This Day in Film History (John Garfield Dies, KO’d by Blacklist)

May 21, 1952—No longer able to land a film role in Hollywood despite box-office success for the prior 13 years, back in the New York theater scene close to his heart, John Garfield died at age 39 of a heart attack.

Assigning causes of death can be difficult, and in Garfield’s case it was certainly problematic: 

*Did he die as a result of the rheumatic fever he had contracted almost 20 years before, maybe worsened by his smoking habit? 

*Had the middle-aged star absorbed more punishment than he could stand in an attempt to portray a young boxer in a revival of the Clifford Odets drama Golden Boy? 

*Had his coronary incident occurred during a romantic interlude with the female friend he was visiting at the time of his death, as some salacious gossips had it?

But there is another factor that underlies all of these theories: the stress of lingering questions about alleged Communist associations that, after nine years, had resulted in his blacklisting from Hollywood.

In perhaps his signature movie role, as an ambitious boxer struggling to win a title and maintain his integrity in Body and Soul, Garfield received his second Oscar nomination. When he was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1951, he found himself in the uncomfortable position of life imitating art.

Like his character Charlie Davis, Garfield was reluctant to give up the position in his profession he had worked so intensely to achieve, including creature comforts. Like Davis, he did his share of bobbing and weaving when faced with his moral dilemma, including releasing a ghostwritten article for Look Magazine, “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook,” claiming he had been duped by Communist ideology, in a futile try at compromising with investigators.

But in the end, again like Davis, he found one demand too many to stomach, in this case violating the moral code of the Lower East Side and the Bronx of his childhood: Don’t be a snitch. His bottom line was that he refused to name names.

It may be so hard to assess all that Garfield lost by making his stand because we have lost a sense of his place in movie history. He opened doors to others (Ben Gazzara cited him, in an interview with Lillian and Helen Ross in The Player: A Profile of an Art, "the first actor I had seen in the movies who felt close enough to my own life to be reachable"), but at the same time his reputation was so Himalayan that it could intimidate those who hoped to follow. (For the same book, Kim Hunter recalled how, in rehearsals for A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon  Brando kept saying, "They should have got John  Garfield for Stanley, not me; Garfield was right for the part, not me.")

*He was the first film “Method Actor”. Before Brando, Clift and James Dean became famous for using this naturalistic style of portraying characters, Garfield got there first.  He learned it originally as a member of the ensemble Group Theatre in New York, then brought the style to Hollywood. As author Isaac Butler described it in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Garfield made a crucial adaptation for his first film, Four Daughters in 1938: “He couldn't just do a stage performance on camera. If you've ever seen someone just give a stage-size performance on camera, it's really too much because the camera picks up so much that an audience at the theater will not see. It can really see you think or people talk about it reading your mind. ... So he really had to learn how to do much less and much less and much less, and to strip away and to learn how to perform with a new kind of ease and spontaneity that the camera would kind of pick up and enjoy.”

*He was "the first Jewish film sex symbol," according to Gil Troy's 2018 "Daily Beast" article. The actor’s given name was Jacob Julius Garfinkle, but his friends nicknamed him “Julie.” He was more than handsome; his intensity gave a palpable erotic surge to his scenes with Lana Turner, for instance, in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

*He was crucial in the development of film noir. Other actors—Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum come to mind—are more indelibly associated with the genre. But Garfield not only brought a rebellious persona, but also what TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller called, in Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, “a fiery desire to Make a Difference,” leading to “a caravan of writers, directors, and actors from the New York stage.”

*He pioneered the movement of movie stars into independent production. So chafing at the largely “B” movies to which he was relegated at Warner Brothers that he was suspended 11 times during his nine years at the studio, Garfield started his own production company, Enterprise Studios. A decade later, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas would follow suit with their own companies.

Ironically, the creative freedom that Garfield won through this daring move also helped lead to his blacklisting, according to his daughter Julie in this YouTube clip.  Hollywood studios resented the challenge to their ironclad control that his new venture represented. When HUAC approached them, looking for a liberal Jewish star that they could make an example of, they had three men in mind: Edward G. Robinson, Danny Kaye, and Garfield. Now on his own, Garfield had the least protection.

The actor had first appeared on a list of names of Hollywood actors with suspicious associations in the early 1940s, but within a few years—especially through the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—he came under heightened scrutiny. Garfield was not and had never been a Communist, but he knew people who were: his associates at the Group Theatre and his wife Roberta Seidman.

Additionally, Garfield was vulnerable because of his habit of signing petitions and joining organizations without questioning who might be behind them. A self-described "Democratic liberal," he did it all "without giving it a second thought, almost as if he were autographing for a friend," observed Robert Nott, author of a 2003 biography of the actor, He Ran All the Way.

Eventually Garfield’s phone would be tapped and he would be subjected to surveillance—even when he went to Harlem to visit his dying friend, blacklisted actor Canada Lee. He told HUAC that he would gladly testify about himself but not his wife or his friends. Though he thought this deal had gotten him through his trouble, he learned that HUAC investigators were poring over his testimony for possible perjury charges.

At this point, he was brought into an FBI office and told that the agency already had paperwork showing his wife’s membership in the party, so all he had to do was confirm it and he would be cleared. Instead, he told them what they could do in unprintable terms and walked out.

Altogether, Garfield went 18 months without work. Under the strain of the investigation, he drank more heavily and separated from his wife.

On the day of Garfield’s death, his friend, playwright Clifford Odets, confirmed, in his own HUAC testimony, what the committee knew already: that the actor had never been a Communist.

Garfield's penultimate screen appearance was in The Breaking Point, a Warner Brothers adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. Like a Hemingway hero, Garfield was, in the end, a proud loser, someone willing to experience grievous sacrifice--even the loss of his life--rather than break with the code by which he lived. 

You can sense something of this bloodied yet unbowed attitude in this still from Body and Soul. He didn't have a chance to make enough such classics (his early death precluded him from the chance to make On the Waterfront and The Man With the Golden Arm), but he put all of himself into his work, and film watchers discovering his less-famous films for the first time are in for a treat.

This Day in Film History (Gloria Grahame, Oscar-Winning Good-Bad Girl, Dies)

Oct. 5, 1981—In New York’s St. Vincent's Hospital, actress Gloria Grahame—far from her Hollywood zenith due to insecurity and scandal, with her body badly weakened by the cancer she had fought for years—died at age 57.

There’s a good chance that this Christmas, as well as so many others over the last half-century, millions of Americans will catch Grahame in her early eye-catching, scene-stealing role as Violet Bick, the blonde flirt who served as a foil to Donna Reed’s wholesome small-town girl as an early rival for Jimmy Stewart’s affections, in It’s a Wonderful Life.

In a way, that role would prefigure several of the film noir characters in which Grahame would shortly specialize: Crossfire, In a Lonely Place, The Big Heat, Human Desire, and Odds Against Tomorrow.

I’m thinking of the nightmare sequence in Frank Capra’s Yuletide classic, where Stewart’s George Bailey gets to see what life would have been like had he never been born. One of the many people whose life is changed for the worse, in the dark honky-tonk town now known as Pottersville, is Violet—not given a chance to start life out of town through a loan from George, but instead hauled away screaming by cops arresting her for prostitution.

Grahame was the ultimate “good-bad girl”—a woman who moved easily across, and beyond, the traditional confines of the goddess, the siren and the victim prototypes of noir. These characters’ vivacity led them to seek excitement, but as objects of the male gaze they drew trouble—whether as the anxious girlfriend of a screenwriter with an unexpected violent streak (In a Lonely Place), the lonely mistress of a racist heist participant (Odds Against Tomorrow), and, perhaps most notably, a gangster’s moll who, for defying him, suffers hideous disfigurement at his hands (The Big Heat).

While her role as the sweet southern belle who serves as the muse of her novelist husband in The Bad and the Beautiful had none of these violent overtones, it was every bit as tragic, and it helped Grahame win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1952 on her second try.

The ceremony should have been Grahame’s moment to celebrate. But she was so anxious that her four-word acceptance speech (“Thank you very much”) led to whispers that she had been drunk, and her dismay at how she looked onscreen resulted in repeated plastic surgery that only subtracted from her appearance.

Far worse would engulf her by mid-decade, when she appeared in the screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma. In this case, her nervousness had a more solid foundation: unlike others in the case, she was not a professional singer. Her apprehension took concrete, and unwelcome, form when she struck co-star Gene Nelson on the set, virtually sealing her reputation as difficult to work with.

But her reputation took its biggest hit with the 1960 announcement of her marriage to her former stepson Anthony Ray. Anthony’s father, director Nicholas Ray and another ex-husband of Grahame’s, Cy Howard sued Grahame, suing her for custody of their respective child with her. The resulting sensational headlines reportedly led Grahame to a nervous breakdown at the most difficult passage that actresses in that time experienced: career decline at age 40.

I was surprised to find, while channel-surfing the David Janssen series The Fugitive, that Grahame had appeared in an episode. But these small-screen appearances became more characteristic of her career in the 1960s than the high-profile movies of the prior decade.

Through most of the Seventies, Grahame toiled onward, in supporting roles in theater, television, and onstage. Even in the last six years of her life, as cancer increasingly ravaged her, she bravely continued working and maintained a relationship with a younger lover, Peter Turner—a period recounted in the biopic Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, starring Annette Bening as the actress.

In a retrospective of Grahame’s best films on the Web site of the British Film Institute, David Parkinson aptly summarized the nature of her appeal: “With her lisping voice and sleepy eyes, Grahame… gave femme fatality a raw but touchingly vulnerable sensuality, ensuring she was always much more than just good at being bad…. At her best…, Grahame lit up the screen with her beguiling, intense presence.”

This Day in Film History (‘The Big Sleep,’ 2nd Bogie Private-Eye Classic, Opens)

Aug. 22, 1946—With The Big Sleep, which premiered in Atlantic City, NJ, Humphrey Bogart became identified for the second time on the big screen with an archetypal hard-boiled detective.

Five years before, Bogart had starred as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, the John Huston movie often credited with launching in earnest film noir, a term created by French critics for a genre characterized by dark lighting, byzantine plots, skeptical heroes still capable of hoodwinking by alluring femme fatales, all set amid a violent, treacherous world.

Bogart’s portrayal of Spade—tough, wisecracking, intelligent while scoffing at intellectuals, with a surface cynicism concealing a strict moral code—had thrust him, once and for all, beyond the gangster straitjacket in which he found himself in his early years at Warner Brothers Studios.

Other actors have also portrayed The Big Sleep’s Philip Marlowe over the years (e.g., Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum). But Bogart may be associated with the role most indelibly.

The Big Sleep helped land “Bogie” for the fourth straight year among the nation’s top 10 money-making stars. But the film’s success was hardly preordained. At one point, the actor’s marital woes stemming from his tormented affair with leading lady Lauren Bacall threatened to turn the production into a disaster.

The film would run a gauntlet of production delays, cost overruns, a year-long shelving by Warner Brothers, and reshot scenes before it saw the light of day. It would probably not have turned out half so well but for the careful guidance of director-producer Howard Hawks (whose 125^th birthday I commemorated with this blog post from three months ago).

The movie resulted from the desire by studio head Jack L. Warner for a follow-up to the initial Bogart-Bacall teaming, To Have and Have Not (1944), also directed by Hawks. Hawks’ production company used the $50,000 forwarded by Warner to purchase the rights to the first novel by Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, for $5,000—then pocketed the difference.

Hawks recognized in this material the same quality that led Huston to adapt The Maltese Falcon: edgy characters, surprising plot twists, and crackling dialogue. By his own account, he advised the first two screenwriters assigned to the project, William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett, “Don’t monkey with the book—just make a script out of it. The writing is too good.”

That didn’t mean that changes wouldn’t be made from page to screen. Chandler had included several elements—nymphomania, nudity, homosexuality, pornography, and a main character’s complicity in a crime—that had to be either eliminated or softened to pass muster with the movie industry’s censorship authority, the Hays Office.

Moreover, as Faulkner and Brackett worked on the screenplay separately, Hawks needed to fit the two parts together seamlessly, and—as a producer whose deal with Warner Brothers allowed him to make more money if he cut expenses—he changed locales for others that entailed lower costs.

But these were not even the biggest obstacles associated with the film, which can be seen virtually step by step in the memos, letters and production reports collected in Rudy Behlmer’s Inside Warner Brothers (1985).

After the first day of shooting, when Bogart had downed five or six drinks for lunch, his intake was cut back to one beer at that time of day. But that did nothing to curb his after-hours misbehavior.

On the morning after Christmas 1944, with Bogart not showing up for shooting, studio production manager T.C. Wright went to the star’s house, only to be told by Bogie’s estranged wife, Mayo Methot, that he had come in drunk and was still trying to sleep it off an hour and a half later.

That afternoon, by which time the star had finally straggled onto the set, Hawks drew aside Bogart—who had been mostly living away from home, uncertain about whether to reconcile with or divorce Methot—to administer some tough love. Not only was the situation with Bacall affecting Bogart’s performance, but his co-star’s, too, Hawks said.

Bogart, normally punctual and professional, was giving Warner Brothers fits with the absences and conferences required to deal with the situation—so much so that by December 29, the 64^th day of shooting, the picture was already 30 days behind schedule, with corresponding costs incurred.

Hawks then did what he did best: improvise. Over the Christmas break, and in the lengthy daily delays caused by Bogart, he huddled with a third screenwriter, Jules Furthman, to figure out how to delete entire scenes and secondary sets. By the time it was over, he ended up only $15,000 over budget—a miracle, all things considered.

The plot of the novel had been so complicated that even Chandler couldn’t recall who was responsible for one murder when called about it by Faulkner and Brackett. But now, the behind-the-scenes goings-on took on their own craziness.

With the end of World War II in sight, Warner decided to move up the release dates of several movies revolving around the conflict lest they seemed out of date before their premieres (including another Bacall picture, Confidential Agent). Though The Big Sleep had been shown to troops overseas already, it could wait before being viewed stateside—for a whole year, as it turned out.

In the meantime, Bacall’s agent, Charles K. Feldman, wrote Warner to complain that his client’s scenes needed to be beefed up. Although he had some specific scenes in mind that could be replaced (such as one where Bacall was veiled), he may well have been concerned that she would be upstaged by two other up-and-coming supporting female players, Dorothy Malone (as a flirtatious bookstore clerk) and Martha Vickers (as the Bacall character’s nyphomaniacal kid sister).

Hawks obliged, inspired by his affection for the ponies, creating dialogue revolving around horse racing with the same kind of racy Bogie-Bacall repartee that had made To Have and Have Not a sensation.

Throughout this piece, I’ve stressed the difficulties that Bogart created by his uncharacteristic lack of professionalism. But in justice to him, it also bears stating that he also contributed enormously to the ultimate success of The Big Sleep.

Hawks was in no doubt about that, observing, in an interview ultimately included in Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors: “Without his [Bogart’s] help, I couldn’t have done what I did with Bacall. The average leading man would have got sick and tired of the rehearsal and the fussing around. Not very many actors would sit around and wait while a girl steals a scene. But he fell in love with the girl and the girl with him, and that made it easy.”

Chandler had a different, equally valid perspective on the actor’s quality: “All Bogart has to do to dominate a scene is to enter it.” Because he was in every scene and the action unfolded entirely through Marlowe’s eyes, Bogart’s performance had to carry the film.

With this intense focus on his leading man, Hawks set the template for Roman Polanski to follow nearly three decades later with his neo-noir classic, Chinatown, in which Jack Nicholson, like Bogart, appeared in every scene, becoming the audience’s surrogate in sorting through the multiple deceptions and red herrings of the plot.

Twenty years after The Big Sleep confirmed her hold on the public’s affections—and drew her close enough to her co-star that she married him—Bacall made an unmistakable reference to that film’s General Sternwood by appearing as another wheelchair-bound employer of a private detective in the 1966 Paul Newman neo-noir, Harper.

The first version of The Big Sleep had a logical explanation for its murders. But, while reshooting, Hawks made a discovery that would influence the remaining quarter-century of his career:

The plot, he told Bogdanovich, “didn’t matter at all. All we were trying to do was make every scene entertain. I can’t follow the story. I saw some of it on TV the other night and I’d listen to some of the things he [Bogart] would talk about and it had me thoroughly confused because I hadn’t seen it in twenty years.”

Flashback, September 1949: ‘Third Man’ Exposes Evil in Postwar Vienna

The Third Man, which premiered in the U.K. 70 years ago this month, is now frequently regarded as the greatest British film of all time. 

No wonder—it featured a supernova of creative forces in front of and behind the camera: producers Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, director Carol Reed, assistant director Guy Hamilton (who later graduated to helm three James Bond features), stars Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, and, in a small but pivotal role, Orson Welles. 

The production history of this drama set in postwar Vienna is fascinating in and of itself, including the clash of wills between Korda and Selznick, the accidental discovery of the musician who contributed the distinctive “zither music,” Anton Karas, and the hurdles thrown up at will by the willful Welles.

But the prime mover behind this classic thriller may have been Graham Greene. Not only did the finished feature stick closely to both the novella he wrote as, in effect, a treatment as well as the screenplay, but it sounds themes he returned to consistently throughout his five-decade writing career. 

Easily among the most famous literary converts to Roman Catholicism in the last century, Greene still resisted making his chief characters simple conveyors of virtue. Riven by doubt himself even after converting, Greene depicted characters twisting in the coils of sin, utterly unable to escape even when they knew the right path to take. The Third Man was no different.

Until relatively late in his career, Greene classified his novellas as one of his “entertainments,” a name given to distinguish his crime melodramas from his other, supposedly more profound, works. But, as he recognized as time went on, that division was too neat and facile.

Like many entertainers, Greene knew how to pay more attention to his work by joking about it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the satire directed at the hack writer of Westerns, Holly Martins, when a literary group he’s to address presses him for something profound.

"They want you to talk on the crisis of faith," he is told.

"Cri-? What's that?" Martins asks, stupefied. 

"Oh, I thought you'd know,” comes the reply. “You're a writer."

In a discomfort he could never have previously imagined, Martins must address this “crisis” not only in a lecture hall or on the printed page but also in his own life. He will have to answer to what extent his loyalty matters when the friend he thought he knew so well, Harry Lime, turns out to have made a fortune peddling diluted penicillin that resulted in the maiming and deaths of countless innocent children. 

Divided politically by four occupying powers who often find it hard to speak the same language, the Vienna of The Third Man is riven spiritually by the eternal sins of greed and hatred. Through the Oscar-winning cinematography of Robert Krasker, the “old Vienna of Strauss music and bogus easy charm” has been reduced to a city of shadowy, slightly tilted streets. 

Martins, a penniless pulp fiction writer, finds it even more dangerous here than his earlier callow predecessors, the American innocents abroad of Henry James. Amid proud but crumbling buildings, it is not merely hard to see here, but even to maintain one’s balance. It is a striking visualization of Greeneland.

With the war having reduced survivors to a Darwinian struggle for existence, crossing borders, geographically and ethically, becomes commonplace, even expected. Identities are cast aside, then utterly confused. Martins is mistaken at the hotel for a more acclaimed author; Anna Schmidt mixes up his first name with that of her onetime lover and Martins’ friend, Harry Lime; Martins drunkenly calls the unillusioned British Major Calloway “Callaghan”; and the plot centers on the uncertainty identity of the title character.

But it is in the sewers of Vienna that Greene finds the ultimate metaphor—a Stygian repository for human waste to which the desperate run for an illusory escape. Even amid the loud roar of this rushing underground river, humanity runs aground. From here, fate—what passes for the justice of God in this fallen world—arrives in the form of a relentless police manhunt.

The late, fine mystery novelist Philip Kerr suggested that, in the confrontation between Martins and Lime on the Ferris wheel in Vienna’s Prater Park, Greene underscored the moral hypocrisy of the Western victors of the war, as Harry disclaims any sense of responsibility for his victims: “Victims?” says Harry. “Don’t be melo­dramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?”

There is another way, however, to view this scene: as one where the devil cites scripture to his purpose. Lime, a figure of energy and charisma, binds men and women to him. But all of that intelligence and charm, instead of being directed toward life-affirming ends, is devoted to selfish ones. Rapid by necessity on his feet, he is just as agile with his tongue, as made beautifully clear in a speech ad-libbed by Welles:

"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love--they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

But all of this is clever, honeyed words. Not only does Lime take facts taken out of context (the Renaissance was hardly confined to Italy), but he doesn’t address the sources of Martins’ rage: How can Harry endanger the lives of innocent people? If he loved Anna as much as he said, why did he betray her to the Russians by disclosing the secret of her forged papers?

Greene’s friend Kim Philby—the British intelligence operative who sold secrets to the Russians—has been proposed as a model for Lime. (Philby’s given first name was Harry.) But it might be even more appropriate to regard Greene himself as a possible source for the character. Not only was his real first name Harry, but the character was associated with a fruit of a green(e) color. 

And both author and creation remain nominal Catholics, with Lime remarking cheerfully to Holly, "Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and mercy and all that. I'm not hurting anyone's souls by what I do.The dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils."

If Harry Lime lives—and he does, more so than any other character in the film or, arguably, throughout all of European film noir—it might be because Greene (himself a serial betrayer, of his marriage vows) was a paradoxical secret sharer of his sinful humanity. 

In a famous address on “The Virtue of Disloyalty” given at the University of Hamburg, Greene observed: “Loyalty confines you to accepted opinions: loyalty forbids you to comprehend sympathetically your dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages you to roam through any human mind: it gives the novelist an extra dimension of understanding." 

That “extra dimension of understanding” elevates The Third Man to an unforgettable cinematic experience long after Anna cold-shoulders Martins at the wintry second funeral in the haunting final scene.

Appreciations: Crime Fiction for a Muggy City Summer: Vera Caspary’s ‘Laura’

“The city that Sunday morning was quiet. Those millions of New Yorkers who, by need or preference, remain in town over a summer weekend had been crushed spiritless by humidity. Over the island hung a fog that smelled and felt like water in which too many sodawater glasses have been washed. Sitting at my desk, pen in hand, I treasured the sense that among those millions, only I, Waldo Lydecker, was up and doing. The day just past, devoted to shock and misery, had stripped me of sorrow. Now I had gathered strength for the writing of Laura’s epitaph. My grief at her sudden and violent death found consolation in the thought that my friend, had she lived to a ripe old age, would have passed into oblivion, whereas the violence of her passing and the genius of her admirer gave her a fair chance at immortality."— Vera Caspary, Laura (1943)

As I get older, I find myself less and less thrilled about commuting into New York City during the hot, fetid summer. Last year was no exception. Luckily, I had just the vehicle at hand for this: the 1940s novel about crime among Gotham’s rich and fashionable set, Laura.

The photo accompanying this post is of Gene Tierney, who played the title character in Otto Preminger’s celebrated 1944 film version. Over seven decades, so many men have beheld that luminous face in rapt astonishment, like Dana Andrews’ hard-bitten detective Mark McPherson, that it’s simply impossible to disassociate the celluloid image of Laura from its original source material.

But the novel by Vera Caspary contains pleasures that, as fine as it is, the motion picture simply doesn’t prepare you for. Start with its opening paragraph, which I’ve included above. It draws you in not just because of its swift depiction of setting, but because of its tone—a first-person narrator so in love with the sound of his own voice that he reveals even as he conceals himself.

For the first three sentences, the narrator, the newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, sticks to the conventional way that murder mysteries are told. But his heart’s not in this mode of storytelling, as he informs us before long: “I still consider the conventional mystery story an excess of sound and fury, signifying far worse than nothing, a barbaric need for violence and revenge in the timid horde known as the reading public.” Only “a deep emotional involvement in the case of Laura Hunt” has led him to this activity.

But the writer’s deepest “emotional involvement” is with himself—a fact tipped off when Lydecker notes that, among the “millions” in the city, only he was “up and doing.” The only fact disclosed about Laura is that her death was “violent”—a point that, despite his fastidious style, he repeats. The end of the paragraph confirms our sense of a self-centered narrator who, all protestations to the contrary, believes that his late “friend” will be little remembered except for “the genius of her admirer.”

One would little know it from Preminger’s film, but Caspary created something far more interesting than a “conventional mystery story” or, on the screen, a highly unnerving love story (even Andrews’ no-nonsense cop becomes transfixed by necrophiliac zeal for a portrait of the victim). She subtly underscored the contrast between achievement and artifice that the men who circle Laura Hunt must weigh as they come to terms with what really happened to her.

Coming to the novel after viewing the film, it’s a shock to discover that Lydecker is not slim, as embodied memorably onscreen by Clifton Webb, but burdened by “obesity, astigmatism, [and] the softness of pale flesh.” Viewed another way, the first of the novel’s narrators is a creature of uncontrolled appetites, distorted vision and effete sensibility. But these details are in keeping with both the real-life newspaperman who inspired the character (the waspish theater critic Alexander Woollcott) and the fictional villain of the Victorian thriller whose structure Caspary was imitating (Count Fosco of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White).

Lydecker’s literary allusions and elevated vocabulary can’t hide his lack of originality or substance—or, as McPherson says early on, “You’re smooth all right, but you’ve got nothing to say.” His snobbishness—shown in an inability to see Laura as little more than the earnest young woman he helped to rise in the advertising world and society—also makes his other observations about her equally suspect. But the other two males who figure in her life—fiancé Shelby Carpenter, intent on declaring his contribution to her creative work even as he admits to being financially beholden to her, and McPherson, initially dismissive of her as a “two-timing dame”—are little better, at least at first.

In the hands of Preminger, Laura might have been landmark film noir (how its implications of necrophilia got past Hollywood’s Hays Office is itself a mystery), but it was hardly progressive in its treatment of working women. Caspary went to great lengths to chronicle Laura’s rise up in the advertising world (one with which the author was all too familiar, in those pre-Mad Men days, as a copywriter) and her ambivalence in balancing her career and private life. 

Preminger de-emphasized those elements onscreen. It was doubtful that a strong woman would hold much appeal to this notorious on-set bully. 

Still, let us give the director credit. Creating a classic in spite of himself, salvaging just enough elements of the source material to make it compelling (though angering Caspary for his blithe disregard for the rest), he made numerous readers like myself curious to hunt down the original—real—Laura.  And there we can relive early 1940s New York, swept up in a heat wave and a tabloid murder. In this, the year of the novel's 75th anniversary, its heroine is more contemporary than ever.

Appreciations: Dorothy B. Hughes’ ‘In a Lonely Place’ and the Male Predator, Then and Now

This past summer, I started to dip into the work of Dorothy B. Hughes, a postwar American master of crime fiction, for two reasons: for research on a blog post on lawyer-detective Perry Mason and his creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, the subject of a biography by Hughes; and for the pleasure of reading In a Lonely Place, one of four works in a Library of America anthology, Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s. 

Little did I know that the latter would so profoundly and disturbingly explore the vulnerable, resentful male psyche, with more than a little contemporary relevance. 

Even today, more people know of this work secondhand, through Nicholas Ray’s 1950 big-screen adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame (pictured here). For all the great talent involved in that production, the filmmakers still had to pull their punches with the very dark material in this innovative 1947 crime novel.

The problem was that Hughes was one of the first, if not the first, to write from inside the consciousness of a serial killer—a term not even coined until the 1970s. Most reviews of the time used words or phrases like “pathology” and “periodic bloodlust” to describe this new kind of criminal. Her protagonist, Dix Steele, was a demobilized and disoriented WWII pilot, the kind of character only then appearing on film and in literature.

But like many other writers whose works turn out to have enduring resonance, Hughes had also identified a type more commonly identified in the last several weeks, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal: the male predator. 

From virtually the novel’s opening pages, Steele approaches women less as human beings than as prey. In this sense, he resembles the entertainment, media, and political figures exposed in recent weeks as part of the viral #MeToo movement. 

“This treating of the hunt like a craft, the carefulness of it, is one mark of what we often call a predator,” Michelle Dean writes in a recent “First Words” column in The New York Times Magazine. “People like that word because of its certainty, the way it rules on the case all by itself. A predator naturally lives outside the herd, and because of that, he can be very easy to ostracize. The shaming, the firing, the possible criminal prosecution: All of that seems a logical consequence for predators.”

But preceding ostracism, or even noticing the predator’s pattern, is identifying him in the first place, by no means a cinch. Dix has “a good-looking face but nothing to remember, nothing to set it apart from the usual.” No outward sign testifies to his inner ugliness and turmoil. 

The murders committed by Steele obscure a more fundamental link to his contemporary real-life descendants in the entertainment industry, such as Harvey Weinstein and James Toback: not merely the shared male pronoun, but also the assumption of male privilege and power that they feel continually under assault in a new, more uncertain environment. (Yes, even the name of Hughes’ killer is a wicked pun—and a clue into his fear of being unmanned.)

Even as the women’s movement and the threat of sexual harassment lawsuits meant that they might face challenges to their authority, producers, directors and stars such as Weinstein and his ilk longed for the days of the casting couch, when their kind were riding high and starlets were there to do their bidding.

Dix Steele had his own actual experience of riding high. Standing on the beach at night in the opening paragraphs of In a Lonely Place, he drifts back to his time as a nighttime pilot in the European theater of WWII, particularly “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky. There was a touch of it here, looking down at the ocean rolling endlessly in from the horizon; here high above the beach road with its crawling traffic, its dotting of lights.”

But already this feeling of expansive self-confidence is being revealed as illusory. Just as Dix’s aerial triumphs happened over a dim but blasted landscape, his current reverie occurs amid “the pale waste of sand, the dark restless waters beyond.” Above all, there is an enveloping fog, all making for “an unknown and strange world of mist and cloud and wind.”

Encountering fog and darkness everywhere, Dix finds himself all too adaptable to this new environment. He had "moved more than once in his seven months in California," with the very indefiniteness of the number suggesting his rootlessness. With his interior landscape “dark [and] restless,” all he can do is reduce female lives to his own nagging sense of ruin and insubstantiality, a “pale waste of sand.”

“Waste” aptly describes Steele’s life. A Princeton education had given Dix a sense of entitlement without a commitment to hard work. A monthly check from a stingy uncle back east has been secured through the dubious assurance that he’s hard at work on a mystery novel, and he resides in an apartment complex under equally ambiguous circumstances: a college friend, he tells those interested, who rents him the space while away in South America. 

It will become all too apparent by the end of the novel just how unreliable a central consciousness that Steele represents. But early on, Hughes follows him on the disturbing evening walks where he tracks his victims:

“He didn’t follow her at once. Actually he didn’t intend to follow her. It was entirely without volition that he found himself moving down the slant, winding walk. He didn't walk hard, as she did, nor did he walk fast. Yet she heard him coming behind her. He knew she heard him for her heel struck an extra beat, as if she had half stumbled, and her steps went faster. He didn’t walk faster, he continued to saunter but he lengthened his stride, smiling slightly. She was afraid.”

Working within a pulp crime genre dominated by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Hughes subverts reader expectations as much as her novel undercuts Steele’s. Critic Lisa Marie Hogeland notes that Dix never receives an “origin story” to explain his pathology, such as the errant mother that Freudian-influenced psychologists inflicted on a generation of American women. 

Superficially, that might make her protagonist an example of what William Hazlitt, in describing Shakespeare’s villain Iago, memorably termed “motiveless malignity.”

But there is an emptiness inside him that he is unable ever to fill, and his wounded ego lashes out repeatedly in virulent misogyny. Feeling rejected, he thinks: “There wasn’t any girl worth getting upset over. They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore. He’d proved it, he’d proved it over and over again. There wasn’t a decent one among them.”

While the police hunt vainly for this killer who strikes again and again before slinking into the night and fog, the two people who sense something deeply amiss in Dix are women. One is aspiring actress Laurel Grey. Meeting her for the first time by literally bumping into her, Dix is immediately nettled by her cool appraisal: “He stood like a dolt, gawking at her.” She allows Steele to take her to bed, but resolutely resists his attempt at possession.

The other woman is Sylvia, wife of his wartime buddy in England, Brub Nicolai. Even as Brub (now an LAPD detective) searches in frustration for the mysterious strangler, Sylvia senses something amiss about his friend. Her loveliness, reserve, and centrality in Brub’s life simultaneously lure and disturb Dix. This remote object of desire only reinforces his isolation and resentment of all women.

It was only natural that the Ray adaptation of In a Lonely Place became a staple of film noir, because the genre originated in a war that revealed to Americans the evil latent in all human beings, even themselves, and that the men who fought the war came home often unable to express what they had seen to women they had hoped to share their lives with. 

And women, through their entrance into the military-industrial complex in the war (symbolized by Rosie the Riveter), represented, in their rising assertiveness and accomplishment, a new threat to the likes of Dix. Possessing, then repressing, them becomes all the more important. Harvey Weinstein could relate to that feeling.

Seventy years after its original publication and nearly two decades after Hughes, the signs are growing that this lean and haunting suspense novel is receiving its long-deserved appreciation. In addition to its Library of America inclusion, it was also republished over a decade ago by the Feminist Press and this year by New York Review Books Classics.

The new Annette Bening film, Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool, will, one hopes, make casual filmgoers as well as cinephiles hunt down all the movies of the marvelous Gloria Grahame, very much including In a Lonely Place. That, in turn, might make the more curious seek out the original novel that provided Grahame with this entry in film noir. 

All I can say is that my own initial experience reading Hughes made me go the other day to New York’s famous Strand Bookstore and purchase a copy of an earlier suspense novel of hers, The Blackbirder. I can’t wait to start reading it.