From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir by Alain Silver and James Ursini (Running Press/TCM, 2024); The Making of the Key Film Noir, and a Groundbreaking Noir Novel Rediscovered by Matthew Sorrento
Regarded as a key film whose success spearheaded a trend, Double Indemnity has a backstory as fascinating as its tightening suspense and wonderful performances. Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray – as temptress and loner-turned-criminal, respectively – shine in the leads, while Edward G. Robinson stands out in a supporting role as claims adjuster Barton Keyes (the film’s unofficial investigator/faux PI). The film was the product of a milieu that solidified a new style of crime cinema, what we now call noir, during World War II and McCarthyism beginning to take shape. Alain Silver and James Ursini are ideal for handling an account of the film’s making from Running Press (a TCM tie-in), with experience in both popular and scholarly studies of noir. It’s a fun and enlightening, if uneven, entry.
The authors focus on elements left out of other discussions, while correcting myths behind the production, like one regarding how Wilder allegedly discovered James M. Cain’s source novella, when Wilder’s secretary couldn’t put it down in a bathroom stall (the version that Silver and Ursini put forth is, as we’d expect, more commonplace). To open the book, the authors stress the importance of the true story of the Ruth Snyder/Judd Gray murder case (a woman using her lover to off her husband) that inspired the film. With such an extensive focus, ‘True Crime’ could have easily been added to Silver and Ursini’s title (were it not rather long, already). An effective prologue sharply connects two famous ‘moments’ bookending the story of the film, from the kernel of the idea to its original closing moment. The prologue begins with the famous execution of Ruth Gray secretly photographed by Tom Howard for the New York Daily News. Also in attendance, and working as a journalist, was James M. Cain, who’d borrow from the case to pen The Postman Always Rings Twice to great success, which later inspired him to write Double Indemnity as a follow-up for serialization (Silver and Ursini’s portrayal also channels Picture Snatcher [1933], a Warner Bros. pre-Code entry not mentioned in the book, which fictionalizes the nicked photo). The prologue finishes with commentary on Sequence E, the original closing scene of the film showing Neff facing the gas chamber. As fascinating as it would have been, the closing in the final version is best, with Robinson’s physical performance of a man bemused over the state of his professional role and lost brotherhood with Neff. The book’s opening establishes a swift pace of the best true crime titles. It’s a fanbase that the authors and press are clearly going for, with the current trend of real crime on streaming series. And it’s a tough tone to continue, even if the book keeps many sections lively.
Silver and Ursini are thorough in covering the path to the screen, from the tabloid story, a related stage play (Machinal, 1928, by Sophie Treadwell), Cain’s novella, and then to co-screenwriters Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder, the latter to direct. Treadwell’s play, while appearing on the stage in recent years, deserves more attention, with its expressionistic staging (in once scene, a cage all alone in spotlight) clearly a key reference point for crime/punishment in pre-code Hollywood, like Mervyn LeRoy’s Two Seconds (1932, based on a 1931 stage play by Elliot Lester) and Josef von Sternberg’s 1935 version of the Dostoyevsky’s novel. Many fun bits come along with way, like the way in which Wilder learned that Cain’s dialog wouldn’t work, as Raymond Chandler had already asserted.
Mainly by citing ‘Multiple Indemnity: Film Noir, James M. Cain, and Adaptations of a Tabloid Case’ by V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy Martha Weston, the book stresses how true crime reportage was key in shaping the film’s gender bias, making Phyllis Dietrichson into an evil seductress/archetypal femme fatale (with many to follow). Silver and Ursini also pinpoint elements of the reportage of Gray/Snyder that made it into the novel and film, like the trick signing of an insurance claim. The following chapters on key collaborators, including Cain, Chandler, and Wilder, show the book losing steam a bit. The chapter on Cain reflects his trademark style, also matching the bleak desperation of the earlier chapters – in fact, Cain was to do the screenplay but was already assigned elsewhere. Together, the biographical chapters work against one another, though worthy as standalones showing the unique collaboration that brought about the tone, rhythm, and dialogue of a great film.
The next section, consisting of two extensive chapters on the film proper, begin as a biographical narrative on Wilder. Readers will want to dive into the film’s next stages, as he approaches filming, where the previous chapter leaves off. Though scattered at times – the authors’ habit of posing questions works against their efforts – these sections do a good job of illustrating the production. The book has more high points, like the thorough critical overview in Chapter 6, but continues at a choppy pace, finishing with a chapter on the ‘Aftermath and Movement: The Rise of Film Noir’. Some bumps down the line, though still a worthy read for fans of noir.
The book is fittingly dedicated to the late Richard Schickel, who wrote an early monograph on the film for the BFI series, and to which Ursini and Silver add plenty. Hardly a replacement for Schickel, this should prove to be a companion piece.
From the Moment They Met it was Murder Alain Silver, James Ursini – (amazon.co.uk)
Freakshow by Jacquin Sanders (New Introduction by Jeff Vorzimmer; Stark House Press/Black Gat, 2024)
The title of this reissue from Stark House Press’s Black Gat imprint sounds purely exploitative. And yet the 1954 novel (long out of print) uses pulp conventions to offer an early example of sensitivity to bodily difference. While the central role in Freakshow, wrestler Bat Fidler, arrives to a carnival as a loner (the personal status overstated a bit, in one example of the author’s occasional tendency to overwrite), his shock at those called ‘freaks’ falls in line with pulp tales of the times. And yet, his journey connecting with three different women results in a true desire and growing love for one of them, the wife of the carnival owner. She’s cruelly known as the ‘Fish Girl’ due to the phocomelia of her arms (a condition she shares with her abusive husband, who is happy to exploit such names). With the novel drenched in a noirish world of a sideshow, a crime appears later, while both elements help develop a love story unlikely in any other midcentury publishing milieu. Like Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932), now rightfully celebrated as a key early work in disability representation, Freakshow will prove worthy of both disability studies and thematic ingenuity in mid-century pulp.
The release of the novel (written sometime in the early 1950s) worked off the success of Nightmare Alley, both the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham and Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film, with settings and motifs similar to Gresham’s. Gresham’s novel uses the world of sideshows (and the long con) for a populist take on the modernist struggle. Sander’s title helped to get the work published and into the hands of an eager working-class reading base, and the work doesn’t skip on the darker elements of the carnival. While Nightmare Alley is known for its use of the geek (in addition to mesmerism and its probing treatment of alcoholism) as a form of punishment, Sanders features an ‘egghead’ whose scarred face protrudes through a canvas for paying customers to hurl rotten eggs toward. Prominent in early chapters, the role will be a payoff directly tied to Bat (as the geek role is later for Nightmare Alley’s protagonist), though Bat initially joins the carnival as a wrestler, in the world of showy and fixed matches that helped to create today’s professional wrestling sports entertainment. Sanders features his geek substitute early to get it out of the way and train focus on Bat’s involvement with a carnival stripper (before he gets involved with Fish Girl), resulting in a crime and, eventually, a transformed Bat. The crime’s aftermath feels overwritten by stretching out Bat’s enmeshing into a conservative southern town. Thankfully, it’s easy to get through as readers await the return of Bat to Fish Girl, in whom Bat sees beauty and, her difference, just a part of her – an example of diversity and not something to be ostracized. Like Browning’s Freaks, Sanders novel was dismissed by many, with Raymond Chandler calling him a ‘roadshow James Cain’ (with some good press at the novel’s release, Kirk Douglas bought a film option that never materialized). And like Browning’s film, it’s progressive art using populist conventions, making it a truly rewarding and important novel.
Freak Show Jacquin Sanders – (amazon.co.uk)
Matthew Sorrento is editor-in-chief of Film International Online and Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon. He has published widely on genre cinema/television, documentary film, crime fiction, and genre poetry. He teaches film and media studies at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.
