CORNELL WOOLRICH : King of Noir

[phil noir]

I've just been reading Night Has a Thousand Eyes as well - and before that, Rendezvous in Black. I'm hoping to get I Married a Dead Man for Christmas (as part of a noir anthology including Nightmare Alley, The Big Clock, etc.).

He's a peculiar talent - the quality of his sentences is often wincingly bad, but the suspense! Strange to think he began as an imitator of Scott Fitzgerald.

When I first looked him up, and found he'd had to have a leg amputated thanks to a pair of shoes being too tight (leading to a blood clot, I believe), I immediately thought that's my kind of guy and wanted to read more.

[jdb1]

I've finally finished Night Has a Thousand Eyes -- it was tough going, and I have to admit I didn't like it much. It had the kernel of a really good story, but the style was so undisciplined and at times rather silly. It alternated between 19th-Century florid and hard-boiled police procedural, and didn't land comfortably anywhere.

BTW, I liked The Big Clock a lot - different from the movie, and the main character isn't nearly as nice (he's not all that nice in the movie, either, but even less so in the book).

[MissGoddess]

I just watched Fear in the Night. I always enjoy the hypnotism
angle in mysteries, and now I'll have to watch the remake, Nightmare.
This version felt akin to Detour, you know, very bare bones and made
on the cheap but entertaining. I can't say much for Deforrest Kelley
in the lead, he was OK but I hold out more hope for the star of the
remake.

One question, is the actress who played Kelley's girlfriend the
same girl who played Robert Taylor's "niece" in Johnny Eager?

[Dewey1960]

Hey Miss G! FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1947) is one of my favorite Woolrich adaptations: eerie, illogical, and loaded with the type of coincidental nonsense that drives the literalists crazy. In other words, it’s perfect. Part of the reason, of course, is the threadbare nature of the production. Nothing can smother a good piece of pulp fiction like those dreaded “production values” most movie watchers assume are necessary for a film to be given any consideration as art. FEAR IN THE NIGHT resembles nothing short of a frenzied nightmare--which is precisely what it is.
Check out the 1956 remake, NIGHTMARE. I think TCM will be airing it in January. Even though Edward G. Robinson is given top-billing (he plays the Paul Kelly role), it’s really Kevin McCarthy’s movie; he has the meatier DeForrest Kelley part. He made this right after he appeared in Don Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and he’s still carrying around the residue of pod-paranoia in this film. It’s not quite as gritty as FEAR IN THE NIGHT but enjoyable nonetheless. It’s set in New Orleans and has a nice jazz backdrop. Band leader Billy May appears (as himself, I think) in some nice recording session sequences. Both versions were directed, oddly enough, by the same man, Maxwell Shane.

[MissGoddess]

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 1:06 pm Post subject:
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Hey Miss G! FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1947) is one of my favorite Woolrich adaptations: eerie, illogical, and loaded with the type of coincidental nonsense that drives the literalists crazy. In other words, it’s perfect.

I like your logic, Dewey!

The movie also felt like an extended "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

I'll try to get to NIGHTMARE next. Right now I'm watching (finally)
THIEVES HIGHWAY.

[Dewey1960]

Right now I'm watching (finally) THIEVES HIGHWAY.
I've always known you to be a woman of impeccable taste, Miss G. THIEVES' HIGHWAY is my favorite Jules Dassin film!

[Dewey1960]

I've just located an incredible clip from the film I WOULDN'T BE IN YOUR SHOES,
a 1948 poverty row noir from Monogram Pictures. A relatively obscure Cornell Woolrich
adaptation, it beautifully illustrates that curiously incomprehensible component of his
bizarre fiction: the utterly incongruous and illogical without ever being called into question.
To wit: a scene on death row wherein one of the condemned prisoners plays a Chopin
record on his phonograph! On his phonograph!
[youtube][/youtube]

[moira finnie]

This intriguing clip makes me wonder: have you or anyone else seen this movie? It seems to be around on the internet in dvd-r form, and it sounds as though they caught some of the Woolrich fatalism rather well. Even the plot with the little woman looking for a killer while her honey cools his heels in the klink seems to echo Phantom Lady (1944) and Black Angel (1946). Thanks for posting this one.

[Dewey1960]

Hi Moira - Yes, I have a copy on DVD-R with surprisingly nice picture and sound quality. I can't speak for whatever else might be available on-line; I honestly don't know if they come from the same source as mine.
And yes, it does utilize the famous Woolrichian device of the "girl detective" trying to free her man from an impending date with the electric chair. Yet another interesting obsession from a writer with more than his fair share of them!

[ChiO]

Okay, you Woolrich readers and watchers...

A couple of nights ago I watched FEAR IN THE NIGHT for the third time, but the first time since reading any of Woolrich's stories. I have not read Nightmare, the story that it's based on. Although I prefer BLACK ANGEL and PHANTOM LADY as films, I now feel that FEAR IN THE NIGHT better captures the rhythm and pace of his paranoid prose.

Close? Or, all wet?

[Dewey1960]

Close? Or, all wet?, ChiO asked.

Right on the mark and dry as a bone. As with the case for much of the filmed works of Woolrich, the most effective examples emanate from poverty row. FEAR IN THE NIGHT, while crude and somewhat clumsy, gets closer to the spirit of the author's intent without being the least bit self-conscious. Part of the reason why many casual observers have a hard time with this film could be the fact that it doesn't quite resemble conventional studio films in either tone or content. And while both PHANTOM LADY and BLACK ANGEL are better remembered and far more popular films with audiences, it's helpful to remember that, at least in the case of BLACK ANGEL, Woolrich despised what Universal did to his original story. Upon seeing the film for the first time in a theater, he dashed off an angry and pained letter to his literary agent expressing his sorrow over what he considered a hatchet job. (The letter is reprinted in its entirety in the Woolrich biography, "First You Dream, Then You Die.")

Despite the fact that BLACK ANGEL is my own personal favorite adaptation of Woolrich's fiction, it only barely resembles the novel. Much of the action in the book involves drugs and prostitution, two subjects that were still completely taboo in Hollywood films by the mid 1940s. Monogram Pictures could have probably produced an interesting version of BLACK ANGEL, but still would have been hampered by the Production Code. Plus they wouldn't have had Dan Duryea. What remains, though, is the brilliantly realized melancholia of Woolrich's classic theme revolving around the absence of free will. Marty Blair (Duryea) was, for all practical purposes, a stand-in for the author.

[ChiO]

In preparation for tomorrow, a National Noir Holiday:

NO MAN OF HER OWN (Leisen, 1950)
[youtube][/youtube]

Cornell Woolrich died on September 25, 1968.

[MissGoddess]

this is airing on TCM?

[ChiO]

No...but isn't it pretty to think so.

Stanwyck, directed by Leisen, in an adaptation of Woolrich. Ahhh.....

[ChiO]

I finally watched NIGHTMARE. By every objective measure -- cast (Kevin McCarthy still has the flop-sweats from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and Edward G. Robinson -- well...), photography, music (not only Billy May, but Meade "Lux" Lewis!) -- it is a better movie than than FEAR IN THE NIGHT.

But FEAR IN THE NIGHT wins in the Atmosphere and Spirit category of the Cornell Woolrich film noir sweepstakes. And that's enough to make it the winner for me.