy Cahn won the prize, and it's a good song, especially as sung by Mr S, but an even better song was "The Man That Got Away" by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin sung by Judy Garland in "A Star is Born."

In 1960 do you really believe "Never on Sunday" is better than "The Second Time Around"?

In 1964 "Chim Chim Cher-ee" collected the most votes. Among the also-rans was the vastly superior "My Kind of Town" by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, perhaps because the two of them had already won four times each.

After 1965, when "The Shadow of Your Smile" was named the winner, it no longer mattered, but for the record here's the full list starting in 1934 when "The Continental" was winner number one.. -- DL

Lauren Bacall sings at Eddie Mars's Casino [in "The Big Sleep"]

"Yes, her tears flowed like wine. She's a real sad tomato, she's a busted Valentine."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmK-gF8nEh4

Long Live Noir -- and No R [by David Lehman]

A few years ago I wrote a piece for The American Scholar employing the Raymond Roussel method of composition that obliges the author to commence with one word or phrase and end with a meaning derived from a homonym of the initial word or phrase. Noir became No R. Here's how:

<<<
Kaminsky got on the noir bandwagon early on.

At Wesleyan he majored in French, spent his junior year in Paris, went to the Cinémathèque Française at the Palais de Chaillot, and watched American movies with French subtitles as a way to learn the language. Many of the films were classic noir efforts of the 1940s and early ’50s. He saw Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, and Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, and Dark Passage with Bogart and Bacall, and The Killing with Sterling Hayden organizing a racetrack heist, and The Lady from Shanghai with Anita Ellis’s voice coming out of Rita Hayworth’s mouth singing “Please Don’t Kiss Me” and meaning the exact opposite, and Pickup on South Street with Richard Widmark as an experienced pickpocket who lifts a woman’s wallet in the subway and the wallet happens to have strips of microfilm that the Communists crave, and Widmark lives on a houseboat under the Brooklyn Bridge and Thelma Ritter gets offed and Jean Peters gets beaten up like you wouldn’t believe, and Cry Danger and The Woman in the Window and Laura and The Asphalt Jungle and the dozens of other notable movies that feature fatal females, mixed-up males with mixed motives, robberies and insurance scams that go wrong, greed that turns lusty, lust that turns deadly.

The dialogue is snappy, witty in the hard-boiled manner. Even cabdrivers crack wise. The fare is a private eye, and the cabbie says sympathetically, “Tough racket.” “Maybe so,” the dick replies, “but cabdrivers don’t live forever.” “Maybe not,” the cabbie concedes. “All the same it’ll come as a surprise to me if I don’t.” In another part of town, Ann Sheridan of the magnificent mane kills a burglar in self-defense, or so she claims. The dame-in-distress sobs to the police: “I’ve told you all I know.” Husband Zachary Scott of the mustachioed sneer knits his brows, but can’t help looking bitchy: “There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of.” Both are lying. But the true noir note is sounded by Eve Arden as Paula, a secondary character, officiating at a party for the suspects, witnesses, and extras. When she has everyone’s attention, she admits to having committed a crime against society some years ago. I “married a man,” she announces. Later the busty broad deadpans that “practically everything” she has is real. “It’s a shame to waste two perfectly good mouths on you,” she remarks when a pair of gossiping girlfriends get on her nerves. Later, still: “Don’t show me out, I know the way. I always look for an exit in case of a raid.”

“Some things that happen for the first time / seem to be happening again”: Lorenz Hart’s definition of déjà vu (from his lyric for “Where or When”) applies with a vengeance to noir. Accidents seem predetermined; events occur as if repetitions of themselves. The gang leader has a heart-to-heart with his dead Ma in the back yard after dark, and the brains of the operation feeds nickels into the jukebox so he can watch a nubile girl jitterbug with a boy her own age. Exhibitionists in gaudy undergarments perform for laid-up photographers across the courtyard. The surgeon with a cigarette dangling from his lips gives the escaped con a new face, and if there’s a knock on the door, the chances are that a man with a gun will enter the room and shoot first, ask questions later. What do you want me to do, count to three like they do in the movies?

A thug throws a pot of hot coffee at a moll’s face or, giggling, rolls an old lady’s wheelchair down a flight of stairs and the wrong man is arrested. The prizefighter refuses to throw the bout and gets beaten in the alley. There's a scheme to do away with one angle of the triangular three, sit pretty, and collect the insurance. bit it doesn't quite work out as planned. The pampered invalid has a panic attack, picks up the phone, and dials the emergency number she has been given. A voice answers, “City Morgue.”

The dead return to life. A beautiful murder victim walks into her own living room wondering what the hell the gumshoe asleep in an armchair is doing there. A small-town notary goes to San Francisco, has a drink, feels funny, and spends the next week—that is, the rest of his life—trying to solve the mystery of his own murder before he expires of a slow-working poison. In one scene at a club, a girl singer does a swinging version of “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are.” We go to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Reno, Mexico, the state penitentiary, a lost highway or two, but for some reason we keep returning to San Francisco. There is also a valise stuffed with $20 bills, a crooked cop, a cuckolded husband, a pair of lethal scissors on the desk, a sensitive black man played by James Edwards, a stick-up in the parking lot, a confusing plot, a lot of rain, and a lot of cigarettes.

It was an easy genre to like. The French were crazy about it.
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But that's just the noir portion. How do we get from here to "no R"?
Click here to find out.
From "No R" by David Lehman in The American Scholar. Click here for the rest of the piece. [Originally posted 2015.]

For other noir features we have run every Sunday since July 2019, click here.

"The Big Clock" -- Kenneth Fearing's novel, John Farrow's film [by David Lehman]

On TCM on a recent Sunday at midnight and again at 10 AM, Eddie Muller of Noir Alley showed The Big Clock (1948), a great movie adapted from the fearless Fearing novel centered on a magazine empire that puts out such periodicals as Newsways, Crimeways, Sportsways, Airways, Styleways, and Artways. Charles Laughton is the Luce-like villain; Ray Milland the magazine editor who happens to be in the wrong place at the right time and is the object of a manhunt that he is supposed to be in charge of. Watching it, and enjoying Elsa Lanchester's splendid performance as a kooky painter modeled on Alice Neel, I recalled writing this paragraph years ago for American Heritage. Here's what I wrote when asked to name an "underrated" detective novelist:

<<< The 1940s was a great period for the indigenous American crime novel, and Kenneth Fearing was a notably sophisticated master of suspense. A distinguished feature of his Dagger of the Mind (1941) is that it is set at a venerable artists’ colony like Yaddo or MacDowell, where intrigue and amorous affairs are usual but homicide is not. The Big Clock (1946), one of the greatest murder mysteries, has inspired two movies (the one from 1948 with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton has it all over the 1987 remake with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman, No Way Out). Fearing offers a clever variant on the law of the purloined letter, which stipulates that the elusive object of a search may be most effectively concealed if it is left out in the open. The Big Clock —the title is an allusion to Time Inc.—also features a manhunt organized and led by the hunted man, an editor at a magazine empire whose publications include Newsways, Crimeways, Homeways, Personalities, and The Sexes. How can I, a poet who has written for a newsmagazine and has a passion for detective novels, fail to embrace Kenneth Fearing, a hugely undervalued poet with a splendid last name who wrote for a newsmagazine and produced several masterpieces of detective fiction?
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For our other recent film noir features, timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eddie Muller's Sunday morning repeat of Saturday midnight's noir, click here.

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.

Noir and You: David Lehman Asks Suzanne Lummis About The Studio System

David Lehman:

Do you believe that true noir as a genre -- leaving out neo-noirs, parodies, and ingenious movies on the order of The Getaway, The Usual Suspects, and Memento -- owes its existence to the studio system, where you had the value of a generic formula, the availability of contract players to round out a cast, and excellent writers of dialogue?

Suzanne Lummis:

Film noir probably owes its origins to the studio system but not necessarily its flourishing. I’ve come upon alternative views that say the abrupt weakening of the studio system in the aftermath of some legal battles allowed more independent producers to enter the field, producers who then hired independent directors with their own visions and signature styles. I think it would’ve been hard to get a movie as weird and anarchistic as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly made under the strictures of the earlier studio system.  

Maybe the question has no definitive answer, because there always was a type of formula B-movie cranked out within the profit-making machine. Get yourself a Man, a Woman, and a Gun, maybe a second woman, maybe a couple more guns, and, somewhere, Money—that can be gotten by cheating, thievery, or murder.  Oh, and you’ll need law enforcement, which could be a squad car filled with anonymous cops or one guy who’s made it his life’s work to crack this case or dog these fugitives. They could roll those elements around each other and come up with a working script to film fast and cheap.

On the other hand, we have examples of brilliant moviemaking. Double Indemnity, for instance -- no one pitched that as a B-movie. It was top-tier all the way: Billy Wilder directing and writing, Raymond Chandler co-writing, the source material a book by a seminal writer of hard-boiled crime, James M. Cain.  Starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson. All of them, great talents at the top of their game. 

I just read a quote by Robert Aldrich about the paradox of the studio system, the good and the bad of it. This makes me laugh — file it under You Can’t Win for Losing. “We'd had twenty years of petty dictators running the industry, during which time everybody worked and everybody got paid, maybe not enough, but they weren't on relief. Seventeen years later you wonder if the industry is really more healthy in terms of creativity. Are we making more or better pictures without that central control? But when everybody worked under those guys, they hated them.”      

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

Acting Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Who’s Your Favorite Noir Actor?

Suzanne Lummis:

I can’t choose between Richard Widmark [left] and Dan Duryea, both consummate artists, absolute originals who enlivened every scene of every movie they appeared in with their idiosyncratic expressions of evil, villainy or rascally mischief—lowlifes but so alive.  

Dan Duryea’s the only actor I can think of who could inhabit characters who were not only bad, not only murderous, but downright smarmy, and still seem weirdly attractive.  Often his characters slap women around, in Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window, Too Late for Tears… One of the women noir scholars contributing to the commentary on a DVD said, “I find Dan Duryea sexy, which is really disturbing.” That made me laugh. - Problem is, confidence and energy combined with focus is sexy, and nothing can be done about that.  In life, though, I’d loath that type of abusive person, but in the movies…  In the movies, what you’re looking at is talent.

Widmark played strong, good guys, too, especially in Westerns, but in Noir, oh anything from the hapless grifter in Night and the City, a loser forever a step away from the Big Break, to the maniac in Kiss of Death. It’s said he’s the only actor ever to become famous for his first scene in his first movie. And it haunted him; he got so freaking sick of people asking him to giggle like Tommy Udo. It went on for years. I adored Richard Widmark, who was commanding in all his roles, and I sympathize with his disappointment that the public tended to reduce him to one role, one scene. Stupid public.

I especially love that Duryea [right] and Widmark lived lives that dramatically contrasted their screen images. It’s not simply that they were nice—nothing surprising about that. These guys were absolute sweethearts, known as a couple of the kindest, most honorable men in Hollywood, both with happy lifelong marriages to high school or college girlfriends, not a trace of scandal. When asked why he didn’t flirt around Widmark said, “I happen to like my wife—a lot.” When she got Alzheimer’s, he gave up acting to nurse her for seven years till her death. 

They were smart as hell, both of them. Before Widmark came to Hollywood he taught acting at the college level. At Cornell, Duryea was elected to the most prestigious honor society.  They read, these guys.  The sleazeball hustler in Scarlet Street majored in English.  The Psycho in Kiss of Death lived in a home packed with books. I love that both were able to capture that raw, streetwise (or street-dumb) darkness and wildness but knew not to live it.   It’s called acting.   

David Lehman:

Edward G. Robinson gets my vote because of his amazing versatility. He can be the indomitable investigator (Double Indemnity),the relentless G-man and Nazi hunter (The Stranger), the nasty villain (Key Largo), the poor sucker who loses everything and ends up on a park bench (Scarlet Street), or the genial clubman who kills a man in his sleep (The Woman in the Window). In each case he knocks it out of the park.

May I also cast a ballot in favor of Ida Lupino the director. I love her movies, “The Hitchhiker” and “The Bigamist.” Very daring. She is a wonderful actress, too -- for example in 'The Bigamist," about which I wrote this poem:

The Bigamist

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time
          and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas are Joan
          Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

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

Fred and Peggy in "The Best Years of Our Lives"

Dana Andrews, left, and Teresa Wright, steering the wheel, in The Best Years of Our Lives.

And he's thinking: if only I could get a good job. 

And she's thinking: when I think that he's married, I sob. 

And he's thinking: I married a stranger.

And she's thinking: a divorce would be a game-changer.

And he's thinking: wait till my friend gets married and I'm the best man, Okay?

And she's thinking: Okay.

Well, it's been a long war. . .

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.

Why Poets Love Noir #12: The First Time [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

 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:

<<<
    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]
>>>

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.

What is the Sexiest Film Noir? [An exchange between David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Suzanne Lummis

For the chemistry between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, as “Slim,” the drifter who’s been living by her wits and an occasional lifted wallet, and Harry “Steve” Morgan, expatriate American with a fishing boat for hire, and for their subtly charged exchanges, that’d be To Have and Have Not.  And, of course, it includes perhaps the most sexually electric lines of dialog on film—certainly from that era—beautifully delivered by Bacall in her low, sly, silky voice: “You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, you don’t have to do anything. Or, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve…”

Director Howard Hawks, together with the writers, primarily Jules Furthman, William Faulkner, and some contributions from Papa himself, pulled apart and re-imagined Ernest Hemingway’s story, setting it in the French territory of Martinique during the Nazi occupation of France.  So, in this 1944 movie the balmy island paradise becomes a microcosmic setting for the global battle between good and bottomless evil, while the evolution of the script involved a dance between the Production Code people and the writers.  The censors curtailed what the movie-makers could show, and the writers kept striving to outwit them with smoky, sultry dialog.  Amidst this battle, and this dance, Bacall, the young actress in her first role, and Bogart, by now a star, were falling in love. Does it come across on camera? Does it ever. 

Small wonder that shortly after this movie wrapped, Bogart ended his fraught, unhappy marriage, and Bogart/Bacall became one of the most celebrated couples in Hollywood history. 

If some know To Have and Have Not only from the "...you know how to whistle" line, c'mon now. Take the time to see the whole movie.  Like Casablanca, it charts the evolution of a laissez-faire type of guy coming into his own sense of moral conscience. However, it includes some flavors Casablanca does not. 

David Lehman

Many would say Out of the Past should get the award for sexual heat. Three reasons are Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. Greer is as fatal as cyanide without the after odor of almonds, and the dialogue is hot. For example,

Kathie (Jane Greer): Did you miss me?
Jeff (Robert Mitchum): No more than I would miss my eyes.

 

While I would divide my own vote between Out of the Past and Double Indemnity, I would also register my admiration for the sexuality of Gun Crazy (1950). Joseph H. Lewis directed, and the script was written by MacKinlay Kantor and the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. The leading characters, Bart (John Dall) and Laurie (Peggy Cummins), seem young and ordinary; they’re not stars on the magnitude of Mitchum or Barbara Stanwyck, and you can see in them younger versions of yourself. There’s all that phallic imagery, all the guns, and how comfortable she is handling one. It’s significant that Dahl is a pacifist before sharpshooter Cummins casts her spell over him. She is the “bad” one, and it is the power of the fatal female not only to corrupt her partner but to bring out the manly beast in him. The partnership between hero and heroine is a bond which they can’t dissolve, try as they might. They are in it till death do them part. They go on a robbery spree, though they know it will lead to a fatal end after, of course, one last job. They can’t help themselves. Their very desperation adds to the sexual energy between them.

This is the eleventh in a series on film noir. Click here to see the others.

Smoking Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

What do you make of the cigarettes that get smoked in any Noir movie?

David Lehman:

Goddamn, they’re sexy.

Suzanne Lummis:

Sure are, and it’s clear that cigarettes had to go—no question about that—but the cinema lost a language. Aside from the smoking, the lighting of the cigarette could be handled so many ways with such different effects. Richard Conte, Robert Mitchum, all those guys—in two smooth gestures they’ll slide out that silver lighter and make the flame leap up, and we get the message—this is what unflappable cool looks like, virile confidence. 

Sometimes, men light each other’s cigarettes and that has meaning; often it’s about camaraderie. In Out of the Past, an easy-going ritualistic exchange occurs at the start of the first meeting between Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey and Kirk Douglas as the gangster Whit Sterling. Whit offers Jeff a cigarette almost before he’s got his foot in the door, but he already has one so he smoothly lights Whit’s who is reaching for his matches. It’s all quite friendly. Then, the camera cuts to Whit’s unsmiling gunman, Joe, whose eyes shift darkly between the two, sizing up this new guy, watching for unconscious indicators or one false move.

Those who don’t watch much noir, early or neo-, probably think a woman never has to light her own, a man’s always near-by and quick on the trigger, but, no, not always. For example, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown shakily lighting up, and Nicholson’s nasal drawl off-camera, “You’ve already got one going, Misses Mulray.” (The camera shows us her bejeweled hand rubbing out the live cigarette in the ashtray.) “Does my talking about your father make you nervous?”

Most often, and most memorably, men light women’s cigarettes.  I like Clare Trevor everywhere I see her, and I like a moment in Murder, My Sweet, when Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) fires up his lighter and she puts her hand on his and moves it toward the tip of her cigarette, “You will help me, won’t you?”  Marlowe: “Am I doing this for love, or will I get paid with money?”

But those moviemakers could achieve other affects outside of social interactions. I’ve never come across a mention of this in any writings about film noir, but I spot an eerie, ominous illusion near the end of Murder, My Sweet when, outdoors, Marlowe’s starting to make his way up to the luxurious piece of property perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It’s night. He’s going to confront Helen, who is actually Velma, who is actually a killer. Inside the shadowy beach house, the camera focuses on the couch sunk in darkness. Heavy smoke rises from it and, all along, specks of light begin to glint like embers. Someone, something, set fire to the couch—this whole place is going to go up. Then Velma rises from the shadows with her cigarette, in her gown slashed with stripes of glinting sequins.   It’s a premonition of danger embodied by this woman. Soon, characters will be lying all over the room, dying of bullets.  

And me? I smoked for years then gave it up overnight. It was easy. It was nothing—I was never hooked on caffeine.  I did love the play of hands, the motions, the waving away of smoke, that mysterious shared thing between myself and whomever I was talking to, man or woman, who, without fail—in those days—was also smoking, both of us reaching for the same ashtray. Nothing can replace that wordless, silent lexicon of gestures, and I will never stop missing it. It just wasn’t worth dying for. 

David Lehman                   

I miss them. If I may quote myself, "Watching the stars / as they smoke in film noirs" makes me want to throw caution to the winds and light up an unfiltered Camel or Lucky. There’s an entire ritual involved: pulling the cigarette out of the pack, tapping it (if it’s unfiltered), lighting it with a match or lighter, taking the first satisfying long drag.  I have considered writing an ironic “modest proposal” in the vein of Jonathan Swift advocating the return of cigarettes to movies, but people have dissuaded me on the grounds that the irony would not be grasped.

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

Why We Paint it Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Why are poets attracted to film noir?

Suzanne Lummis:

 

Well, out this way there aren’t as many poets who double as film noir buffs as one would expect, but, for some, my YouTube series produced by poetry.la, They Write by Night, has been their introduction to film noir and the poem noir, or my UCLA Extension Writers’ Program workshop, “Poetry Goes to the Movies.” In Los Angeles, the poet Cece Peri has struck black gold with her poems noir, which get published and re-published.   

The poem noir, when it works, can be remarkably appealing, and not necessarily as grim as one might think—so many different values, tones and approaches can come into play. Some of these poems conjure a kind of dark laughter in the face of the inevitable. That’s certainly an element of noir’s appeal for me, in film or on the page.  

One thing for sure, these days more women poets than men seem drawn to these movies, and they’re bringing unexpected perspectives. The poet Marsha de la O did something extraordinary—right after my own heart—with Janet Leigh’s appearance as the preyed upon Susie in Touch of Evil followed by her role as slashed-to-death Marion Crane in Psycho. “Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz” reads as one long hysterical plunge from damage to death, and—without being heavy-handed about it—speaks to the specific vulnerability of women in a violent world. 

David Lehman:

Many of us are attracted to the shadows, the stuff beneath the surface of human relationships, the things we do or fantasize doing when no one is looking. In noir, sex is the ultimate prize, but also the consummate killer. We love forbidden fruit. Of all the mammals, only humans have sex for reasons other than to perpetuate the species. The intensity of desire creates the motive for murder, whether acted on or not, and makes guilt and paranoia inevitable.  The tensions between man and woman animate this genre, are palpable, feel real. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them”: the fundamental things apply as time goes by. The genre recognizes that we are fallible people, sinners, gamblers, drinkers, addicts, dreamers, losers. We occupy the night as night-club singers, piano players, thieves, detectives, kept women, greedy men with criminal minds almost as infinite as our lust for sex first and money second.

In a curious sense the poet’s identity in our society has more in common than meets the eye with a hard-boiled detective or noir loser.

Also, the genre has a certain charm. I can never get over the fact that gangsters and hit men wear double-breasted suits in these movies, the women are as stylish as they are dangerous, and many of the background songs (“Tangerine,” “How Little We Know,” “Laura,”” Too Marvelous for Words”)  have lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

Finally, this column appears on September 1, 2019, exactly eighty years to the day that Germany invaded Poland, World War II began, and W. H. Auden wrote "September 1, 1939." That poem more than any other explains we love noir.

This is the ninth in a series of exchanges about noir. Pictured: Janet Leigh on set and in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. For previous posts, click here