Thomas Roche's BOILED HARD

Recently, I thought to myself, “Hey, there’s money in Hollywood, right? Huh. I should learn to write that shit.” I figured I would learn from the masters. Makes sense, right?

Well, it was a terrible idea. Vintage screenplays are formatted completely differently than contemporary ones; after reading a few of them, I haven’t the foggiest idea how to write a screenplay. In fact, I’m more confused than ever. It’s alright, however, because my “connected” friends tell me, in fact, there isn’t any money in Hollywood anymore; it’s all remakes and reboots for the next ten years. Everybody’s tapped out, so movies are pretty much greenlit only if they’re, y’know, “re-imaginings” of “The Partridge Family,” “TJ Hooker” and/or “Webster,” preferably without any resemblance to the originals because, let’s face it, that shit sucks.

However, I did stumble across at least one good experience, completely in spite of myself.

If you have any interest in noir, screenplays, movies, popular American literature, or the fact that life sucks and human beings as a philosophical and moral construct quite simply blow chunks, this facsimile edition of the Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder script for Wilder’s absolutely unparalleled 1944 production of Double Indemnity.

It is a must-see movie, one of the vest films noir ever released. It is a must-read novel, a museum tour of a tense psychological hell and one of the tautest, tightest, meanest, scariest, most thrilling, most beautifully written and above all most human novels ever written.

And as for the screenplay? The damn thing is better than either of them.

In fact, I believe it just may be the best screenplay for a crime movie ever written — with the Maltese Falcon running either a close second or just barely edging Indemnity out, depending on my mood.

How is that possible, you ask? How can a screenplay be better than the novel it’s based on and the movie made from it?

I make this assertion after reading many screenplays and writing a couple, and studying film fairly closely for the better part of my life so far. Films are creations with many moving parts — far more moving parts than novels. That is one of the reasons that when a screenplay is not original to the screenwriter — or based on a play or other property –  novels are usually the starting point for feature-length storytelling, not the other way around. Screenplays turned into novels require padding; padding is death to good novel-writing, as far as I’m concerned…. especially in the action and crime genres. I don’t know about you, but I would never expect a novelization to be any good at all, even when based on a very good film with a very good screenplay. My heart goes out to the writers who write them. They have to spin silk purse out of sow’s ears even when they’re writing from damn good scripts and/or movies.

Novels are a glimpse of inner life; they’re personal, because (usually) one person thought them all up. They’re not collaborative works. Scripts, even when written by a single screenwriter, require allowance for the actions of others — whether that’s lighting, staging, acting, tone of voice, or whatever. With a novel, what you see on the page is what you get in the brain of the reader. With a screenplay, the idea is that such a thing is only true until the sale is made and a production moves forward. Then? What you get in the brain of a reader depends on a lot of peoples’ talents.

Cain’s novel Double Indemnity, which should probably more properly be called a novella, is one of the best things ever written in the English language. It’s also deeply flawed. Its ending devolves in much the same way that Jim Thompson’s brutal and uncompromising novel Savage Night does…in both cases, it feels like not knowing where to go with the ending, the author punted. Don’t get me wrong; both works are still worth reading. Savage Night is not one of Thompson’s best in my opinion, but it’s still sui generis and memorable as hell like almost everything that spilled from Thompson’s pen. Double Indeminity, on the other hand, is quite simply so good that even a punted ending can’t do anything but leave me gasping.

On the other hand, the Wilder-Chandler screenplay utterly solves the problem of the ending. If you’ve seen the flick, I hope you’ll agree that the viewer gets a one-two punch from that final scene between Fred McMurray’s Walter Neff (Walter Huff in the novella) and his boss, Edward G. Robinson’s smart but at times pathetic (in Neff’s eyes) Barton Keyes. To me, it’s the mope saying “Sucker!” to the mope…the sad act of lighting a smoke serving as a final valediction between a man who committed murder and a man who’s spent far too many of his days thinking about committing murder. Where’s that line between lighter-of-the-match and smoker-of-the-smoke in that brilliant staging there in the film’s final moments? Where’s the boundary between deviant and detective, insurance peddler and insurance scammer…the killer and the killed?

Chandler and Wilder found it, in a shifting shadow between Neff and Keyes. It isn’t pretty to see how mutable and yet how durable that boundary is, and Robinson’s Keyes carries that nightmare in his eyes. But the ambiguity is right here in the screenplay, if you read it closely… a final moral judgement from the faithful, or maybe just a twist of the wicked knife from two nasty satirists bent on hurting the audience one last time, because that’s what they’re there for. Where the usually bitter-sounding Cain wasn’t always sure where the boundary lay between right and wrong, ugly and beautiful — which was largely his strength as a novelist — Chandler knew, and so did Wilder. They just didn’t respect it all that much.

In this facsimile edition, the script is recreated in exact typographical detail; there are even handwritten notes from the original, whether by Wilder or Chandler I couldn’t begin to speculate, but I get goosebumps just thinking about either of them scrawling notes while glaring at each other and quite possibly plotting murder.

What’s that? Yes, the two guys hated each other. The best damn part of this amazing edition is the Jeffrey Meyers introduction which covers just how much Chandler hated working with Billy Wilder, and just how fussy and insane Wilder found Chandler. They drove each other nuts. Can you imagine? Two unparalleled geniuses ready to throw down, while creating one of the greatest scripts of all time for one of the greatest movies of all time based  on one of the greatest novels of all time, by a writer that Chandler actively disapproved of? That’s right, Chandler didn’t even respect Cain. He didn’t like his writing.

According to the introduction, Chandler actually went to movie company execs and demanded that Mr. Wilder not wave his cane under Chandler’s nose or assign him arbitrary tasks, like “Ray, open the window, will you?” “Ray, close the blinds, will you?” Chandler was also pissed off that Wilder wore his hat indoors. Honestly, the idea of Raymond Chandler, wry sarcastic tough-guy author from England sitting there stewing while Billy Wilder asks him to open the window — I mean, hell! Could anyone MAKE this stuff up?

That is not to distract from the point that, despite its weak ending, this is one of the most nearly perfect imperfect crime novels ever written, and as I said the brilliant screenplay by Wilder and Chandler completely remedies novel’s only real problem with a one-two punch that leaves you gasping.

When Edward G. Robinson lights that match? Fuck’s sake, man. You know it’s all over: It’s the death of the human soul, people, and little time to mourn it.

The screenplay also crowbars Chandler’s brilliance out of the master’s main shortcoming, in my opinion — that being his tendency to write detective novels that linger on incredibly confusing details that, honestly, I don’t give a damn about. For all that Chandler is a poetic stylist with no peer, his plots could get bogged down in details and repeated red herrings to the point where I always feel like I have no idea what’s actually going on and, more importantly, don’t care. Don’t get me wrong — I love Chandler. He’s one of the best writers of detective novels around, do I even need to say it? But for all its pleasures, reading Chandler can get at times, shall we say…a little thick?

Cain was nothing like that. He didn’t have Chandler’s fondness for convoluted tautness and complex threads of mystery. He was straightforward to a fault — almost to the point of being blockheaded, which is why he works so well as melodrama, where Chandler actively doesn’t. Cain is movie-friendly because he’s obvious…or, at least, he appears obvious on the surface, much like Jim Thompson. Chandler didn’t like the obvious. His plots were subtle….so subtle I’ve heard stories about him getting confused himself when he was asked about them.

It seems likely that if Chandler really didn’t like Cain, he thought him an inferior writer for this very reason….melodrama, melodrama, melodrama. But I believe it’s Chandler’s disdain for Cain that led to his and Wilder’s tapping into a breezy, cynical, world-weary tone that was 100% Chandler, 100% Cain, and 100% f#*@!#ing genius.

They just don’t write ‘em like this any more.

Read the novel, see the movie, gape in awe at the genius of it all. This is classic America, A-list noir, the soul of the nation laid open and bloody with a tire iron.

Originally reviewed at http://thomasroche.livejournal.com, 03/12/2010.

If Roger Zelazny’s best science fiction and fantasy novels are strikingly Chandlerian, was there ever a Zelaznyesque crime novel? Not until the surfacing of The Dead Man’s Brother, a “lost” manuscript probably written in 1970 or 1971.

That’s when Zelazny was at the height of his powers, the same general era that bore a long string of excellent science fiction novels and some stunningly innovative fantasies like Jack of Shadows, probably my very favorite Zelazny book.

The Dead Man’s Brother was discovered by Zelazny’s agent Kirby McCauley, and somehow ended up with Hard Case Crime — the perfect home for it. I’m going to guess it ended up with HCC both because the publishing world outside the science fiction community never seemed to quite “get” Zelazny, and because Trent Zelazny, the elder Zelazny’s son, is a huge fan of noir fiction. (He’s also quite an author in his own right.)

Whatever the provenance of Brother‘s happy home, it couldn’t fit anywhere better than right where it is. The Dead Man’s Brother is about an art-thief-turned-art-dealer who gets mixed up in a plot involving the CIA, the Vatican, and a rebel movement in the jungles of Brazil. Do you need to know anything more? Nope, because the second you pick it up you’ll blink, look around, and wonder how two or three hours have passed. You will have slurped the damn thing down and I only hope, for your sake, you haven’t been reading on public transportation. If you have, you might want to check if you might have gotten rolled, and also investigate which city and/or state you’ve ended up in. It’s that good, that hard, that fast, that impossible to put down.

Does it work? Hell’s bells, does it work! The Dead Man’s Brother is a fast-paced, gorgeous piece of crime fiction that would have fit as easily beneath the pulp cover Hard Case put on it or the weird photo-covers they put on mainstream international thrillers in those days. And wherever it had gone, it would have been rhapsodic poetry, cover to cover, and that’s what it is today. If crime is your poison, this is one of the best. It’s quick, hard, brutal, and uncompromising. But there are other authors who can do that…some as well, or almost as well, as Zelazny. What The Dead Man’s Brother brings to the table that is absolutely unique is the Zelazny feel…dour, world-weary, erudite, clever, unimpressed by human foibles but in love with the arts and the good life and the wicked twist of a phrase or a sentence that nobody seems to be expecting.

Speaking of weird ’70s thriller photo-covers, I remember shelf after shelf in my grandparents’ house, packed with the half-trashy, half-snooty paperbacks that Zelazny was probably imitating. If it was published in the seventies and it had a cover with a .25 Beretta, a Gold Krugerrand and a tube of lipstick on the cover, that’s the genre Zelazny was aping here. He blew them all out of the water in a book he never even bothered to get published. Here, he skunks Helen MacInnes; he drop-kicks Alistair MacLean; he spanks Ian Fleming and sends him home crying. For what it’s worth, The Dead Man’s Brother even gives John LeCarre a wedgie.

But since I brought up LeCarre, it’s worth considering for a moment where international thrillers like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold deviate from international thrillers like The Dead Man’s Brother. I think it’s important, to me at least, in figuring out why Zelazny and LeCarre occupy very different niches in my pantheon of genre writers.

My one beef with Zelazny has always been that he never seemed to push himself in dealing with deeper themes. Though his life seems to have  had its share of drama — as does everyone’s — most of his work seems to only hint at a depth of inner experience.

Meanwhile John LeCarre is at times as brilliant a stylist as Zelazny, but LeCarre’s action scenes and incidences of physical jeopardy and emotional tension lack the intensity I crave in my crime novels. As an amateur student of British history, I find generalizations about the “English character” deeply distasteful, but there’s no escaping the fact that for my American tastes, LeCarre is usually if not always far too polite. If even the boneheaded Ian Fleming could be bothered to thrill at violence now and then, doesn’t it stand to reason that a competent writer like LeCarre, whose ideas reflect a bona-fide political existentialism at times, would bring an urgency to his violent scenes that matches or exceeds other spy writers who don’t seem to have a deep or wounded sense of life’s futility and beauty?

Sadly…not really. LeCarre has written effective scenes of menace, to my mind, in only two novels — the aforementioned The Spy Who Came in… and Our Game. He tried with Absolute Friends, but never got there because by the time on-screen violence occurs, the novel has long since lapsed into pedantry. Most of LeCarre’s works in the interim have been weak on the action and long on the slow.

Why I mention it here is that LeCarre’s works, on the other hand, feature the intensely powerful interpersonal and political themes that I always want from a stylist as evocative as Zelazny, but never quite get. In The Dead Man’s Brother, Zelazny unquestionably comes closer to those interpersonal insights and real-world intensity than he did anywhere else, with the exception of his brilliant early short stories and novellas.

It may sound like a strange observation, but I think if Zelazny had gone the direction that The Dead Man’s Brother seemed to have been taking him, there’s a chance he might have gotten there. Zelazny certainly had the brains and the balls to understand how the world works, on an interpersonal, geopolitical and historical level, and the humanity to care. The fact that he seems to have remained largely apolitical in his writing may not be an absolute of his personality, and it might have changed in the environment that ’70s crime novels would have represented. Not having known the man, I wouldn’t really know.

Anyway, back to The Dead Man’s Brother itself, with which I have no beef whatsoever — “deeper themes” be damned, it’s one of the best crime novels ever written.

The aforementioned Trent Zelazny, the Z-man’s son, speculates in his afterword that his father did not plan the book as his “breakthrough,” but rather just wrote what was in his brain. He says that at the time it was (probably) written, Zelazny was reading a lot of crime fiction, so it makes sense he would have headed this direction…knowing Roger Z’s writing, it does seem unlikely that he sat down and planned it out as a career move. From what I can tell, he wrote what he loved at any given moment…a habit that is in keeping with his visceral love of language.

If you’re an aspiring action writer, there is no better tutorial on how to write action scenes than reading The Dead Man’s Brother alongside Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. If you’re a science fiction or fantasy fan, it doesn’t get better than Zelazny’s writing in either genre, especially some of his his stunning early short stories and novellas.

But regardless of whether you give a damn about science fiction or Roger Zelazny, if you appreciate a crime thriller that punches you in the face so hard you have to go looking for your molars about six blocks over, grab The Dead Man’s Brother and see how it’s done.

(Originally reviewed on Thomasroche.com, 04/25/2009)