Book to Film and Back:
Reviving the Great Gangsters, Outlaws and Femmes Fatales
Lee Horsley
Trail, Scarface Anderson, Thieves Like Us Homes, Build My Gallows High
Many of the greatest films noirs and neo-noirs have been adaptations of pulp fiction - of the Hammett and Chandler novels that originally appeared in Black Mask (Maltese Falcon, Farewell My Lovely), of the work of James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice), of mid-century American paperbacks (Dark Passage, The Grifters) and of the contemporary successors to the early traditions of hard-boiled writing and literary noir (LA Confidential, Mystic River). Some of the acknowledged masters of the huge body of crime fiction that has been adapted for the cinema have, of course, had their work almost continuously in print; some, like Jim Thompson, have fallen out of print but, reissued, have found a new audience and achieved the kind of cult status that helps to ensure the availability of their novels. Many others, though, have disappeared from publishers' lists never to reappear except on the stalls of book fairs or, more recently, on the sites of online vintage booksellers.
In the last decade, however, publishers seem increasingly to have recognized that there is a market for the books on which much-loved films have been based, and this recognition has led to the publication of some beautifully produced new editions. The Bloomsbury 'Film Classics' series has led the way in this, bringing out, for example, Robert Bloch's Psycho, John D. MacDonald's Cape Fear (originally The Executioners), James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Evan Hunter's Blackboard Jungle, Peter Maas's Serpico, Robin Moore's The French Connection, Ernest Tidyman's Shaft, Robert L Pike's Bullitt (forthcoming in 2005), Harry Grey's Once Upon a Time in America, Gordon Williams' Straw Dogs, Nicholas Pileggi's Goodfellas (originally Wiseguy, discussed in our 'true crime' review section) and (discussed here) Armitage Trail's Scarface. Prion, so far on a smaller scale, looks to be starting their own film-related series, with Geoffrey Homes's (Daniel Mainwaring's) Build My Gallows High and David Goodis's Dark Passage; and Blackmask's pulp fiction series, though not specifically film-centred, includes Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us, which has been adapted twice for the cinema, by Nicholas Ray in 1948 as They Live By Night and by Robert Altman (as Thieves Like Us) in 1973.
Also adapted twice for the screen (by Howard Hawks in 1932 and by Brian De Palma in 1983), Armitage Trail's Scarface (1930; Bloomsbury edition forthcoming, July 2005) fictionalised the career of Al Capone, who had become by the end of the 1920s the most widely recognized incarnation of American gangsterism, seen as a force in American life that government hadn't the power to control. Capone was also a substantial political influence and an example of how a gangster could make a business asset of his reputation. In telling his story, Trail (whose real name was Maurice Coons) went to some lengths in pursuit of verisimilitude, seeking out Sicilian gangsters and immersing himself in Chicago’s gangland in order to gather material for the book. As with Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929), however, there was also an impulse towards universalization, leading to the creation of a figure symbolic both of capitalist drives and of the conflict between private and public identity.
One of the key issues in the representation of so flamboyantly transgressive a figure is whether the gangster is to be contained within a moralizing frame that functions in the manner of the traditional detective narrative – that is, to judge, disempower and punish the criminal. When Howard Hawks directed the film of Scarface, he came under intense pressure from the film’s producers to establish a moral context for the story that would point the finger of blame at the gangster. The film could not be released until scenes were cut and added, allowing spokesmen for official morality to deliver a diatribe about the gangster as an evil force in society.
In Trail’s novel, however, the frame is rather different, moralizing the career of the gangster but also quite explicitly exploring socio-political causes of gangsterism. Tony Guarino, the Capone figure, is both protagonist and scapegoat, and Trail’s method of commenting on the narrative is to interpolate numerous passages that function to establish a normative moral perspective. He insists that, as an exemplary figure, the gangster supplies a cautionary tale rather than a glamorous role model, but he also, from his opening descriptions to the moralizing end of the novel, presents the celebrated career of Scarface as a rebuke to the society that produced him – a lesson that will help in the restoration of decent government. Trail even gives to Scarface himself the role of articulating the causes of his own corrupt ascendancy. Moved by ‘the social impulse’, Tony Guarino writes before his death a ‘damning indictment’, setting out his ‘great vision’ of his own role in creating the ‘monster’ of his gang and of the corrupt system that has facilitated his rise. Also like Burnett's Rico ('Little Caesar'), he is separated from most other crime and detective fiction protagonists (whether heroes or anti-heroes) by his drive for power, sustained by a combination of efficient business and efficient violence. It is this that most obviously makes his story not simply an allegory of gangsterdom but of the whole of the capitalist system. A dapper, efficient, post-war gangster, Scarface goes in for ‘regular business administration in crime’ and ultimately feels ‘like many another millionaire’ that success is easily achieved if you are not too squeamish.
Capitalism is seen from a different angle in one of the great Depression-era crime novels, Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us (1937; reprinted by Blackmask, 2004). As in much other American crime fiction of thisperiod, the fate of the protagonists is determined by harsh economic realities. Anderson places the social origins of crime at the heart of his narrative. Rather than using the successful big-time gangster as the mirror of a corrupt capitalist system, he chooses the vantage point of the victims of an unjust and oppressive society. The plight of the hapless small-time crook comes to be seen as the measure of 'respectable' society - of its criminality, its want of humanity, and its failure to recognise that this society itself is constituted by 'thieves like us'. These are characters destined to be fleeced not only by respectable society but by the bigger crooks as well, an emblem of the defeat of the decent small man.
The choice of bank robbers as protagonists is, in the context of the time, a way of generating sympathy, since hostility towards banks, which were often blamed for the Depression, was widespread in the 1930s. The bungling young crooks are used throughout to provide a perspective on the economic disparities that produce crime. Anderson underscores the irony of the poor allowing themselves to be persuaded that small-time criminals are deserving of punishment in a system in which 'the great criminals' never go to prison at all. His protagonists are products not of urban squalor but of the rural dust bowl: in Bowie's description of his 'people', for example, we see him as 'just a big old country boy' who has found that a gun is necessary just 'to make a piece of money'. But there is little nostalgia for the old rural America, except perhaps as it is embodied in the moral natures of the protagonists themselves. They are motivated by a combination of altruism and by a simple wish to have some semblance of the good life, such as the house, home cooking and little luxuries that they experience when they are briefly in 'Clear Waters'. In an era dominated by the stereotypical gangster, there is an ironic miscasting of the small-time criminal by the newspapers. Bowie and his girlfriend Keechie dream of getting away somewhere and forgetting about the 'Bowie Bowers' created by the press, a fantasy of escape in which there would ultimately be just be 'the real Bowie Bowers', the man submerged by the myth of the gangster created by a hostile world.
Nicholas Ray's 1948 film of Anderson's novel, They Live By Night, is generally included in studies of canonical film noir, but is often viewed as at variance with traditional noir motifs, not just because of its rural setting but because of the passivity of Bowie and Keechie, and because Ray handles his lovers-on-the-run theme with a degree of sentimentality and romanticism. More fully representative of postwar noir is Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947, released in the UK as Build My Gallows High): widely regarded as one of the all-time great film noirs, Tourneur's film contains many of the defining characteristics of the genre. Its dark, convoluted plot has at its core the central triangle of the treacherous spider woman, the traumatized protagonist who is under her sway and a corrupt figure of patriarchal authority, the gangster in possession of the femme fatale and in conflict with the protagonist; its shadowy mood and visual style (Tourneur's cinematographer was Nicholas Musuraca), its use of a flashback structure, its cynicism and moral ambiguity, and its themes of doomed (but never sentimentalized) romantic obsession, greed and betrayal (with double- and even triple-crosses taking place) are all quintessential elements in canonical film noir.
It would be difficult, I think, to claim that the source novel, Geoffrey Homes's Build My Gallows High (1946; reissued in Prion's 'Film Ink' series in 2001), is of equal stature. But it is, in its own right, a fascinating novel, as well as an excellent example of some of the key differences between literary noir and film noir. Whether naturally mad and bad or driven to aggression by a bad male world, the femmes fatales of canonical film noir are generally required to meet an unfortunate end, dead or imprisoned, their disruptive aggression and sexuality duly punished. Literary noir, however, does not necessarily require this form of containment of the dangerous female, and we do not nearly as routinely see a reassertion of control on the part of the male subject. In fact, it offers ample opportunities for the survival and even the prospering of the tough, independent, sexual woman. In Out of the Past, Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer), the seductive and coolly calculating femme fatale, must in the end meet her death. In Homes' novel, however, 'Mumsie', as she is called here, is not killed. She is throughout the true spider woman, 'collecting' men and willing to do whatever it takes to acquire and hang on to money, a 'realist' who establishes for herself 'a good life, all the dough she wanted...No illusions'. In the end, the taciturn private eye - Red in the book (Jeff Bailey, the Robert Mitchum character in the film) - dies knowing that Mumsie, in spite of her utter cold-heartedness, will survive as part of a set of relationships that always operates.
For those readers who haven't had a chance to see the films discussed above, one can now (on Region 1 DVDs) buy 'The Scarface Deluxe Gift Set - Scarface (1983) & Scarface (1932)'; Out of the Past was reissued on Region 1 DVD in 2004; Nicholas Ray's They Drive By Night (1948) is unfortunately not available, but Robert Altman's 1974 film, Thieves Like Us, is available on VHS in both the US and the UK.
Copyright © 2005 by Lee Horsley
