Adapting Elmore

Though Elmore Leonard’s fiction now carries a literary seal of approval, films adapted from his street-level crime novels have, until recently, seldom exceeded the mediocre. As his novels- produced at nearly one a year for some forty years- have become more anodyne, his screen adaptations have become, on the whole, more watchable. Not that Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Jackie Brown are without blemishes. In fact, they might not be any more noteworthy than 3:10 to Yuma, Valdez is Coming, The Tall T and Hombre, adapted from Leonard’s stories when the latter was primarily a writer of westerns.

Yet there have been few writers who have been so often adapted, but so badly served. In a 1997 interview, Leonard recalls seeing the The Big Bounce (1969), adapted from his first crime novel: "About fifteen minutes into it, the woman sitting in front of me turned to her husband and said, 'This is the worst picture I ever saw.' And I agreed with her and all three of us got up and left." However, that film’s 2004 remake is barely any better. Made by George Armitage, the director of one of Leonard’s favourite films, Grosse Point Blank, the remake looks like a cross between a Hawaiian tourist board travelogue and Leonard dumbed-down for the sake of a consumer-oriented audience.

Part of the problem with adapting Leonard lies with an industry that seeks an easy profit, opting for generalities over detail, ersatz style over substance. Because Leonard’s fiction reads so effortlessly and seems cinematic, some think he can be produced on the cheap. As Leonard told me when I interviewed him for my book Heartbreak and Vine, “The problem is that what’s left after the adaptation is just the dialogue, and it’s not always my dialogue...[When] you reduce one of my manuscripts to 120 pages...you realise my books are not just about dialogue. Nor are they just about plot. It has more to do with the characters. So the screenplay is just the plot. An unusual plot, but it’s still just a plot.”

One wonders why it’s taken Hollywood so long to realise that Leonard’s work is character, rather than plot, driven. Even if his last few novels haven’t been as exciting as earlier work like City Primeval, La Brava and Glitz, characters in the more recent Mr Paradise and Tishomingo Blues retain their ambiguity, particularly Leonard’s criminals, who are as, if not more, interesting than those who pursue them. Though in Leonard’s world everyone stumbles towards corruption, there are, with the exception of his drug-addicted psychotics, few who do not garner sympathy from the reader. Consequently, part of the problem with Leonard adaptations has been Hollywood’s inability to establish back-stories for his various characters, or to understand that Leonard’s characters are more complex than they seem.

Faced with a novel that reads like a film treatment, directors convince themselves the hard work has been done. Yet until Get Shorty (1995), most of the characters in the films, even where Leonard is credited as screenwriter, have lacked the depth of their fictional dopplegangers. As Scott Frank, who wrote the script for Out of Sight and Get Shorty, said in an interview, “You have to start with those characters and that may mean reinventing some of the plot." Of course, plot fundamentalists would prefer not taking that risk. Yet Leonard’s plots are usually little more than an excuse for his characters to interact, revealing their personalities through their use of language.

Leonard’s humour, sprinkled with references to race and sex, has also been a problem for Hollywood. As Leonard told me, “When I wrote screenplays, I would...plot out adaptations straight from the books. I assumed that they liked the style, and the ironical element running throughout the story, which is not exactly comedy. Sure, the characters say funny things, but, ultimately, the characters aren’t trying to be funny.” At least Frank and Tarantino have understood that Leonard’s dialogue can be funny and serious at the same time. As Leonard reported saying to Sonnenfeld, “When one of the characters says something funny, don’t cut to another character to get a reaction or a laugh. Treat them seriously and let the audience decide.” Of course, Leonard’s characters love to talk. “‘Chili Palmer's a talker,’" says Nick in the novel Be Cool. ‘That's what he does, he talks.’” But what interests Leonard is not what is said but how it’s said, not the words so much as the rhythm of the words, which is difficult to capture whether on the page or on the screen.

Then there is the way Leonard breeches the gap separating the real from the representational. As the narrator says of Chili in Get Shorty, “He could see himself in different movies Robert DeNiro had been in. He could maybe do an Al Pacino movie, play a hard-on.” Conversely, in the movie Out of Sight, George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez portray people who could be basing themselves on those two stars. It not only represents confusions between the real and the representational, but conveniently substittutes for character description, which Leonard, more Hemingway than Chandler, likes to avoid.

By the late 1980s, Leonard decided to stop writing screenplays, having notched up screenwriting credits for a number of his own novels. Not just The Big Bounce (1969), but The Moonshine War (1970), Joe Kidd (1972), Mr Majestyk (74), The Rosary Murders (1979), Stick (1985), and 52 Pick Up (1986), Cat Chaser (1988). “You’ve put all your energy and thought into the book,” said Leonard, “then you’ve got to redo it in a script...So you’ve done that first draft and it might be good, but then you’ve got to rewrite it a number of times. In the end you get sick to death of the whole thing.”

Understandable, since Leonard’s relationship with Hollywood was, even then, more than thirty years old, stretching back to 1957, when Delmar Daves’s adapted his story 3:10 to Yuma. Now considered a classic, 3:10 to Yuma was written in the post-High Noon era of psychological westerns. With a screenplay by Halsted Welles, Daves’s film stars Van Heflin as a rancher who, to collect the bounty money that will save his drought-stricken ranch, escorts outlaw Glen Ford to the state penitentiary. That same year saw the release of a more underrated, but no less successful, adaptation. Budd Boetticher’s The Tall T, scripted by Burt Kennedy, stars Randolph Scott and Richard Boone. If any old-school director was to do justice to Leonard it was Boetticher. Described by historian David Thomson as perhaps the “most impressive and least handicapped B film ever made,” The Tall T begins with Scott, having lost his horse in a bet, hitching a ride with a stage coach carrying a pair of newly weds. The stage is soon overrun by Richard Boone and his team of half-wits. “Almost all of the dialogue,” said Leonard, “came right out of the novel.” Like a character from Ed Dorn’s epic poem Gunslinger, Scott endears us through parable, wordplay, and, according to Paul Shrader, “a crackerbarrel Socratic method: questioning, teasing, suggesting.”

Though Leonard’s westerns might be violent, they are mostly anti-racist. This is the case for Hombre. In a deal brokered by Hollywood agent H.N. Swanson, 20th Century Fox in 1964 paid Leonard $10,000 for the rights to the novella, enabling him to quit his Detroit advertising job, though he still supplemented his income by writing scripts for films put together by his old ad agency. Having represented Chandler, Woolrich, Cain, Burnett, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, Swanson was largely responsible for Leonard switching from westerns to crime fiction, having sold his first crime novel, The Big Bounce after it had been rejected eighty-seven times. Directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman, Hombre (1967) concerns a cowboy raised by Apaches who attempts to make a life for himself in white society. Notable for its realistic dialogue, Hombre depicts the heartbreaks of someone who fights intolerance while indifferent to his fate.

If the efficient and timely Valdez is Coming (1970), starring Burt Lancaster as a Mexican double-crossed by a rancher, was not the classic it seemed to be when it first appeared, it’s still one of the better examples of the genre during a time when good westerns were becoming fewer and further between. Made by neophyte director Edwin Sherin, whose reputation at the time rested on having staged The Great White Hope, the movie is another tale of intolerance and racial hostility in the southwest.

Throughout the 1970s, Leonard’s scripts would be misused by a series of lackadaisical directors and producers. The first example of which was The Moonshine War. Directed by Richard Quine at MGM, it features Patrick McGoohan, Alda and Richard Widmark. Fresh from the ground breaking TV series, The Prisoner, McGoohan reportedly approached Leonard on the set and said, “What’s it like to stand there and hear all your lines fucked up.” Still, some of the characters display Leonard-like characteristics. Such as Dual, played by singer Lee Hazlewood, who develops a lascivious liking for “that boy’s nice suit.” While Quine, having previously directed Drive a Crooked Mile and Pushover, is uninspired, Alan Alda appears too one-dimensional to be a convincing Leonard protagonist.

A couple years later, Leonard was writing the screenplay for Joe Kidd- bounty hunter tracks down Mexican bandits- for John Sturges at Universal. Starring Clint Eastwood, the film seems both violent and morally dubious. One might think the combination of Sturges (The Magnificent Seven, Gunfight at OK Corral and Bad Day at Black Rock), Leonard and Eastwood was a menage made in heaven, but the film doesn’t come off to anyone’s credit. Though neither The Moonshine War nor Joe Kidd is an unmitigated disaster, neither is comparable to their director’s best work, nor to Leonard’s fiction.

In 1974, Mr. Majestyk, made at United Artist, gave a passing nod to Leonard’s anti-racist westerns. Directed by Richard Fleischer, it features Charles Bronson as a melon grower who confronts the local mafia. Here Fleischer commits the cardinal sin of Leonard adaptations and fails to create a convincing back-story for the movie’s villain. "Most of my movies,” said Leonard, “make the bad guys over-the-top bad rather than bad but human underneath. In Mr Majestyk, he is so over-the-top evil that it ruined it." Like Quine and Sturges, Fleischer was a Hollywood veteran with a decent track record, including noir classics Narrow Margin and Violent Saturday. But the subtleties of Leonard’s manner and libertarian perspective were beyond him. In searching for material that would allow him to repeat past successes, Fleischer ends up simply recycling past clichés.

The next to trample on Leonard’s work was Burt Reynolds, who, as director and lead actor, turned Stick from a crime novel containing some interesting characters into another Hollywood action movie. “In the end,” says Leonard "I didn't recognise my screenplay at all.” Around the same time, Whiskers Production paid Leonard $20,000 to rewrite the first twenty pages of a script to his novel Cat Chaser. Instead, Leonard rewrote the entire script. The studio promptly fired him, and the film slouched towards incomprehensibility. Abel Ferrara would say, “Even I couldn’t understand it. And I directed it.” So contorted is Cat Chaser that any dedicated Leonard fan might be excused for taking a perverse interest in it Likewise, 52 Pick-Up. Directed by John Frankenheimer, it derives from an early street-wise Leonard novel about a businessman who takes revenge on blackmailers who attempt to film his sex life. Unfortunately, the once talented Frankenheimer turns the narrative, starring Roy Scheider and Ann-Margaret, into a routine thriller, itself a remake of The Ambassador, an even less remarkable adaptation starring Robert Mitchum, made two years earlier, minus Leonard’s screenplay.

Ironically, Leonard’s emergence as a bankable Hollywood property coincided with the publication of Get Shorty, a novel that lampoons Hollywood and its relationship to organised crime. Suddenly everyone in Tinseltown was extolling Leonard’s virtues. While Sonnenfeld’s film would be surpassed by subsequent adaptations, it contains, thanks to Frank’s script, some excellent repartee, and comes-off as a tangled comedy of manners. Though it enjoys biting the hand that feeds it, Get Shorty succumbs to its self-consciousness and stylisation, perhaps inevitable given its subject matter. Unfortunately, the camerawork does not equal that seen in the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Millar’s Crossing for which Sonnenfeld was responsible. Yet, with its many fine moments, Get Shorty helped revive Leonard’s Hollywood profile.

Unfortunately, Paul Shrader’s Touch (1997) did not do the same. One would have thought a former critic, screenwriter and director of Mishima and American Gigolo, would have been up to the task. But Touch seems overly static, and, at times, tedious. Not qualities one associates with Leonard, who wrote the novel in 1977, ten years before its publication, only for it to be rejected due to its prickly subject matter. Touch centres on a young man trained in a Catholic order who looks after alcoholics, curing those by touching them, after which stigmata wounds appear on his body. Though the ex-Calvinist Shrader deploys Christopher Walken, Bridgit Fonda and Skeet Ulrich, the humour is stilted and the portrayals cartoonish. But Touch, which portrays religion as a structure comparable to organised crime, should at least be commended for mocking religious zealotry, tabloid television, America's penchant for the sensational.

As the most successful of recent Leonard films, Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) attests to an obvious affinity between author and director. “Quentin Tarantino has always been a fan of mine,” said Leonard. “Ever since, as a teenager, he stole Switch, and got caught doing it. Then he went back and stole the book again. When, thirteen years later, Rum Punch was published, and he realised that some of the same characters in that book, he wanted to buy the film rights straight away.” Jackie Brown was to became Leonard’s favourite adaptation and script. After all, Tarantino’s script pays homage to the spirit, if not letter, of the novel, adding his own touches, such as changing the locale to the west coast and portraying Jackie Brown as an African-American. While Tarantino has a refined eye for actors capable of playing Leonard’s off-beat characters, the movie’s success can be attributed to the fact that, as producer, director and writer, he was able to exert control over the entire process.

Appearing a few months later, Steven Sonderberg’s Out of Sight (1998) may not be as convincing as Jackie Brown, but it works well as an adaptation. This is helped by the fact that Leonard was in constant communication with scriptwriter Frank, and consulted on aspects of the film, including casting: “I suggested Elizabeth Shue because Leaving Las Vegas had just come out. Then Jennifer Lopez came along, and I liked her immediately.” Not that he and Frank always agreed. “He wanted a more upbeat ending,” said Leonard. “I said, ‘You’ve got to remember it’s her story.’ But Scott Frank said, “No, it’s her book, but it’s his film.” When I saw the picture, I realised he was right.”

Out of Sight, Jackie Brown and Get Shorty, though more complex than those early westerns, work for much the same reasons. That is, they are built around interesting characters and are authentic in their depiction of a particular time and place. While only Jackie Brown approximates classic caper movies of the past, each conveys Leonard’s attitude and sense of language. Though Tarantino, Sonderberg and Sonnenfeld, have, to varying degrees, succeeded, others, beholden to disinterested economies of scale, lack the autonomy needed to confront the narrative traps presented by Leonard’s work. As for Leonard, he remains characteristically upbeat, saying, “I think in the future, film will affect writing more and more.” Surely, the opposite might also prove to be true. In either case, it takes more than money to make a smooth transition.

Ben Maddow: Affairs of the Skin


Part 3

That Maddow was blacklisted in 1952 might account for the statement on the dust jacket of Forty-Four Gravel Street which states that the author had recently adapted Fred Zinnerman’s Member of the Wedding. Not only would one be hard pressed to find evidence supporting this claim, but Maddow would maintain that, at the time of his blacklisting, he had been working on an early version of High Noon and had just finished a draft of The Wild One. Though, after seeing the finished product, Maddow insisted that his name should be removed from the latter film. That might have been the case, but it was, in all likelihood, less his dislike of the The Wild One, than McCarthyite politics that caused his employer, Stanley Kramer, to summons Maddow to his office only to inform the writer that he had no choice but to fire him.

As for the blacklist, Maddow was to insist that, since those on the Hollywood left were making considerable sums of money, the process had more to do with denying the left funds than with the notion that the left might have been influencing Hollywood films. According to Maddow, there was little to influence. What, said Maddow, was leftwing about Intruder in the Dust, other than it was about a black man, who was, in any case, not even an African-American. Moreover, Maddow maintained that, if compared to New York, there were, in fact, relatively few leftwingers in Hollywood. He would point out that most Hollywood leftists were from New York, and, once on the West Coast, found themselves in alien territory, so joined the party as “a sop to their conscience.” Typically, Maddow’s cynical analysis, though containing an element of truth, fails to consider that some principles transcend sectarianism, locale, and the blatantly obvious. True, the total number of Communist Party members in the movie business was never very large. The House Committee maintained that there were 324 employees, and their wives who were Party members. This out of an industry of more than 30,000. According to Otto Friedrich, in his excellent City of Nets, “scarcely two or three dozen Communists could be said to have any importance whatsoever.” Likewise, fund-raising. While the HUAC maintained the Hollywood Communists had raised over $900,000, social critic Murray Kempton suggests the figure could not have been more than $500,000, and this was over a fifteen year period.

It was through Irving Lerner, whom he had known since his days making documentaries at Frontier Films, that Maddow met the infamous Philip Yordan, Maddow would end up writing between six and ten scripts for Yordan, who, himself, would go on to receive credits for “writing” The Big Combo, House of Strangers, and scores of other films. According to Maddow, Yordan was incapable of writing anything, and, even before the blacklist, had employed others, blacklisted or not- though obviously blacklisted writers were cheaper- to do his writing for him. But in Hollywood, Yordan’s approach was not unusual. Well-known writers would often have a stable of underlings working for them. For instance, Ben Hecht, who, amongst his many great films, penned such noir efforts as Edge of Dawn, Kiss of Death, Underworld and Where the Sidewalk Ends, employed a staff to write in the style of Ben Hecht, with the famed writer adding a personal touch to authenticise the scripts. It is another example of Hollywood’s lop-sided orientation, a situation that lends itself to various absurdities, from hiring a stable of writers to Milton Sperling (producer of I Wake Up Screaming, Cloak and Dagger and co-scriptwriter of Merrill’s Marauders) asking Maddow to work on a film with him, the idea of which was to look at the last five winners of Best Picture of the Year, take the best scenes out of each of them, and recombine them into a new film. Maddow wisely chose to pass on that particular project.

In Maddow’s estimation, Yordan was nothing short of a con-man, who began his writing career by going to his local library where he asked how one might go about becoming a writer. The librarian politely inquired if he had ever read anything. Yordan had to admit he hadn’t. She suggested he should read a play, study its structure, and try to write something similar. She gave him a copy of Anna Christie, which Yordan took home, read and copied word for word, changing its locale, making the language a bit more contemporary and changing the heroine from a woman who returns to New England to a woman who, as a B dancer, returns to Chicago. Retitling it Anna Lucasta, he was able to sell it to Hollywood, which launched his career as a Tinseltown writer.

According to one filmography, reproduced in Backstory 2, Yordan’s screenwriting credits can be attributed to a variety of writers. Maddow supposedly wrote Man Crazy, The Naked Jungle, Gun Glory, Men in War, God’s Little Acre, and Johnny Guitar, while Joseph Mankiewicz wrote House of Strangers, and Robert Tasker wrote Dillinger, despite the fact that Yordan received an Academy Award nomination for the latter script. Yordan would also employ Bernie Gordon (55 Days at Peking), Milton Sperling (The Bramble Bush), Ben Barman (El Cid) and Arnaud d’Usseau (Studs Lonigan).

So enigmatic is Maddow’s Hollywood profile, and such was the low regard he had for his own scriptwriting career, that it is difficult to pin down exactly what films he did or did not write. It is said that under Yordan’s name Maddow wrote Johnny Guitar, a film which many have taken to be a critique of the McCarthy era. Strangely, Maddow always maintained he had no recollection of having worked on the film, while Yordan would swear he wrote the film while on location. One Spanish periodical goes so far as to claim that Maddow not only wrote for Yordan, but also ghosted all of Huston’s films. This is hardly likely, Maddow was never able or willing to elucidate the matter, saying that, for the most part, he only saw the rushes to the films he worked on, and that six weeks’ work that happened over thirty years in the past can easily fade beyond recall.

The ambiguity surrounding Maddow’s- or, for that matter, Yordan’s- screenwriting credits leads one to briefly ruminate on the politics surrounding film credits. Any close reader of these chapters will no doubt have reached the conclusion that the world of film credits is, indeed, a murky one, abundant in falsifications, discrepancies, omissions, and inaccuracies. It is a subject about which film historian and critic David Thomson says the following:

“Anyone who spends long contemplating the product, or listening to the stories told by men and women who have worked in film, knows that credits are not to be trusted... A great script is many things, or versions, along the way. In the end, it is the transcript of the finished film that may involve structures only perceived in the editing room as well as lines lopped over resistant lips. The script is always changing,and there are people who have had busy and well-paid lives assisting the changes with hardly a credit to show for it. Some writers are doctors; and nearly all writers feel sick sooner or later.”

Regarding Yordan, Thomson concedes that he was a superb deal-maker, hustler, and entrepreneur: “He could have written nothing, or he could have written everything. The truth will never be known, and if Yordan is half the operator one suspects, then it is probably beyond remembering.”

Employing blacklisted writers might have been a lifeline for Maddow, but it would prove even more lucrative and career-enhancing for Yordan. Not that the distribution of profits would take place on a level playing field. The two men were meant to split any money derived from the scripts, but Maddow, who, for obvious reasons, had never put pen to paper regarding their arrangement, would remain in the dark regarding the exact percentage he was receiving from Yordan, and had to take the latter’s word that he was receiving his fair share. This is not something one would normally choose to do when dealing with one so slippery as Yordan, the supreme trickster of post-1930s screenwriting.

It wasn’t that Yordan was leftwing or rightwing. The fact was, he had no politics, much less scruples. Unless, in Hollywood, self-aggrandisement counts as a political position. For this was a man who, according to Maddow, would buy the rights to novels on the basis of their covers, only to stack them on his desk to illustrate to anyone entering his office the number of titles he currently controlled. Maddow even claimed to have written a novel for Yordan. It was a typical piece of chicanery that began with Yordan selling a screenplay- written by Maddow in three-and-a-half weeks- on the basis that he had already sold the novel on which the screenplay was supposedly based; and then selling the novel on the basis that he had already sold the screenplay. To secure the deal, Yordan then told a minor executive at Warners that he would pay off his large gambling debt in exchange for the executive telling Jack Warner that he had mistakenly taken home the script, began reading it and couldn’t put it down. At which point it was up to Maddow to write, in a matter of days, the non-existent novel and send it off to the publisher. Thus the script to Gun Glory (1957) and the novel Man of the West were born. Of course, Maddow’s name was missing from both the film and the novel.

Despite such exploitation, Maddow and Yordan remained on reasonably good terms. However, not being able to write under his own name depressed Maddow to such a degree that he, like so many in Hollywood, began seeing a psychoanalyst. To see his words and ideas on the screen, yet not be able to claim them as his own, would lead to a case of writer’s block even regarding stories and poetry written under his own name, a condition from which it would take him a number of years to recover.

Maddow’s recantation occurred in the late 1950s when the blacklist was all but over. Supposedly, Maddow’s agent at the William Morris agency was desperate to get him work, so much so that the agent was willing to pay someone to have Maddow’s name removed from the blacklist. Not that Maddow was an innocent bystander in the matter. After going to the office of Republican congressman and committee representative Donald Jackson, and signing a statement, Maddow was, overnight, once again able to work. According to his friend and fellow blacklist victim Walter Bernstein, Maddow willingly admitted he had become a friendly witness, that he had simply grown “tired of going into the screening room when the lights were out,” and that it was his decision to phone the William Morris Agency and demand that they get him “out of jail.” Though Maddow had told Bernstein that he had only named those who had already been named, former Frontier Films director Leo Hurwitz claimed Maddow had named him, which all but ruined his career. Once removed from the blacklist, Maddow’s depression quickly disappeared, and he immediately found employment with that friendliest of friendly witnesses Elia Kazan on Wild River (1960).

Maddow would claim he felt little allegiance to the Hollywood left, or to his earlier political principles which, interestingly, were formed, as a Sand Street investigator, through observation, rather than through theory or participation in a particular struggle. Maddow would insist he was beyond ideology. Regarding his recantation, Maddow would only say that “conscience had nothing to do with it,” he had simply felt caught between two flags, and if one does not believe in flags, then what could it have mattered to him. What’s more, Maddow claimed he had disagreed with the Party on several issues, and, though he mixed with party members, would disclaim any adherence to conventional Marxism: “Any theory, when matched up with life, doesn’t begin to deal with complexity. And I’m interested in complexity.”

A man of mystery, Maddow, who would pass away in 1992, maintained that Hollywood, in many ways, suited him. Yet, with an almost Buddhist-like resignation, he would also say, “your spiritual life is inward. It’s enclosed in your house and grounds. It’s in your books and records,” and not in what one produces for money.

Strangely, many of his former leftwing friends were willing to forgive Maddow. As director Faith Hubley put it, “I don’t believe in permanent guilt. There are some people I’ll never talk to because I don’t really like them. But I feel some people were victims- they were weak, and they became victims- and I believe they punished themselves enough, so I don’t have to punish them.” While Bernstein says, “I always felt Ben was a strange man in many ways...[Although] my friend Arnold Manoff was not surprised at all, because he had always thought there had been something dark about Ben. But I feel uncomfortable assessing this or that degree of guilt because...so much of that feeling...is subjective.” Manoff, the husband of Lee Grant, died in 1963, a year before the release of Maddow’s now all-but-forgotten Affair of the Skin. Despite his obvious talent, Maddow would leave the world of film in the 1970s, his career and perspective as enigmatic as ever.

Films China Strikes Back, 1937; Native Land, 1942 (as David Wolff); Framed, aka Paula, 1947; The Man From Colorado, 1948; Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, aka Blood on My Hands, 1948; Intruder in the Dust, 1949; The Asphalt Jungle, 1950; Shadow in the Sky, 1951; The Wild One, 1954 (uncredited); The Naked Jungle, 1954 (as Philip Yordan); No Down Payment, 1957 (as Philip Yordan); Gun Glory, 1957 (also novel, as Philip Yordan); Murder by Contract, 1958 (uncredited); The Unforgiven, 1960; The Savage Eye, 1960; Two Loves, aka The Spinster, 1961; An Affair of the Skin, aka Love as a Disorder, 1963; The Balcony, 1963; The Way West, 1967; The Chairman, aka The Most Dangerous Man in the World, 1969; The Secret of Santa Vittoria, 1969; The Mephisto Waltz, 1971; Man on a String, 1972 (TV).

Novels Forty-Four Gravel Street , Little Brown, Boston, 1952.

Sources Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s, ed. Patrick McGilligan, University of California, Berkeley, 1991. A Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson, Andre Deutsch, London, 1998. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s by Otto Friedrich, University of California, Berkeley, 1997. “Evolution of the Thriller” by Claude Chabrol, Cahiers du Cinema, The 1950s, Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed, Jim Hillier. Routledge/BFI, London, 1985. The Hollywood Screenwriters, ed Richard Corliss, Avon, New York, 1972. “The Making of The Naked City by Malvin Wald, The Big Book of Noir, eds. Ed Gorman, Lee Server, Martin H. Greenberg, Carroll & Graf, 1998. More Than Night by James Naremore, University of California, Berkeley, 1998. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, eds. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, St. Martin’s, New York, 1997.

Ben Maddow: Affairs of the Skin

Part 2

Never thinking he was following a particular career, Maddow, at first, considered writing for the movies merely a pleasurable way of making a living. When he didn’t feel like working, he was not beyond turning down a project without a second thought. He once had the nerve to turn down a lucrative screenwriting job at Columbia because, as he told the studio, he was working on a long poem and didn’t have the time. Maddow preferred to think of himself as a would-be writer of short stories and poetry. Not that he was alone in this pursuit, but, as he would later say, “I noticed that most of the guys who were in the same position I was, writers with ambition, never got around to doing their own work. They would accept one assignment after another. Or they would spend three or four months between assignments doing nothing or getting drunk.”

Hollywood Ten scriptwriter Albert Maltz had once told Maddow there were three secrets to a successful Hollywood career: talent, luck and social contacts. Maddow doubtlessly had the talent and the luck, but he did not go out of his way to cultivate contacts. He and his wife rarely socialised with Hollywood people, and knew few fellow-scriptwriters. Fortunately, Maddow, when he wanted to, was usually able to find work, writing films like the noir melodrama Framed (1947). Directed by Richard Wallace, and starring Glen Ford and Barry Sullivan, it concerns an unemployed drunk who is used as a fall-guy by a couple of thieves. It was Maddow who thought up the opening scene in which a truck goes out of control. Though the film, like other examples of film noir, have been expurgated ad infinitum, Maddow would say that he “never thought these films were a vehicle for any kind of ideas.” They were simply meant to entertain audiences. Any serious ideas that came forth from the films were, according to Maddow, purely accidental, or came from the novels on which they were based.

Though this was not the case regarding Maddow’s script for the extraordinary The Asphalt Jungle, a film which differs considerably from Burnett’s novel. Not only does Huston’s movie do away with the police superintendant-as-narrator, but, unlike the novel, it focuses on the criminals, treating their activities as an everyday human endeavour. This is why, according to Maddow, audiences sympathise with the film’s criminals. As far as Maddow was concerned, Burnett’s crooks were always fascinating, and he was only highlighting what the author had inferred in the novel. Of course, one can also attribute the success of Huston’s film to the cast, predominantly unknown East Coast actors assembled by the director. The one established Hollywood star that Huston had managed to bring on board was Sterling Hayden. Like the director, Hayden was a former communist who had been a member of the Hollywood Committee for the First Amendment and would later reluctantly supply names to the HUAC. He also spent time on the couch of Tinseltown psychotherapist Ernest Philip Cohen, who, at the time, was urging patients to comply with the HUAC. Hayden would say to Cohen, “I don’t think you have the foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing.” Cohen, a former party member himself, was, according to writer and director Abraham Polonsky, not only turning patients into stool pigeons, but handing over names and information gathered from his sessions to the Feds.

The studio had let Huston have his way with the cast and general direction because, in Maddow’s opinion, it never considered the film to be important enough to merit the usual amount of meddling and interference. However, the film would come under heavy criticism for its liberal attitude towards the underworld. While MGM boss Louis B. Mayer, who had supplied the names of various screenwriters to the HUAC, hated the movie- calling it “full of nasty, ugly people. I won’t walk across the room to see something like that”- and wished Huston had stuck with hackneyed stereotypes.
A study of, as one character puts it, “this left-handed form of human endeavour,” the film, to everyone’s surprise, was given the go-ahead by the Production Code office. This despite the fact that it trod on dangerous ground, showing a robbery in detail, depicting a crook who escapes punishment by committing suicide, and portraying the police as corruptible. It’s possible that the Production Code office, who concluded that the movie showed that “justice triumphs through efforts of law,” might have seen an early version of Maddow’s script, which went some way to portray the police sympathetically, rather than the final script or film. In his earlier script, Maddow had included an epilogue and prologue- similar to what would turn up a few years later in Invasion of the Body Snatchers- in which the Police Commissioner is shown talking to a group of reporters. “The worst police force in the world,” he says, “is better than no police force...Take the police off the streets for forty-eight hours and nobody would be safe...We’d be back in the jungle.” Though Huston junked Maddow’s framing device, he did include that bizarre penultimate scene which takes place at the police station: the Commissioner switches on the police radios and says to waiting reporters, “Suppose we had no police force, no matter how bad?...[The] jungle wins, the predatory beasts take over.” Yet, with hindsight, the message is clear: this is a film that not only shows crime as an everyday occurrence, but mirrors the demoralisation of the left and the nation’s unease during the onset of the atomic era, McCarthyism and the souring of the American dream.

It was Clarence Brown who recommended Maddow to Huston. Maddow never felt totally comfortable when faced with Huston’s princely lifestyle, but the two got on reasonably well, working together on the script for some six months. Of course, it was Maddow who did most of the writing, while Huston talked. Maddow also found it difficult to adjust to Huston’s work habits, which consisted of getting up late, attending to various domestic matters, having lunch, working for a couple hours, followed by a cocktail, by which time he would be about ready to sit down for dinner. Finally, Maddow was urged by the film’s producers to make Huston do more work, lest the film fall hopelessly behind schedule.

Working with Huston gave Maddow some insights into the source of cinematic ideas. He told Richard Corliss in the early 1970s, that films come from three sources. They can come from an idea originating with the director or producer, though such a person is “generally quite devoid of any but the most primitive notion of actual human life. Frequently he is quite unable to write, though there are certain gifted individuals who are able to dictate.” So a screenwriter is hired, but “it is difficult to make these people come alive, because the idea, however charming, does not grow from the marvelous confusion of American Life, but springs...from the crevices of a clever, skillful and egotistical brain.” The second source is through an adaptation of a play or novel. “If the novel is bad, the film has a decent chance to be good. If the novel is fairly good, the film is generally not bad at all. But if the novel is great, the film, paralyzed with admiration, is quite hopeless.” The third, and, according to Maddow, the source of truly great films is “when the real maker of the film, the director, is also the author. This imposes the interesting burden upon him or her of being a person of enormous talent. We have, so far in this country, only a few who can do it.” However, Maddow would also say, in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, that the situation is not without hope: “I have a purely personal superstition that good films are made mostly in the decade after a country has suffered defeat. Let us hope, then that the golden age of film in America is yet to be.”


Part 3 to follow.

Ben Maddow: Affairs of the Skin

Part 1

Not listed amongst the over 20,000 films in Halliwell’s Film Guide, An Affair of the Skin, was, at the time of its release in 1964, a worthy, if not altogether successful, attempt at being an American art movie, a hodgepodge of influences, from Italian Realists, Antoniani and Bergman to US social conscience films and documentarists like Robert Flaherty. Written, produced and directed by former documentarist and Hollywood scriptwriter Ben Maddow, the film was, for the most part, shot on the streets of New York, and memorable for its sensuousness, its street-level camera-work and use of natural light. Strangely, the film has since disappeared from film catalogues.

Still, Maddow’s career remains an interesting one. Under the name David Wolf, he published poems and short stories, and provided commentary and narration for documentaries like Native Land (1942). Under his own name, he also wrote Forty-Four Gravel Street, which, set in Brooklyn, part-urban hardboiler, part-proletariat tract and part-literary novel. Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Maddow was able to make a living writing screenplays under another scriptwriter’s name (a number of blacklisted writers worked under pseudomyns, or worked for other writers). Later, after he’d retired from making films, Maddow would write books on photographers such as Edward Weston. Despite his numerous film credits, Maddow never considered himself merely a screenwriter. As he would say in an interview with Film Comment critic Richard Corliss, “In my experience...there is no such animal as a screenwriter. There are persons...who write screenplays, but they are admittedly monsters, because it is the grotesque fact that they have responsibility, but no power.” As far as Maddow was concerned, screenwriting was just a job, one that allowed him to finance other projects.

An Affair of the Skin featured actors Kevin McCarthy and Lee Grant. McCarthy had recently appeared in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Misfits. His co-star, Lee Grant, had, like Maddow, also been blacklisted, though less for her politics than for refusing to testify against her husband, playwright Arnold Manoff (No Minor Vices, The Big Break and, along with Walter Bernstein and Abraham Polonsky, the author of most of the episodes of the historical TV program You Are There). Prior to that her portrayal of a shoplifter in William Wyler’s Detective Story (1951) had earned her the best actress award at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination. Though, once blacklisted, her Hollywood appearances would quickly grind to a halt, Grant, before appearing in Affair of the Skin, was in such marginal productions as Cornel Wilde’s Storm Fear (1956), Delbert Mann’s Middle of the Night (1959) and Genet’s The Balcony, the latter also produced, directed and adapted for the screen by Maddow. But Grant would not relaunch her Tinseltown career until 1975 when she appeared in Hal Ashby’s astute critique of the early 1970s, Shampoo.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Maddow had been a major influence on a number of film-makers and writers. Malvin Wald, who, along with Albert Maltz, wrote the cutting-edge and streetwise The Naked City, recounts meeting Maddow while both were serving in the Air Force motion pictures unit. At the time, Maddow was championing the documentary techniques of Robert Flaherty, John Grierson and Joris Ivens. The latter film-makers would influence Maddow when it came to writing the commentary for the one of the era’s more heralded documentaries, Native Land (1942). In turn, Maddow would influence the look and cinematic ethos of The Naked City. But Maddow would be less known for his influence, his films, poetry, and novel, than for his screenplays, particularly his adaption, written alongside John Huston, of W.R. Burnett’s novel The Asphalt Jungle (1950), closely followed by his once praised but now underrated adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust (MGM, 1949).

Once considered a person of political principle, Maddow chose to make an eleventh hour mea culpa to the HUAC, for which he would be roundly criticised. In his book Naming Names, Victor Navasky claims a special dispensation was created purely for Maddow’s benefit. Despite his recantation, Maddow was never able to regain a foothold in Hollywood. Not that this seemed to bother him, for Maddow’s rejection allowed him to pursue his independent avant-garde film productions like An Affair of the Skin (1964), The Balcony (1963), The Savage Eye (1960 and Storm of Strangers (1970). While his final screenplay was the more mainstream The Mephisto Waltz (1971), a cult effort written for Paul Wendkos which some have interpreted as a defence of his testimony- its theme being if you can’t beat them, join them, or the devil makes use of idle hands- before the HUAC.


Born in 1909, Maddow grew up in a small town outside New York city. At Columbia University, he studied under poet Mark Van Doren, read the likes of Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Shakespere’s Sonnets, and Emily Dickinson, and began to write poetry that was, according to Maddow, “pretty dreadful, so exaggerated.” While Hollywood attracted journalists, novelists and dramatists, Maddow was one of the few active poets to work in the studios.

Out of college and unemployed for two years, Maddow was finally able to find work as an orderly in Bellevue Hospital. At this point, he did not consider himself a writer, and, in fact, did not start writing seriously until after the war. So bleak was the future during the Depression, and so unsuited was he for the job market, that Maddow saw himself as a permanent hospital employee. But when Roosevelt was elected in 1932, he was able, with his college degree, to become an “investigator” in the social services department, a job that entailed visiting prospective relief recipients. Assigned to a middle-class district, Maddow found the shame of middle-class people asking for assistance reminiscent of his own family, and so asked to be transferred to a poorer district. He was sent to Sand Street in Brooklyn where he felt more comfortable: “When you came down the street, kids would take your hand and start shouting, ‘Investigator!’ You were a famous man.” His experiences there would go into his novel Forty-four Gravel Street. It was while working as an investigator that he became politically aware. This would be reflected in his poetry, which he was beginning to publish, more often than not under the pseudonym, David Wolf, so, according to Maddow, his colleagues would not think he was getting “uppity.”

When he was unemployed, Maddow would often take refuge in the movie theatres of New York, where, for fifteen cents, he would sit through as many as three features. He saw films, not only from Hollywood, but from Russia and France, and was particularly impressed by the films of Alexander Dovzhenko, which were, he realised, constructed like poems.

It was while working on Sand Street that Maddow came across an advertisement in a New York newspaper for a poet who could write the commentary for a twenty minute film about baggage in the harbour. The quirkiness of the idea appealed to Maddow, as did the prospect of working in film. The project turned out to be Ralph Steiner’s Harbor Scenes (1935). While working on that film, Maddow met other still-photographers who were trying to make films and were searching for someone to write for them. Soon Maddow had singlehandedly invented a style of narration, one which would be used in countless other documentary films, as well as in various examples of street-level film noir, not least of which was Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. Constructing the narration as though it were a poem, Maddow sought to have each word modify an image. With the film running before him, Maddow would record his commentary, “carpentering phrases so they fit into the rhythm of the film.” Though these days the style has become a cliche, at the time it was nothing short of revolutionary.

The documentary film group to which Maddow attached himself happened to be an adjunct to the Film and Photo League, which, in turn, was the cultural branch of the Workers Relief League, a leftwing insurance company set-up to encourage photographers- a forerunner of modern day film-maker co-operatives- in which each person paid minimal dues for the use of a dark room and, if necessary, lessons in how to make and process film. Not surprisingly, considering the era, it was Marxist in orientation, and affiliated to the Popular Front. Because the smallest detail had to be discussed, each film was an even longer and more involved process than usual. Moreover, all decisions were to be taken collectively. In an interview with Patrick McGilligan, Maddow recalls standing on a street corner with his fellow members vehemently arguing about something that appeared, at the time, very important, when the issue had simply been where they should go for lunch.

Influenced by the CPUSA slogan, “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism,” the patriotic Native Land was the culmination of Maddow’s documentary career at Frontier Films. So huge was the project- at least in their terms- that the company, in the making of the film, eventually went broke.

Despite working in New York, which, at the time, was a cultural hotbed, Maddow, when it came to writers, knew only fellow-poets Muriel Rukeyser, Maxwell Bodenheim and Kenneth Fearing. Rukeyser was a stalwart lesbian whose radical spirit continued through the Vietnam war era, while Bodenheim was the bete noire of the New York poetry world. Leftwing parents would tell their wayward sons to be careful or they’d end up like the Bohemian Max Bodenheim. After writing two or three interesting novels, Bodenheim flirted with a possible Hollywood career, only to become a Greenwich Village poet-clown bartering his poems for drinks. Along with his girlfriend, Bodenheim was found murdered in a Greenwich Village flophouse. On the other hand, Fearing would continue to write his hardboiled poetry- he won the Yale Prize for Younger Poets- and would pen semi-hardboilers- often deploying alternating narrative voices- such as The Big Clock and Clark Gifford’s Body.

After working on a documentary in South America with future eminence-gris of the New York avant-garde film set, Willard Van Dyke, Maddow was drafted into the armed forces and assigned to the Army’s Signal Corps. With his background in film and writing, it was decided that Maddow should be trained as a radio technician, and so was transferred to Los Angeles where he could attend radio school. Once on the West Coast, he came into contact with various movie people, including a member of the Air Force motion picture unit who mentioned that they were on the look-out for anyone with a background in documentary film-making. Maddow asked to join, and was taken on. Other members of the unit included William Wyler, John Sturges and, as previously mentioned, Malvin Wald. Maddow made a series of films about a variety of specialised subjects. The voice-overs were invariably read by Hollywood actors, such as Ronald Reagan, Clark Gable, Alan Ladd, Arthur Kennedy and George Montgomery. According to Maddow, Reagan could read scripts perfectly and with absolute conviction, though he had no ideas what they were about. During the war, Maddow, as writer and producer, estimated he had made somewhere between 200-500 documentaries, all based in the Los Angeles area.

The only movie writer to influence Maddow during this period was Lester Koenig who, at that time, worked as William Wyler’s assistant. Koenig would go on to write the narration for Wyler’s Memphis Belle (1943) and the script for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Heiress (1949) and Carrie (1952). Maddow and Koenig had planned to make a film on the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, and forerunner of the CIA). But the film was never to be realised.

When Maddow’s wife, Frieda, an ex-Martha Graham dancer, was hired for a Broadway production of Finian’s Rainbow, the couple moved to New York. It was there that Maddow began writing Forty-Four Gravel Street (1952), about a man who returns from a business trip to his apartment to find his wife has disappeared, his apartment has been sublet, and the money from their bank account has been withdrawn. All he finds is an address written in lipstick on the mirror: 44 Gravel Street.

Having received a call from Harold Hecht, Maddow’s sabbatical in New York proved short-lived. Hecht- “a general phony,” according to Maddow- was a former Martha Graham dancer, and had directed dance routines in films like Horse Feathers and She Done Him Wrong. After working with the Federal Theater Project, he went to Hollywood where he discovered Burt Lancaster, and produced The Sweet Smell of Success, Birdman of Alcatraz and Cat Ballou. Hecht asked Maddow if he would be interested in collaborating on a film with him. He was also offering what, to Maddow, seemed like an enormous amount of money. By this time, Frieda had been dancing in Finian’s Rainbow for some seven months, and had grown bored with the work. So the couple decided to return to Hollywood, where Maddow worked on Hecht’s film, which turned out to be Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948), about a nurse- Joan Fontaine- who helps a seaman- Burt Lancaster- on the run after being accused of a murder he did not commit. Maddow, who thought it a ludicrous title- others have considered it one of the more evocative of film noir titles- worked on the script with Walter Bernstein. It would be Bernstein’s only film credit before being blacklisted, though, in future, he would contribute to such screenplays as Paris Blues, Fail Safe, The Train, The Molly Maquires, The Front, Semi-Tough, Yanks and The House on Carroll Street.

When it came to scriptwriting for film, Maddow maintained that his background in poetry was of little help, though he admitted it did teach him “to struggle with formal structure because structure in a documentary is quite different...How much time you give to certain things, how much importance...it’s very complex.” Certainly, poetry writing must also have given Maddow an appreciation of music, particularly rhythm. Maddow would go on to develop an interest in jazz, and, along with a friend whom he had met after publishing a poem in a small magazine, would go out hunting for secondhand 78’s. Coincidentally, this same friend’s wife happened to work in the script department at Metro. Aware that Maddow was a scriptwriter as well as a poet, she recommended him to Clarence Brown, known at that time for his Garbo movies and National Velvet. Brown had just bought Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust but had no idea what to do with it. Maddow, who loved Faulkner’s writing, considered Intruder in the Dust the author’s worst novel, indicative of Faulkner’s belief that he could make money from a series of books about a lawyer and a detective.

After telling Brown he was willing to do the screenplay, Maddow realised he would have to simplify the plot- four disinterments were three too many. Equally problematical were his attempts to explain the plot to the director who, confused by Faulkner’s writing, could not understand why any writer would want to tell a story backwards. The two men would meet in Brown’s huge Hollywood office, empty except for a desk and a caged parakeet. At the beginning of each story conference Brown would let the parakeet fly around the room. While Maddow explained the story and script, Brown would close his eyes and doze off. Whenever he did, the parakeet would land on the director’s head, flying away as soon as Brown awoke. Consequently, Brown had little idea what Maddow was up to, enabling the writer to work without any undue intervention.

Maddow’s script became a talking point at Metro, and marked the relaunching of Maddow’s Hollywood career. Suddenly people were talking about this writer who had been able to translate Faulkner to the screen. Despite the film’s obvious faults- such as using a Puerto Rican rather than an African-American, and stereotyping him in the process- Maddow would later say that he was pleased with the film, that it was a rare occasion in which he had seen on the screen what he had imagined in his mind. Though Maddow was to admit that his task was helped by the material, including Faulkner’s preciseness and ability to describe locations and characters. However, studio honcho Louis B. Mayer disliked the film. Of the black hero, he said, “He ought to take off his hat when he talks to a white man.”

Part 2 to follow.

Charles Willeford's Library

Though Cockfighter, arguably his finest novel, was based on The Odyssey, Charles Willeford was primarily a reader of modern literature, whether pulp schlock or high art. At least that is the conclusion one arrives at after going through his reviews and essays. When, in an interview, Ed Gorman commented that Jim Thompson would rather read Jonathan Swift rather than mysteries, Willeford replied, “I read Swift in graduate school, so I don’t have to read him again, but I don’t confine my reading to mysteries. That would be too limiting... If you only read mysteries, you could easily become like the people who only watch “Donahue” on the tube and think that all the people in the U.S. are sexual deviates.”

As his Master’s Thesis, “New Forms of Ugly,” illustrates, Willeford not knew his modernism, but was aware of its philosophical implications. Amongst those he cites in his thesis are Dostoevsky, Bellow, Beckett, Kafka, Nathaniel West, Hesse, Joyce, Walker Percy, Robbe-Grillet, Himes, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, John Barth, Salinger, Thomas Wolfe, Waugh, Capote, Joseph Heller, Carson McCullers, Dalton Trumbo, Jim Tully, Camus, Michel Butor, Malcolm Lowry, Sherwood Anderson, Hamlin Garland, Erskine Caldwell, Pound, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Tom Kromer and Horace McCoy.

Willeford calls on these writers to illustrate what he terms “the immobilized hero.” Though others have pinpointed such a condition, Willeford at least coined an original term, while throwing a few names, either unfamiliar or under-appreciated into the cauldron of modernist practitioners. That Camus’s Sysiphus must forever push the rock up the hill, is one thing, but, for Willeford, the immobilized hero is content to do so. Beckett’s famous words, “I can’t go on, I won’t go on, I can’t go on, I will go on,” is not only a celebration of the human condition, but a statement regarding the writer in contemporary society, about which Willeford has few illusions: “[As] the electronic impact of immediate information forces literature of all kinds into microfilms where it can be stored and forgotten, the immobilised hero novel will gradually disappear.” Later he adds, “Instead of man reading about man writing about man writing, immobilized hero novel readers will be reduced to small groups of semi-literate men reading the immobilized hero novel as small groups of graduate students meet today to read Beowulf.”

No wonder Willeford opted for popular literature over literary experimentation and regular punters over high-brow readers. Nevertheless, writing, for Willeford, was not just a profession, but something akin to a subversive activity, what he called the Burnt Orange Heresy, a phrase that would later form the title of his excellent novel about art forgery. Back in the late 1960s, a couple years before completing his existential western, The Difference, Willeford, sounding like Marshall McLuhan trapped in a story by Jorge Luis Borges, wrote, “The only real difference between the rock-and-roll of The Peanut Butter Conspiracy and the rock-rolling of the Burnt Orange Heresy is the serial consistency and orderly arrangement of movable type rearranged by an unmoving writer for an immobilized and highly literate reader.” It can only occur in the hiatus that exists between experience and observation, which Willeford likened to the false calm created by playing a record containing three minutes of silence on a jukebox in a noisy bar.

Though those mentioned in “New Forms of Ugly” were important to Willeford, he relied on others when it came to the genre in which he made his living. For instance, in courses on the Mystery and Suspense Novel he taught in 1974, Willeford had students read Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, Chandler’s Little Sister, Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Dorothy Uhnak’s Policewoman, Mailer’s An American Dream, and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and Lawrence Sanders’ The First Deadly Sin. While in a study guide for students, he also suggested students read Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels and Dell Shannon’s novels about the LA Homicide Squad.

When asked what writers had influenced him, Willeford replied, “I have no idea. I read a lot of people- Jim Tully, Nathaniel West, Robert Tasker, Jack Black, Dreiser, John Sanford, Malcolm Braly. But I don’t write like them.” Nor did he write like those he’d read as a young man: Wolfe, Joyce, Kafka, Henry Miller (”responsible for the honesty of my writing”), Kafka and Hemingway. For Willeford was, in a sense, trying to create his own path between modernism and pulp fiction. Yet it would take him, by his own admission, some ten years before he could find a voice that would allow him to do so.

A particular favourite of Willeford’s was Chester Himes. Singling out The Primitive for praise, Willeford maintains that its author was too hard-boiled and uncompromising to be widely appreciated. It’s no coincidence that a volume of Willeford’s autobiography is entitled I Was Looking For a Street, the same title as the novel that Jesse Robinson in Chester Himes’s novel The Primitive is writing, and Jethro Adams in Himes The Lonely Crusade.

As for Hammett, Willeford wrote, “Every year, when I remember to do so, I reread...The Maltese Falcon. It reconfirms a lot of important things about American life: The business of America is business; romance is a worthwhile delusion; it’s hazardous to sleep with your partner’s wife; women who engage in serial relationships will lie to you when the truth would do them more good; existentialism is a practical philosophy for urban males to follow; and if a man develops a professional attitude towards his work, he will probably succeed where others fail.” Amongst other crimes writers mentioned by Willeford are Joseph Hansen, William McGivern (Rogue Cop and Shield for Murder: “masterpieces of the bent cop genre of tough detective fiction”), Frederic Brown (Night of the Jabberwock: “bizarre and classic mystery”), and Ross MacDonald (“a major American novelist”) adding that the latter “was not a stylist...but he wrote with a great depth of feeling, and his characterizations ring true.”

But it was Ross’s namesake, the prolific pulpist John D. MacDonald that Willeford named as “a spokesman for our times.” Not only a superb story-teller, but, according to Willeford, a social historian and moralist, who “speaks as well for and of the Sixties as Scott Fitzgerald did for the Twenties, Nathaniel West for the thirties, Raymond Chandler for the Forties, and Jack Kerouac for the Fifties.” MacDonald’s Travis McGee isn’t “trying to save America, he is trying to save himself.” Though acknowledging MacDonald’s deficiencies when it comes portraying female characters and the dynamics of sexual relationships, Willeford believes a novel like Cape Fear illustrates that “the veneer of our modern American civilization is as thin as the gold on a rented wedding ring.”

One senses that it was a particular perspective, defined during the Depression, as much as a hardboiled style, that attracted Willeford’s attention. While many today have assumed that style- perhaps under false pretences- its accompanying perspective, derived from proletariat fiction- has become diluted in the libertarian cynicism of past decades. Not surprisingly, some of the writers Willeford recalls have, by now, gone out of fashion or have been simply forgotten. As an insight into his literary world- one that is in danger of vanishing from public consciousness- it would be fitting to end this investigation by briefly mentioning some of the more obscure writers cited by Willeford.

-Jim Tully. Willeford discovered Tully in 1935, age 14, while searching through the L.A. public library stacks. He had planned to write a book on Tully, whom he considered one of the outstanding writers of the century, but other commitments prevented him from doing so. “Together with Dashiell Hammett,” wrote Willeford, “Tully was the founder of the hard-boiled school of writers in the U.S.” In Willeford’s estimation, Tully possessed “a finer intelligence than he was ever given credit for during his lifetime.” An ex-prize fighter, chain cutter and occasional jailbird, Tully wrote a number of books- Beggars of Life, The Circus Parade, Shanty Irish, Shadows of Men, Blood on the Moon (all out of print)- about hoboes, prize fighters, circus performers, and other outcasts. Later he would go to Hollywood where he became Chaplin’s press agent. While in Hollywood, Tully contributed “additional dialogue” to a handful of films, and ended up writing about Hollywood movie stars for mass circulation magazines. So widely read was Tully that he could make or break most Tinseltown careers. Championed by the likes of Mencken and Damon Runyon, Tully was, at least in his early work, a true proletariat writer. It was Tully’s perspective as well as his writing style that impressed Willeford, who maintained that, since Tully’s day, little had changed in America: rich men get parole, the poor go to prison and the military industrial complex is as powerful as ever.

-Robert Tasker. Knopf published his novel, Grimhaven, in 1927, which Willeford undoubtedly read (Grimhaven was also the name of one of Willeford’s unpublished novels). Tasker’s book concerns life in San Quentin where, in 1924, he was sentenced from five to life for robbing a dance hall in Oakland, California. After relieving patrons of their money- but telling the band, “Not you coloured folks. You’ve suffered enough”- the police found him on the stairs, smoking a cigarette, an unloaded gun at his side. In San Quentin, Tasker, who came from a wealthy family, encouraged fellow-prisoners to write (the warden would complain that so many inmates were submitting manuscripts to publishers that Quentin was in danger of turning into a literary agency), corresponded with Mencken, and wrote his novel. Upon his release, he travelled to Hollywood where he worked as a screenwriter and occasional actor. A condition of his parole was that he was not to write about prison life; consequently Frances Marion, with whom he was having an affair, received an Academy Award for The Big House, which was essentially Tasker’s script. Unable to publish his second novel, and having no desire to take part in WW2, he went to Mexico where he died under mysterious circumstances.

-Jack Black. Another immobilized heroes. You Can’t Win was published in 1926, and later lauded by not only Willeford but William Burroughs. Another gentleman of the road, Black wrote about America’s underbelly: small-time criminals, inhabitants of seedy rooming houses, pool halls, brothels, mining camps, opium dens, burglars and hobo jungles. A small-time criminal, burglar, safe-cracker and ex-con, Black writes about a time when there was apparently honour amongst thieves. Before settling down to a secure life in San Francisco, Black, like Tasker, served time as a Hollywood screenwriter. Unlike Grimhaven and Tully’s classic tales, Black’s novel remains easily available (Amok Press).

-John Sanford- Willeford doesn’t specify which Sanford books he read, but they would have included The Old Man’s Place (1935), Seventy Times Seven (1939), The People From Heaven (1943) and That Land That Touches Mine (1953). Born Julian Shapiro in Harlem in 1904, Sanford, a committed Marxist, was a lawyer by trade, and a friend of Nathaniel West’s. It was West who urged him to turn to fiction and to change his name. After the publication of The Old Man’s Place- written in the style of James M. Cain and W.R. Burnett- Sanford went to Hollywood where he wrote the occasional film script at Paramount and married screenwriter Marguerite Roberts (True Grit). He would be blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Rediscovered by Black Sparrow Press two decades later, his anti-racist People From Heaven- judged too leftwing by the Communist Party- would be reprinted in 1995 (University of Illinois).

-Malcolm Braly- His novels Shake Him Till He Rattles, It’s Cold Out There, The Protector, On the Yard and Felony Tank, were honest and evocative depictions of prison life. A burglar, armed robber and four-time loser who, between the ages of 18 and forty, spent most of his time in prison, Braly began writing fiction during his third stretch in San Quentin, and would write his first three novels while behind bars. Had they not been published by Gold Medal, Braly (1925-1980) might have been more widely acclaimed. Hailed by such diverse writers as Vonnegut and John D. MacDonald, On the Yard offended the California Adult Authority so that Braly had to wait until he was off parole in 1967 before it could be published.

-Hamlin Garland. An early American Realist. It’s Garland’s ground-breaking collection of short-stories, Main-Travelled Roads, published in 1891, to which Willeford refers. But Garland (1860-1940) wrote some 40 other books, including four volumes of autobiography, Middle Borders (1917). During his day, he was involved with various literary, social, and artistic movements, as well as a recipient of the Pulitzer prize. He campaigned for Native Americans,and was a proponent of impressionism in art, an unabashed advocate of literary and cultural elitism, and a dabbler in research on psychic phenomena. Thanks to University of Nebraska, Main-Travelled Roads, which explores the brutal reality of farm and rural life in the Midwest, remains in print.

-Erskine Caldwell. Once a best-selling author- those lurid Signet covers obviously contributed to his success- with novels like God’s Little Acre, Tobacco Road Trouble in July, Caldwell (1903-1987) explored the brutality and tensions- racial, sexual and economic- of life in the American South. It’s a world of poor whites from the hills and backwoods of southern Georgia, where Caldwell was born. Willeford’s Cockfighter and The Black Mass of Brother Springer bear the Caldwell mark. After 1940 Caldwell was content to live on his laurels and spent his time touring rather than writing anything of importance. These days inhabitants of the New South might find Caldwell’s world- with elemental forces, buffoonery, desperation and hopelessness- somewhat offensive.

-Tom Kromer. Waiting for Nothing, published by Knopf in 1935, was Kromer’s only book. Born in 1906 in Huntington West Virginia, Kromer was another Mencken protege. Waiting For Nothing remains one of the great books to come out of the Depression. It was an era in which Kromer was an itinerant worker, scrambling for what crumbs he could find, and willing to try his hand at anything, from picking fruit to hustling homosexuals- a description of which would cause problems when it came to publishing his all-but-forgotten classic. Unlike Edward Anderson, Kromer’s hard-bitten view of the Depression was not something Hollywood could easily co-opt. Writing for a number of radical periodicals including the 1930s California socialist Pacific Weekly, Kromer contracted TB in 1935 and moved to New Mexico, where, having lost interest in writing, he taught in a school for Native Americans. When his wife died in 1960, Kromer, in poor health, suffered a nervous breakdown, and died nine years later, age sixty-two.

-Leonard Gardner. Not so much lost as missing in action, Gardner’s only novel, Fat City, is one of the great hardboiled boxing novels. Originally published in 1969, the novels takes place in and around Stockton, California, where Gardner was born and raised, and would be adapted, with a script by Gardner, for the screen by John Huston a couple years later. Other than this novel, Gardner has, to this day, published very little, though his stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire and Southwest Review. During the 1990s he contributed to a number of NYPD teleplays. Fat City, which takes place in gyms, seedy hotels and bars, prefigures the likes of Raymond Carver and Russell Banks.

-Arthur Crew Inman. Willeford called Inman’s Diary, published by Harvard University in 1985, a masterpiece. Subtitled A Public and Private Confession, it reads like H.P. Lovecraft crossed with Howard Hughes. At 1661 pages, it’s a extremely bulky but classic study of one man’s thoughts. Inman (1895-1963) was a would-be poet from a wealthy family who, after a mental breakdown in his early twenties, withdrew to his bed in a darkened room. At the time of his death, he had written some 17 million words and had filled 155 volumes. Amongst his entries were descriptions of contemporary Georgia and New England, as well as his own bigotries and fantasies. A mixture of social history and case study, Inman, who committed suicide in 1963, was a racist, inveterate lecher, and compulsive voyeur. A case of egoist-deviant as visionary chronicler of American culture.

-Don Robertson. “[Read] Dan Robertson’s Ideal Genuine Man, the best books I’ve read in years,” wrote Willeford. Reprinted by Stephen King’s Philtrum Press in 1988. Willeford must have liked Robertson’s characters- fat, troubled and ordinary. And that, in Robertson’s world, everyone, good or bad, suffers. Currently out of print, Robertson’s book is as vulgar as it is poignant. Having written two best-sellers- Praise the Human Season and Paradise Falls- Robertson is now all but forgotten. Said King, “[In] an age when New York publishers have become more and savagely focused on best-selling genre novels and highly praised ‘prestige’ novelists…guys like Robertson have become expendable.”

-Waldo Frank. Born in New Jersey, Frank (1889-1967) was very popular during the 1920s-30s when he personified the writer as rebel, hitting out at bourgeois puritanism and American capitalism. Educated at Yale, his radical socialist views appeared in such journals as The Liberator and New Masses. His novels, which advocated social and political reform were poetic, psychological, symbolic and, above all, critical of society. They included City Block (1922) Holiday (1923), Chalk Face (1924) and The Death and Birth of David Markand (1934). He also wrote about politics, like Our America (1919), Salvos (1924), The Rediscovery of America (1929), America Hispania (1931), In the American Jungle (1937), Birth of the World (1951) and The Prophetic Island: A Portrait of Cuba (1961). Once again, Willeford would have been attracted by Frank’s perspective and his analysis of society during the Depression.

-Dorothy Uhnak. Willeford was nothing if not democratic in his tastes. So long as a book was tough in perspective and written from experience. He would have been impressed that Uhnak, a retired NYC Transit Police Detective, sought in Policewoman to tell like it is, or, at any rate, like it was. In doing so, she preceded writers like Wambaugh and Petievitch. Moreover, she was probably the first female police officer to depict the travails of her profession, and would later win an Edgar for her NYPD novel The Bait which combines the police procedural with a multi-generational family saga. As her book illustrates, she experienced more types of harassment than even she was aware. Having grown tired of the discrimination, she quite in 1964 after 14 years on the job. Observant and angry, this is an interesting, if routinely written, portrayal of law enforcement during an era of repression and permissiveness.

Anthony Boucher

The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Vol. 1, Reviews and Commentary, 1942-1947, As Crime Goes By; Vol. 2, Reviews and Commentary, 1942-1947, The Week in Murder; Vol. 3 Reviews and Commentary, 1942-1948, A Bookman’s Buffet. Ed., Francis M. Nevins. 001086-001088. $19 each.

No wonder the Bouchercon is named after him. Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) was a prolific writer of classical detective novels and an early advocate of the genre whose reviews appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Herald Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. With catholoic tastes, he championed Jim Thompson and David Goodis, and found relevance in Gold Medal paperbacks as well as in traditional mysteries. These three volumes, edited by Francis Nevins, cover Boucher’s early Chronicle columns, and provide proof that Boucher’s pithy critiques invariably hit the nail on the head.

Despite his appreciation of hardboilers, Boucher despised Spillane- “so vicious a glorification of force, cruelty and extra-legal measures that the novel might be made required reading in a Gestapo training school.” This was someone who could be eloquent (“Hughes’s novels, like olives and the Marx Brothers, are never simply tolerated.”), poetic (“Even if Woolrich has never written a tenser, more jolting, novel; if you’re heart goes no further than your throat, you’re lucky.”) and all-encompassing (“[Goodis] has an originality of naturalism, as precise feeling for petty lives, a creatively compelling vividness of detail that you might perhaps match if you could combine top Woolrich with early Odets.”), Hopefully Ramble House (www.ramblehouse.bigstep.com) will treat us to Boucher’s subsequent criticism.