By THIRSTY
Mark Yost has
written for The Wall Street Journal for 25 years and is a regular
contributor to the Journal’s Leisure and Arts pages and its Book
Review. During his time at the Journal, he has also written for the
Editorial page and worked at the European Edition covering subjects as diverse
as the creation of the Euro, the war in Bosnia and international efforts to
curb money laundering by organized crime. He has run with the bulls in
Pamplona, Spain, done underwater archeology in the UK, ice climbing in Scotland
and cross-country skiing across the battlefields of the Battle of the Bulge in
the Ardennes. From appearances on Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, syndicated radio
programs and appearing in Oliver Stone’s documentary about the business of the
NFL, Yost brings a wide range of passions and experiences to his Rick Crane
Noir mystery series.
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| Mark Yost's Rick Crane Noir Series |
Stay Thirsty
Magazine was honored to visit
with Mark Yost at this home in Houston, for this Conversation about the
greatest figures and films in the history of the noir genre.
STAY THIRSTY: Raymond Chandler.
MARK YOST: Chandler, to me, is the greatest noir writer of all time.
Others would say David Goodis, or Dashiell Hammett – whom we’ll get to in a
moment – but to me it doesn’t get any better than Chandler.
He wrote The Big Sleep,
which introduced us to Philip Marlowe. Together with Hammett’s Sam Spade, these
two characters are literature’s archetypal private eyes, both, not
coincidentally, played by Humphrey Bogart.
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| The Big Sleep |
The Big Sleep is interesting, I think, because there are people who have
read it several times over, seen the movie, which, due to Hollywood decency
standards at the time, is even more opaque, and still don’t get all of it. I
don’t see that as a criticism of the book or the film, but a compliment. It’s a
whodunnit that’s ultimately solved, but still leaves questions.
Chandler wrote
three other novels featuring Marlowe, including The Blue Dahlia and The
Long Goodbye, both critical successes. Interestingly, Farewell, My
Lovely, was the second Marlowe novel but the first to be translated for the
big screen. But I would argue that it was Bogart’s Marlowe, first seen in The
Big Sleep, that is the image most people have of the San Francisco private
detective.
Of course, the
other big noir name I haven’t mentioned is James M. Cain. His novella, Double
Indemnity, was first serialized in Liberty magazine, a popular pulp
publication from the mid-1920s to early 1950s. Chandler and director Billy
Wilder collaborated on the script for Double Indemnity (1944), but
Wilder has admitted that the best writing came from Chandler. I would agree
with him.
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| Double Indemnity |
Double
Indemnity has what is arguably
one of the greatest lines in all of literature – not just noir. When Walter
Neff, the somewhat hapless, love-struck insurance agent is driving up to the
house of Phyllis Dietrichson, the woman who will convince him to murder for
her, Neff says in the voiceover narrative, “How could I have known that murder
can sometimes smell like honeysuckle.”
I love that
line. So much so that when my son and I were on a baseball trip to Southern
California in 2013, I made a point of driving up into the Hollywood Hills and
finding the house, which is still there, which was used in the film. We parked
the car on one of the narrow streets, got out, and I made my son, much to his
embarrassment, take my photo in front of it.
STAY THIRSTY: Dashiell Hammett.
MARK YOST: We’ve already talked a little bit about Hammett. He,
Chandler and Cain were the pillars of pulp noir in the 1920s ‘30s and ‘40s.
They were all born around the same time; Hammett and Cain in the 1890s and
Chandler – I’ve always noted – a few months after the Jack the Ripper murders
in 1888.
While Hammett
is perhaps best known for creating Sam Spade, the hardboiled San Francisco
private eye played masterfully by Bogart, he also wrote The Thin Man,
introducing us to that most unlikely mystery duo, Nick and Nora Charles. But
many admirers – and Hammett himself – would say that his greatest work is The
Glass Key about a mobster devoted to his political protector. In fact, the
Coen Brothers have said it was the basis for their crime drama, Miller’s
Crossing. Of the three noir authors, Hammett knew best of what he wrote. He
was a Pinkerton detective for seven years. He once said that, “All my
characters are based on people I’ve known personally.”
But perhaps the
most memorable character in his books and screenplays is the city he loved, San
Francisco. It’s largely because of Hammett that San Francisco is known as a
prime noir locale. In fact, I dragged my poor son – again, on a baseball trip –
to a side alley in the heart of San Francisco where there’s a plaque that
reads, “On approximately this spot, Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was
done in by Bridget O’Shaughnessy,” all characters in Hammett’s The Maltese
Falcon. The alley is just a few blocks from 891 Post Street, the apartment
where Hammett did most of his best writing and, not coincidentally, where Sam
Spade lives.
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| The Maltese Falcon |
Although an
icon of noir, Hammett only wrote five novels, but three of them were good
enough to get him into the hall of fame: The Maltese Falcon, The
Glass Key and The Thin Man. Indeed, he was much more prolific and
well-known for his short stories and essays. In fact, many of Hammett’s
greatest characters first appeared in his short stories, including Marlowe and
the Thin Man.
Interestingly,
his creative burst lasted little more than a decade, from the early 1920s to
the mid-1930s. But Chandler said it best: “He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled,
but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all.
He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”
STAY THIRSTY: Humphrey Bogart.
MARK YOST: If the authors mentioned above brought their characters to
life on the page, Bogart brought them to life on the silver screen. Ask most
people to close their eyes and imagine a private eye, and Bogart appears, either
as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.
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| Dark Passage |
Beyond those
quintessential archetypes, I’ve always been a big fan of Bogart’s role in Dark
Passage, a 1947 film based on the novel by David Goodis. Bogart plays
convicted murderer (wrongly convicted, of course) Vincent Parry. He escapes
from San Quentin in a garbage truck and is soon picked up by Irene Jansen,
played masterfully by Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall. She hides him until he can
get plastic surgery, and then begin looking for his wife’s real killer. In a
bit of cinematographic trickery, director Delmer Davis shot the first 45
minutes of the film from a first-person perspective, so we never see Parry’s
face until he’s been transformed by a back-alley surgeon into Humphry Bogart.
But that’s where the gimmicks stop. After that, it’s pure Bogart and Bacall,
arguably at their best.
And then
there’s In a Lonely Place, the 1950 Nicholas Ray noir starring Bogart as
Dixon Steele, a long-in-the-tooth scriptwriter who has to take a piece of pop
writing and turn it into a screenplay to make ends meet. Gloria Grahame plays
Bogart’s love interest in what’s perhaps her greatest screen performance. It
languished for a long time, mainly because it came out the same year as Sunset
Boulevard and All About Eve. There also was some controversy over
the adaptation of Dorothy B. Hughes novel. But the film, thankfully, has been
rediscovered, so to speak. It’s included on a lot of best-of and must-see
lists, and in 2007 was designated “culturally significant,” one of the only
good things Congress has done in the past decade.
STAY THIRSTY: Billy Wilder.
MARK YOST: Wow! What do you say about Billy Wilder? Other than he did
it all and he did it all well. What’s sort of amazing about Wilder’s career is
that Double Indemnity was his directorial debut. It’s such a great film.
Fred MacMurray plays Walter Neff, the lead character, an insurance agent who
falls for the wife of a client and is convinced to murder her husband.
What’s always
been interesting – I think – for people my age (54) is that we grew up knowing
Fred MacMurray as Steve Douglas, father to Chip, Ernie and Robbie on My
Three Sons. Or, we knew him as the title character in Disney’s The
Absent Minded Professor. Then, one day, as adults, we stumble onto Double
Indemnity for the first time and go “Wow!”
Billy Wilder
was part of the wave of Jewish immigrants who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s
and eventually wound up in Hollywood. In fact, I wrote about a great exhibit at
the Illinois Holocaust Museum about this exodus that gave us some of these
great talents, Wilder among them.
Wilder’s other
great film noir, of course, is Sunset Boulevard, starring William Holden
and Gloria Swanson. I’ve always found it interesting that Holden’s character,
down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis, laments having to go back to the copy
desk in Dayton, Ohio, if he doesn’t find a project soon. This had to have been
a bit of an inside joke, since many of the great crime writers had once been
journalists – James M. Cain, G.K. Chesterton, Mark Yost (just kidding) – who
took the crime blotter they’d covered for years and turned it into great pulp
fiction.
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| Sunset Boulevard |
Wilder, of
course, also directed the screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Witness for
the Prosecution. But he also had the depth and breadth to masterfully
direct the crime spoof, Some Like It Hot, starring Tony Curtis and Jack
Lemon as musicians who witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and go on the
lamb disguised as women in an all-girls band.
Wilder
collaborated again with Holden in Stalag 17. It’s principally a war film
about a German double agent, superbly played by a young Peter Graves of Mission:
Impossible fame, informing on the prisoners and their escape attempts. But
it certainly has the classic dark elements of noir. Holden plays an American
flyer wrongly convicted by the other prisoners of being the snitch. What ensues
is a clever game of cat-and-mouse to clear himself and indict Graves to the
satisfaction of his fellow prisoners. Once he succeeds, he basically gives the
finger to his comrades-in-arms as he hands them their stoolie and escapes in
the ensuing commotion. (Hope I didn’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t already
seen it.)
STAY THIRSTY: Michael Curtiz.
MARK YOST: I asked that you include Michael Curtiz because without him
we really can’t talk about Casablanca, which I think is perhaps the
greatest film of all time. I’m going to be writing more about Casablanca
later this year for Stay Thirsty Magazine to mark the film’s 75th anniversary,
but I think there’s really a good argument to be made for it being one of the
great noirs of all time.
Many people see
“Casablanca” as a great love story, or a great war film, but so much of it is
about the cat-and-mouse – sorry to keep using that term – between Victor
Laszlo, the Resistance fighter played so well by Paul Henreid, and the Nazis.
Yes, there’s the love triangle between Bogart and Henreid and Ingrid Bergman,
but the crux of the story is really whether or not Laszlo will escape, and
whether or not Bergman’s Ilsa Lund will go with him, or stay with Bogart’s Rick
Blaine in Casablanca.
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| Casablanca |
Casablanca wasn’t Curtiz’s only foray into the genre. In the mid-30s,
as another one of the European talents that had fled the Nazis and landed in Hollywood,
he directed Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Kennel Murder Case
with William Powell, and Jimmy the Gent, featuring James Cagney and
Bette Davis. He went on to direct Angels with Dirty Faces with Cagney
and Bogart. And then, of course, in 1942, Casablanca.
So, yes, Curtiz
was known for a lot of other things, but he was so talented and such a
significant force in Hollywood for four decades that to not include him in the
film noir genre would be just wrong.
STAY THIRSTY: Otto Preminger.
MARK YOST: I’m glad you asked me about Preminger because I am really a
big fan of The Man with the Golden Arm starring Frank Sinatra. I think
it’s some of Sinatra’s best work. It was made in 1956, sandwiched between
Sinatra’s career-defining performances in From Here to Eternity (1953)
and The Manchurian Candidate (1962). I would argue that “Golden Arm” is
right up there.
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| The Man with the Golden Arm |
It was a
controversial film at the time because it’s about a heroin addict who goes to
prison, gets cured, and then goes back to his old neighborhood and falls back
into his old habits. It’s really a tragic story, and Sinatra plays it so well,
right down to the shakes and tics of an addict.
It was
controversial because it was in the 1950s. Yes, heroin had been around since
Westerners first discovered the opium dens in Hong Kong and Shanghai, but – you
Millennials should run for your safe space because I’m about to say something
that may offend you – heroin was really seen by much of society as a “black
problem.” White kids didn’t get hooked on heroin in the 1950s (they did, but we
didn’t talk about it). That was something that happened up in Harlem or on the
South Side of Chicago.
To their
credit, Sinatra and Preminger took on a controversial subject and showed a side
of the white, urban underclass that many people didn’t even know about. This
was before the so-called “war on poverty” and the civil rights movements of the
1960s. It was really a very brave and controversial film at the time.
The supporting
cast was great, with Eleanor Parker as Sinatra’s long-time girlfriend, whose
holding him back for fear of losing him; Kim Novak as the hat check girl at the
local tavern who has eyes for Sinatra, but terrible taste in men; Robert
Strauss, the great character actor who play Zero Schwiefka, the neighborhood
crime boss. But the biggest accolades should go to Darren McGavin, who plays
the neighborhood dealer. Whenever Sinatra tries to walk away from him, he
whistles softly and coolly says, “I’ll be around.” He knew – and, tragically,
we all knew – it was only a matter of time for Sinatra’s Frankie Machine. “Golden Arm”
also features a great jazzy soundtrack from Elmer Bernstein.
The other Preminger film that has to be included in any best-of noir list is Anatomy of a Murder, which came out just two years after “Golden Arm.” The first thing that drew me to this film was the locale. It’s set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a setting not unlike Upstate New York in my Rick Crane Noir novels.
Preminger
really cast against type here, so to speak. Typically, noirs have been set in
the big cities I’ve mentioned before – New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco. Anatomy
of a Murder was in a rural setting. For many people who live in the city or
close-in suburbs, they drive through these bucolic places – Upstate New York,
Michigan, the mountains of Colorado – and think they’re so innocent. They think
that the people who live in these small towns that are just stops for gas and a
bathroom break or a good, homemade meal at a quaint old diner don’t have the
same problems and pressures of people in the city.
WRONG!
Like “Golden
Arm,” Anatomy of a Murder was also very controversial because of its
subject matter: a rape case. Again, most big-city people don’t think things
like that happen in these small towns, but they do.
The film was
expertly cast by Preminger, with Jimmy Stewart as the small-town, folksy lawyer
who’s a lot smarter than we’re initially led to think he is. Lee Remick plays
the sexy wife and victim, while her husband, an Army lieutenant, is played by
Ben Gazzara. In short, Gazzara confesses to murdering a local innkeeper whom he
claims raped his wife. Stewart is hired to defend him, but spends most of the
trial trying to get the allegation of rape, the basis for his client’s
self-defense, admitted into evidence. Fighting him the whole way is George C.
Scott, playing a high-powered prosecutor brought in from the Attorney General’s
office to oversee the case. It’s a great, great film, and one of Preminger’s
best that’s often overlooked.
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