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.

Public domain Federal government photo from Wikipedia.

In an article from the 23rd, the Christian Science Monitor‘s Randy Dotinga interviews Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai about the role of women in James M. Cain’s work, and The Cocktail Waitress, the unpublished Cain novel Ardai discovered in the papers of Cain’s agent. Hard Case Crime, recently relaunched in partnership with UK publisher Titan, will be publishing The Cocktail Waitress in Fall, 2012, says a Titan Books press release.

Now, the world of vintage noir fiction is a relatively small universe of complete obsessives; the fact that I’m completely flipping out over having a new Cain novel discovered seems like it should be more or less irrelevant to the mopes out there who aren’t all that sure if he’s the guy who wrote The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, or if maybe he’s the guy Humphrey Bogart played in the movie where he clicked two balls together.

But I’m off my nut, as usual. It turns out the discovery of an unpublished novel from the author of Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce warrants fandangos from the mainstream. There’s been coverage of The Cocktail Waitress everywhere: The Guardian, USA Today, Media Bistro, Publisher’s Weekly, and points further afield like The Violent World of Parker, which said “What would we do without Hard Case Crime? Wither away and die, I suspect. (It then embedded a YouTube video of Sonic Youth’s “Mildred Pierce,” which pleased the cockles of my aging punk soul, spanking me back to a time when I drove up to Berkeley to see that estimable band, and discovered opening for them these guys from Seattle no one gave a fuck about.)

Oh and BTW, speaking of obsessives, here’s one of the Q’s from the CSM, and one of Ardai’s A’s:

Q: How are you figuring out which revisions to keep and which ones to take out?

A: There are some parts that are easier. For the rest, I’m going to be spending some time in the archive rooms at the Library of Congress going through correspondence, and I’ll go through all the primary source evidence I’ve got to determine what his intent would have been. I’ll be doing the work of a responsible editor to shape it into the best story it could be.

Oh, also, opening for the next Ardai novel:

Q: The book has multiple revisions of the ending. How will you figure out which one to keep?

A: There’s a good deal of variety, but the core events are the same in them. The last line does not change, nor should it.

…which is exactly the kind of teaser yours truly loses sleep over, obsessive as I am over Cain endings. Me, I’m not so good on what my psychiatrist likes to call the, like, the Delayed Gratification. I’d even venture so far as to suggest that Mr. Ardai might wish to reinforce the locks on the Hard Case offices, especially given the inspiration that could be drawn from a HCC novel I recently perused in my copious leisure time. That could be drawn, mind you. Could be. If one were, like, of criminal nature.

Ardai’s original email to the faithful says the acquisition was made “After more than 9 years of detective work and negotiation.” The great blog Pulp Serenade actually went so far as to track down and excerpt Cain’s comments about The Cocktail Waitress from a 1976 issue of Film Comment. The next day The Guardian quoted the same passage, proving either that information wants to be free or that, oh, maybe the world of vintage noir fiction is a relatively small universe of complete obsessives.

I’m on record as thinking that when it comes to writing, Cain is an absolute genius beyond all meaning of the word. He’s so damn good that the (in my opinion) not-quite-home-run Grand Guignol ending of Double Indemnity, the novel, doesn’t faze me one bit, especially since the brilliant novel’s dying lapse in brilliance was so beautifully remedied in the un-fucking-believably good screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler.

This is one of the absolute best screenplays ever written, without question, and for various reasons one of the weirdest documents in literary or cinematic history. It was rendered in a feat of truly inspired screenwriting accomplished by two masters against all odds when they weren’t busy plotting to kill each other. As I wrote of the screenplay’s closing moments, “This is classic America, A-list noir, the soul of the nation laid open and bloody with a tire iron.”

By the way, did you know James M. Cain attacked Ernest Hemingway’s writing in print, in response to comparisons of him with Papa? I remember him being particularly nasty in a letter reprinted in an ancient reprint of an editorial I dug up at the UCSC library umpteen years ago. One of the reasons Cain hated Hemingway, as I recall? The H-man used too many four letter words. Hell’s bells, could Elmore fucking Leonard make this shit up?

The excitement over this acquisition just goes to prove a fact that I’ve been thinking about alot, lately, particularly since someone just spent forty-five minutes interrogating me about the use of the “rude” word “douchebag” in the opening lines of The Panama Laugh. It’s the “relatively small universes” of “complete obsessives” that determine WTF the “mainstream” mopes think, when they finally come around and stop trying to burn us at the stake.

What I mean to say is that the people who determine the future direction of culture and thought are not in fact the Walter Huffs, who can be driven to murder by the promise of plenty cheddar and the love of a dame with an ankle bracelet.

No, the people who matter are the ones who are, to paraphrase Chandler, walk the mean streets but are not themselves mean.

The ones who build a better world — not one where misery doesn’t happen, but where it means something — aren’t the ones who think that cash and some dreamy fantasy of bullshit love will finally free them from the rot that grows from within.

The people I care about are the ones who walk the mean streets because they give a flying fuck what the hell that rot means…and what it means when the moon blazes bright overhead and then you and the chick with the anklet go and toss yourselves in. Or Edward G. Robinson fires up a match and lights a guy’s smoke and says, “You’re finished, Neff.”