Books and Movies, Movies and Books
By Alan Catlin

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“Poetry can bring you the movies that
movies can’t make. I dream in movies; I write
in dreams.

And, sometimes there are places in those
dreams or in those waking moments when they
both come together, when the poem and the poem
and the film merge into something more mysterious,
something that may not be filmable but can almost
certainly, be writable. A great poem can take you
as well as you see it. And, once you know that then
you know you have gained that extra eye.”

Todd Moore from his essay/poetry collection
Blood on the Screen, Blood on the Page

Moore was a brilliant poet whose work celebrates the culture of blood, guts, and guns in his epic poem Dillinger ( never published in its completed form). Not that Moore was a violent man, he was a high school English teacher, but what he saw was that the American ethos is inextricably entwined with violence and guns.  His work does not extol the virtue of violence per se, but depicts it, asserts the primacy of it, the inevitability of it. Knowing that violence is deeply embedded in our culture and recognizing the connection, the glorification of it, is essential to an understanding of modern life (even though he was writing in the days before school shootings were a thing, he died suddenly in 2010).

Todd saw a deep connection between the cinema and his poetry (writing in general) and no one is more visual or more visceral than Moore is in Dillinger. (One idly wonders if Americans, especially the American male, haven’t seen way too many violent movies, in lieu of reading any history, especially of the “winning” of the West. It’s difficult to separate the mythos surrounding a radical right-wing troglodyte, like the iconic John Wayne, star of post-Civil War, 20th century wars, and Westerns galore, with our “understanding of The History.” Such as it is.  Try telling someone, in a bar setting, that Wayne’s real first name was Marion, and see how fast the bar fight starts. Or assert, in the same setting, that he was a chicken hawk. Better duck after that one.)

Moore offers many examples of movies about the outlaw that Americans celebrate. Our culture is saturated (super-saturated?) and celebrated with violent men and women who flaunt the law like Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger,  the Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and on and on. There is a strange kind of Romantic attachment to these guys who, on the whole, were hardened criminals, bank robbers, and murderers. One of Moore’s favorite movies was the Dillinger epic, Public Enemies featuring Johnny Depp. The tommy gun speaks louder than words.

Moore created a whole way of seeing poetry based on these cultural assertions which he called “Outlaw Poetry.” These are poets who live outside the academia, don’t follow the conventions of what we used to common y think of as “poetry” and visceral and vocal, down, and dirty writers who mix it up with music, song, and in-your-face language.  Many adherents of the outlaw creed, are still working today. None of them are currently working on their MFA. As Bob Dylan suggested, “to live outside the law you have to be honest.”

Reading Todd’s recently released essay collection, I thought about the age-old question of which is better: the book or the movie? Generally, my answer would be the book is better, 99% of the time. But the more I thoguht about the books and movies, the less sure I was that was even close to true.

Any number of books about outlaws have been written and several of them have been made into movies. Who is to say if the books or are better than the movies? Is it even appropriate to ask that question? The most violent and perhaps, the most profound meditation on the subject of the violence that permeates the myth of America, is the essentially impossible to film, Blood Meridian (though James Franco gave it a try and quit. He did direct another McCarthy novel, Child of God, about a necrophiliac who stores bodies in a cave, which was (is) a questionable enterprise, and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, with a dual, split screen narrative, that is intriguing at first, but fatiguing, if not disorienting,  in the long run) The Coen Brothers, however succeeded in the more approachable McCarthy,  No Country for Old Men, a pitch perfect modern Western with a stone-cold killer played by Javier Bardem with the improbably name of Anton Chigurh. Is one better than the other?  Hard to say as both are perfect in their own way.

Recently, I was discussing one of my all-time favorite novels with a friend who was reading it for the first time. She was having a hard time relating to Under the Volcano. Not getting into this difficult novel is totally understandable given his long opening is a descriptive scene setting of twin volcanos in Mexico. The mood, though,  is set in colorful, evocative language. It is a dry and desolate place somewhere just this side of Purgatory. Maybe it is Purgatory. Eventually, though, we meet the characters in this opaque, densely packed, absolutely brilliant, autobiographical novel.

If you haven’t read it, imagine Ulysess (talk about an unfilmable novel! Of course, it was filmed and I would recommend it, if you can find it, as a kind of visual Cliff’s notes for people who haven’t read the book. I found it inordinately useful when I first saw it. I was then able to visualize that “Stately plump Buck Mulligan” referred to a young man shaving, looking at himself in a broken mirror on top of a Martello Tower. And so on. I found it much easier to navigate the novel with a mental, visual guide of the “plot” of the novel. That said, the movie is not Ulysses. Not really. Not even close) in Cuernavaca whose main character is an absolute drunk. (the Platonic form of drunk?)I say absolute, as he has a capacity of drink far exceeding that of a mere mortal. He reaches a state of inebriation that can only be achieved by someone with the constitution of a horse and who has had years of hard drinking practice.  Serious hard drinking.( And believe me when I say there are stages of drunks and drunkenness. A lifetime of working experiences with people drinking made me sensitive to degrees of inebriation..There are professional drinkers with incredible skills for hiding the extent of their inebriation(and this is not an exclusive club for men only.) These people are weirdly functional alcoholics with BAC’s that would boggle the mind.  Many begin each day, well past the legal limit and only add to their total as the day goes on as in; they are never sober.

The last time I read Volcano, I estimated the main character, the consul, Geoffrey Firmin, had consumed the equivalent of five and half or so quarts of alcohol in the course of the one day of the novel.  And he was still standing (most of the time) articulating and capable of speech, much like its creator Malcom Lowry. Novelist David Markson, a close friend of Lowry’s who wrote a critical study of Volcano and a novel Lowry was the main character of) said Lowry was capable of retaining whole conversations around him while prostate on the floor of a bar in the depths of Mescal drunk and seemingly unconscious.  He could rise up from the grit and the dirt and speak intelligently on any number of topics. Don’t try this at home.

The setting is the Day of the Dead, November 2, 1938 and the former consul is a British citizen in a country that will not support the allied cause during World War II. He has no official capacity, as he resigned his commission, and very publicly insults the German ambassador at a social function. You can almost hear the Rolling Stones song, “Don’t play with me because you’re playing with fire “ in the background.” Which made me think of John Huston’s movie of the novel movie starring the incomparable, Albert Finney.

Huston is well known for his adaption of literary works as movies, most famously, and most successfully The Maltese Falcon.  The esteemed movie critic, David Thompson, refers to Falcon as a “talky movie” and objects to Mary Astor as Brigit. Yes, it is talky and that’s one of the wonderful aspects of the book and the movie. And Mary Astor is perfect in the role, all the character actors are.

The dialogue, the interplay of personalities, the nuances, and the ripostes. The conversations reveal who these people are, what their goals and motivations are, and what they are willing to do to achieve their shared goal. Who can forget Sam Spade’s disarming (emasculating) the Gunsel with the brutal dig, “This should get you in solid with the boss.” Or the final dialogue with Brigit, “I won’t play the sap for you….” Bogart is perfect as Sam, refusing to argue about who loved who, “Well, if I send you over, I’ll be sorry as hell-I’ll have some rotten nights-but that’ll pass. “ During the long monologue Sam trades places with Brigit uttering what should have been her lines, what she expected she would get a chance to say, “Sure, I’ll wait for you….” Talky yes, but perfect and the dialogue comes directly from Hammett’s book. Yes, I followed the movie with the book open and charted the speeches. And perfect as Hammett knew how people talked. Melodramatic, well yes, but it is The Perfect Melodrama(with the possible exception of Casablanca.)

Thompson confesses to not liking Huston very much. That’s his problem. He concedes Flannery O’Conner’s  Wise Blood, is a faithful adaption, as well done as anyone could have expected. Personally, I don’t care for either the movie or the book , but I can’t argue with the attempt  to bring Flannery’s words to life. Thompson also notes Red Badge of Courage was/is a mess. Which it is, as he accurately cites Lillian Ross’s fascinating study of how not to make a studio movie. Thompson concedes the battle scenes are wonderful, which they are, in black and white and seem so artistically rendered and realistic they could have been lifted from Mathew Brady’s photographic gallery. Keeping in mind, of course, that Brady staged some of his most enduring photos (which isn’t surprising given how long it would take to actual get m a negative in the 1860’s.) I have a soft spot for this movie if only for the inspired casting of Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of WWII, as the “coward” Henry Fleming while his best buddy was played by another non-actor, Bill Mauldin, the leading WWII cartoonist whose  images of the common soldiers still resonate today.  So, Huston gets an A for effort in my book and a C for execution.

Speaking of war movies, I have never warmed up to the tedious made contemporaneously  as Red Badge, theBildungsroman,  Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead. Maybe because I flat out don’t like Mailer, except for his non-fiction which he excels at( Executioner’s Song which falls somewhere between fiction andreportage).  Not that the movie doesn’t try hard. Somehow even the most earnest adaptions, especially having to do with war, fall victim to cliché (Has anyone ever managed to make it all the way through For Whom the Bell Tolls? The movie with the mostcliché strewn movie I ever tried to watch delivered in a way that made everything totally lifelessly? I’m not a huge fan of Hemingway fiction either after The Sun Also Rises. The novel isimmortal and the movie is much less so though it was a nice try.) Aldo Ray, gives a wonderful performance as the tough, but caring sergeant, so well you root for him to make it but, you know, it isn’t going to happen. Length matters, especially in a movie. How many war cliches can one movie (book) stand? I mean, there is such a thing as a standard WWII movie where you can pretty much predict who will be killed from the beginning( the Joe average kid, the caring sergeant, the principled fatherly figure/  ground commander and so forth (Tom Hanks, Private Ryan anyone? Now there is a movie jam packed with cliches!). The compelling reason to continue watching is to see if you were right.

If you want a real philosophical examination of the meaning of war in terms of war itself, see The Thin Red Line, which dispenses with the cliches and deals with the issues and the average viewer, (based on unscientific research of reactions to the movie, was it was boring and I fell asleep. Probably because there weren’t enough explosions or gore. Beer consumption also plays a part here.) The movie has been justly criticized for being pretentious and unrealistic which is hard to argue with. Maybe Hamburger Hill  has it right, ending abruptly in silence with bewildered soldiers emerging from foxholes into the literal fog of war.

If you want gore and explosions, I suggest Oliver Stone’s Platoon which isn’t above cliches (the good sergeant and the scarred brutal bad sergeant. How can you tell? Well, if you don’t figure that out in ten seconds you probably haven’t be able to read this essay either) but does so in a chillingly real situation though that isn’t based on a book per se but Oliver Stone’s actual war experiences. (Did anyone connect the scene on the ground as the helicopter evacuates Charlie Sheen is an exact recreation of a Sean Flynn photo?)  Saving Private Ryan, is based in several sources, and it literally explodes the typical war scene setting with the seemingly endless invasion beach scene which sets new standards for the genre, but then descends into a pit of endless cliches in typical Spielberg fashion until the viewer is crushed under the weight of the endless hammering home on “the point.”

I won’t get started on Spielberg because I am not a fan. I won’t discuss Shindler’s List as there are so many harrowing scenes and chilling performances that outweigh looking for flaws. Let’s just agree, the subject outweighs the faults. So, they are a wash in terms of quality. I haven’t read Jones’s Thin Red Line so I can’t comment. I can say that Spielberg’s strength is creating three fourths of a great movie as in  PK Dick’s Minority Report, which is completely captures the future of crime police arresting people for crimes they may commit in the future rather than ones they did. (In fact, three quarters of a great movie seems to be his forte. AI anyone? Amistad? Etc) Minority Report has the paranoid, but very real surveillance culture cold, with the facial/retinal scans and sinister, if improbable Control behind that modern world, all so potently real because it could happen. Is happening now. All this despite Tom Cruise as the hero! But Spielberg isn’t content with creating and examining the implications of this world and a resolution of the plot but is compelled to film for another half an hour after you thought (wished) the movie had reached a natural conclusion. It was like watching Ironweed or the last Lord of the Rings movie where you are sitting there suppressing your inner self wanting to scream Basta! Enough! We get it! It’s over!! Please just STOP.

I won’t go on about Tom Cruise, though I have to admit he was entertaining in movies that play to his strength as the good-looking guy next store. But when he plays characters like Ron Kovic, in Born on the Fourth of July, you are not convinced. It is my contention that when you so badly miscast an actor, especially playing a real person, and he has to spend half of the movie convincing you he could be this guy, by the time he does, you realize you haven’t been playing close enough attention to the actual  movie. Kovic has an important story to tell, as anyone who has read his book can attest, and making a movie about it, a major movie, is an important step towards amplifying that message. (Of course, the movie won’t get made without a bankable star attached to it but that’s another story) the movie shouldn’t be a big commercial  enterprise, starring a handsome guy next door who is scarred and crippled by war wounds. You just shouldn’t. Maybe that’s just me.

Though Tom was perfect in Eyes Wide Shut. I’ve had many a discussion about whether this movie is even worth watching. I am not enamored of the long, explicit (depending upon where and how you see it. I’ve seen blurred images of the orgy which was kind of like watching Dr Strangelove on commercial TV just to see what they cut out, as in which political message don’t, they want you to see) Cruise plays this privileged, upper class, thoroughly facile doctor to the rich who gets totally embroiled in an overlapping world of dreams, illusions, and illicit sex. It’s difficult to tell at what point Tom loses the thread, probably early on when his wife, Alice, flirts with a handsome European dude at a Christmas party. Dr. Bill, Cruise’s character, fantasies explicit sexual encounters that his wife isn’t, and doesn’t have, (probably) even as he is being lured by two young, comely, extremely sexually available young women at the same party. Then Bill is summoned to his friend’s apartment upstairs as a woman, clearly a call girl of some sort, has overdosed. The influential friend wants Bill to deal with it. Is his wife, Alice, played by his wife at the time, Nicole Kidman flirting with this dude to spite him? (We can’t figure out how they got together in the first place on screen or in real life. Part of the problem being Kidman’s character has no real personality development whatsoever. Not her fault, either Unlike in real life and score of other movies.) Or if he is imagining a gothic world of rich people partaking in unseemly sexual rites that he is being left out of…. Or is it real? Or all a dream? Life is but a dream, except when it isn’t, and who can tell the difference. At the end of the movie Alice and Bill have a brief discussion:

Alice: The important thing is we’re awake now and hopefully for a long time to come.
Bill: Forever.
Alice: Forever?
Bill: Forever
Alice: Let’s ...let’s not use that word, it frightens me. But I do love you and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible?
Bill: What’s that?
Alice: Fuck.

The End

Oh yeah, okay. Sure, why not? Maybe you should have done that hours ago. Bu there wouldn’t have been a movie then….

Eyes Wide Shut is based on Dream Story, a novella by Athur Schnitzler, that is nowhere near as elaborate or convoluted as Kubrick’s movie. The novella does have a blurring of the states of waking and dreaming that is absorbing to read.  So why is Cruise so perfect in this role? He is playing against type. He is feckless, and clueless, and oddly alluring to women without realizing it or is that part of the dream state? Bill is equally as attracted to gay men as a hilarious Alan Cumming shows in a memorable cameo.  Cumming’s character is practically salivating on him and he totally does not notice. I guess being clueless is its own reward; life is much simpler then.

All male leads in major later Kubrick movies (Alex du Grand excepted I’m not sure about Jack in The Shining, doesn’t count.) seem to be, intentionally weak as in  Barry Lyndon (probably The greatest period piece ever, starring another of my least favorite actors, Ryan O’Neal.)It took me several viewings to realize just how calculated these wonderful performances are.  (And if you want to see a truly horrendous male lead by O’Neal just don’t see Love Story, where it is calculated, but Tough Guys Don’t Dance, where it isn’t. Tough Guy manages to be both a terrible novel and a terrible movie, a remarkable achievement. Largely because Mailer is totally responsible for all of both movie and book and screenplay and directing….)It takes real skill to be so totally inside someone without any moral fiber, self-awareness or inner strength as these guys do. Kudos especially to O’Neal.( You can read the novel Barry Lyndon, by Thackery, if you want to which is witty and well written and all those good things but makes you feel you are back in graduate school being force fed long early British classic novels.)  

And then there is Jack Nicholson as Randall Patrick McMurphy. Seriously! The brawny red bearded jovial, tough guy, rebel. Big and brawny! Size is so important to the novel, not just for McMurphy, but for the Big Nurse (It’s not the cold, steely, martinet professional virgin sexually frustrated nurse, though she is all of those things, it’s the Big Nurse) as is the nurse and that is completely lost in the movie. ( Not to mention rangy, wiry, lean, and hungry Gerald Phelan of Ironweed) Not that Nicholson isn’t good in the leads of both movies, he is. But I can’t think of  many actors more miserably miscast than he was. And Louise Fletcher? The Big Nurse? She deserved the Oscar for her chilling role in Cuckoo’s Nest that Ken Kesey took great pains to describe a daunting physical presence of strength and indomitable will…. She is indominable but…

I guess I am being a stickler, a casting purist, thinking books and movies have to bear some resemblance to one another. They are separate and distinct as anyone who has seen Louis Begley’s novel, All About Schmidt, made into a movie. Other than the title and one or two plot points they bear absolutely no resemblance to each other. More the shame. No wonder there was a clause in his contract that forbade Begley from discussing the movie.

Then there is perfect casting. Who else could play Jack Torrance in The Shining? No one. “Here’s Johnny!” I bet you can see the scene I am referring to. Never had a book been as transfigured and made into something unforgettable as Kubrick does with King’s Haunted House (Hotel) movie. I know King hates it ( or did, I heard he is relenting and seeing the distinction between the two and what Kubrick was thinking.) but let’s look at the book which I have read more than once. It is entraining but almost exactly twice as long as it needs to be. And the animated topiaries running around the frozen wastes? Seriously!  Kubrick cuts out the endless digressions the repetitious scenes, how many times do we need to be told Watson, the hotel maintenance dude, is a drunk? Three is more than enough (like Jack’s problem with alcohol.) Whynot just leave him out entirely, as Kubrick does, honing the book down its essence, The Shining.

Everyone in that movie is pitch perfect. You can argue with whether you like it or not, as King purists do,( the made for TV version is creepy but lacks the bleeding edge of Kubrick’s version) but the point is ,from the opening tracking scene of the car navigating the highways into the mountains in the middle of nowhere, accompanied by Bela Bartok’s dark, extremely edgy music, you are off balance and Kubrick makes sure you stay that way. There are so many little details there is a whole industry of conspiracy type theories about movies within the movie you could spend days, weeks, trying to unravel them all. Don’t bother. Just watch the movie.

I should state my hero remans Lloyd the bartender. Joe Turkel has him cold. He is the embodiment of an imperious, officious, threatening presence;  the bartender. I once wrote a book called The Shining According to Lloyd, all in dialogue. I’m not sure Mr. King would find it as amusing to riff off his copyrighted work as it was for me to write it borrowing all his characters. I meant no harm. I was a bartender after all. I knew the evil that lurks inside the mind of the so-called service person. So, alas, it remains unpublished, in a file drawer, a novel completely in dialogue starring no one. ( And a play, Shakespearian in nature, if not in length and structure. And if you think it is easy adapting a novel all in dialogue into a play, think again. It was a joyless, brutal, futile exercise, though I did it. It’s in the same drawer as the unpublished novel.)

Though being a purist on book adaptions into movies can hamper the critical facility. I was turned off by LA Confidential when I first saw it because almost all of the plot was from another novel that precedes LA Confidential, Clandestine (both by James Ellroy). ( I highly recommend never seeing Black Dahlia, Brian DePalma’s absolutely opaque version of Ellroy’s book and story I know well which succeeds only at one thing; being totally incomprehensible. Even if you know the plot, the characters, the outcome…Don’t get me started on DePalma though his bloody Untouchables is worth seeing despite all the gore. Femme Fatale was surprisingly good. But Blow Out. A kind of remake of Blow Up. No!!!! The Hitchcockian, Dressed to Kill! Which makes no logical sense. Yes, that’s Hitchcock but it’s a DePalma, not a Hitchcock as in a pale imitation.)and I was so wrapped up in this anomaly I failed to judge the movie on its own terms.

The acting in LA Confidential is amazing, the story is as convoluted, and shows corruption almost as deep as in the real LA Police department of the time ( see LA Noir , the book, if you don’t believe me). No matter how unseemly you make the story, reality is worse as Place Beyond the Pines certainly shows. (That inner-generational story of a love story gone horribly wrong, a bank robbery, filmed like two or three blocks from where I am now sitting, a hero cop turned as corrupt as the people he uncovered and removed from the force and the kids they had who bear the burden of their fathers. See Forget It, Jake, It’s Schenectady by David Bushman who details much of the real story of depth of depravity in the SCPD. How do I know what he says is true, I knew guys in the force and one of the cops grew up across the street the same time as our kids were growing up. He was a devious little mother even then.)

Oh yeah, back to Ellroy, I can say that the actor who played Dudley Smith, the totally Machiavellian chief of detectives, James Cromwell, is so sinister he moved into the pantheon of all-time villains(along with Smiley’s, Karla and Othello’s, Iago.)  For more extensive examples of his evil ways, I highly recommend Ellroy’s historical novels which are so well researched, filled with so much period gossip, news, and politics, you would swear he was there.  While Confidential is lavishly filmed in color, it feels like a classic noir. I rank it up there with the great noirs of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s which got by with limited locations, dark lighting, occasional of shrouded docks and houses and lots of shadows.  LA Confidential may be colorful but it sure is dark.

Not so much Hammett’s  The Thin Man, which is not technically a noir at all. It is charming and fun because the actors are (sequels don’t count) the well-suited-to each-other acting duo of Myrna Loy and William Powell. It’s urbane, witty, and even follows the plot to some extent. Following the book, even tangentially, become less a consideration as time passes. 

Changes in books for the movie version are often inexplicable like the wonderful suspense laden  and highly cinematic book by Cornel Woolrich, The Phantom Lady. Oddly, the movie is less cinematic on the screen than it is in print, despite heroic efforts by my namesake, Alan Curtis, in the lead role. There is one amazing scene with Elisha Cook Jr (of Gunsel fame) as a hopped-up drummer in an afterhours jazz club. But other than that, all the cinematic tropes in the books are cut out. Why? Beats me.  (Other than: once the accountants and the big studios take charge, the movies are degraded as director’s are forced to produce product and very of those are even remotely interested in quality.)

And then there are the other actual period writers whose works were made into films. Most of the Hammett books, not Falcon (there was an earlier, less successful, less interesting but still watchable movie with an urbane, slicker Sam Spade) were done with variable, usually forgettable results. An offshoot to the genre, Blue Dahlia, scripted by Raymond Chandler was noteworthy.  Alan Ladd is convincing as kind of murderous psychopath with a soft spot for a glamorous Veronica Lake in her signature role.  Despite lacking nuance, a contrived plot, and all the other hallmarks of melodrama, Blue Dahlia is worth seeing.

As are most Chandler movies featuring his Philip Marlowe character. How you feel about individual movies depends how you relate to the various actors chosen for the part. If you go for the weird, the arty, first-person, narrative style of George Montgomery, who literally filmed the movie as seen by Marlowe, is for you. It’s is both intrguing and irritating.  Despite repeated viewings, I much prefer Ride the Pink Horse based on a Dorothy Hughes novel (also starring Montgomery). Hughes also provided books for several other period movies especially the wonderful In a Lonely Place with Bogart as a totally hateful narcissistic homicidal creep and the much maligned (in the movie) Gloria Grahame in her finest role.

None of the Marlow’s are “bad” but some seem to be better than others. Who could deny Humphrey Bogart’s presence in the pantheon of Marlowes. I  thought the late-in-life Robert Mitchum excelled in the role as balanced the snark, the physicality, the righteousness, and the world weariness in expert ways. The less said about Elliot Gould and Altman’s, Marlowe, the better. The radically altered ending is just wrong. And a non-actor, Jim Bouton of all people, as the villain radiates “I am not a real actor”! (But he threw hard once and survived for a while on a knuckleball pitcher a second time around once the fastball was gone, is notable. For baseball players but not for actors) I don’t think so; an absolute ruination of a movie with great potential so wrong it just pisses you off. 

But when it comes to noir, melodramatic classics, unforgettable movies, no one did it better than Orson Welles. My two all-time favorite movies are The Third Man and  Touch of Evil. Okay, Carol Reed directed Third Man, but where would that movie be without old satchel foot, as Joseph Cotten calls him, in the shadows before the camera halos Welles’s smirking face? There is no movie without Welles. The dialogue is amazing, and I paraphrase,  “Six hundred years of peace and all Switzerland managed to create was the cuckoo clock….  And what if all those tiny dots (as seen from the top of a Ferris Wheel) stopped moving….”Talk about cynical justification for a scheme to substitute worthless drugs for penicillin in post war Germany. And the zither! Oh man.

The opening scene of the restored Touch of Evil where we see a man plant a bomb in the trunk of a car on the Mexican side of the border then follow the car to the border where it blows up, is sheer genius. And worthy of the best of Hitchcock. The movie holds up with amazing, crazy vignettes, weird camera  angles and a large cast of sleazy degenerates all of whom are terrific(especially Uncle Joe and the motel night man Dennis Weaver, pre-Gunsmoke fame.) Dialogue both corny and perfect crackles. There are characterizations, elegies for the evil sheriff right out of the melodrama handbook, often delivered by a world weary, droopy eyed Marlene Dietrich, with a cigarillo somehow affixed to the corner of her lip. Her final assessment, something along the lines of ,“He was a mam, Just a man. Who cares what people say?” It is so good the movie survives the weirdest casting ever of Charlton Heston as the goody two shoes Mexican drug cop!

While thinking of writing about how few movies are better than the books, I realized just how  possible it would be. Like charting the decline of the tragic hero in Western Literature. You’d be like Casaubon in Middlemarch working on a project that has no end, thinking about it. Yes, there is a book that Welles used as a basis for Touch of Evil by some guy named Whit Masterson. He was not exactly a household name even then, though he wrote several novels that became movies. This movie is infinitely better than the book (Kindles are good for something with their huge collection of long forgotten books like this one And decent books like Psycho andthe Vertigo source book). Just thinking about all the forgotten original authors of classic movies (and not so classic ones ) from the era is enough to make your head spin. Consider that W. Somerset Maugham and Georges Simenon were leading the author’s league in books into movies well into the 60’s and beyond. (Dozens if not hundreds of movies come directly from their work. Simenon alone wrote close to 400 books, 75 or so starring Maigret, and Maugham wrote a zillion short stories and novels and so and so forth.) 

Even Welles swung and missed with literary/cinema adaptions. His take on Karen Blixen’s Immortal Story, is relatively lavish and colorful, but lacking in drama or interest. Its main interest was as a last effort by a master who left so many ambitious projects undone for various reasons ranging  from Don Quixote to Macbeth, unfinished. I have tried valiantly to warm up to the Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington but its charm, if there is any, eludes me.  Maybe it was the print I had. There seem to be many, well, whatever, I simply don’t care.

It is possible to make a short story or a novella into a classic film? I’m thinking of Julio Cortazar’s Blow Up, that Antonioni adapted. Rereading the story, you have to marvel at how so  little was made into so much. Not that the movie is exciting or action packed as say du Maurier’s, Don’t Look Back ( the movie) becomes. As far as I can tell Antonioni borrowed a couple of basic, albeit small, plot points and the basic arrogance of the character. Star, David Hemmings, fully captures as the self-involved, obsessive fashion photographer who wants to be taken seriously as an artist. (see Cortazar as one of the factor workers in the photos by Don McCullin in real life, as Hemmings, in character,  provides his publisher for an upcoming photo essay) The smallest, maybe the most effective detail from the story, is the rustling the leaves in the breeze which Antonioni uses to great effect to set mood not only in Blow Up but in other movies as well. ( Leaves as a sound point drove home a thought I had never considered previously: what is so enjoyable about many Antonioni movies, which are usually about nothing, is there are no annoying sound tracks to tell you what to feel!)( Zabriskie Point being the major exception. That, however is A’s “American” movie. Consequently, it needs an American sound track. The music is used modestly, mostly as stuff on the radio, background incorporated into the movie in snippets from popular bands of the era: Pink Floyd, The Youngbloods, Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead instead of pointed undertones as in many of Hitchcock’s movies whose soundtracks range from distracting to annoying to chillingly effective.(Oddly enough Roy Orbison has the most “air” time in the movie but is uncredited for his Exit Music the original song, So Young, which is also not on the Soundtrack.  It was that kind of lovie. I think I could agree with the BOMB assessment or the worst movie a film maker of genius made.)

Raymond Carver was the master of realistic stories of ordinary, usually down and out, people in everyday life whose work translates well to film. For instance, his Everything Must Go and the Robert Altman amalgam of Carver stories Short Cuts are bittersweet and readily identifiable, if a bit off the wall. These are all glimpses of people in various stages of decline. 

Everything Must Go stars Will Ferrellasa hapless man whosewife has left him. All their remaining worldly possession must be sold as part of the settlement.  Rather than conduct a kind of traditional everything must go estate sale, he removes all the furniture from the home and recreates the inside in the front yard. His interactions with people passing by, the curious and the interested buyers,  range from hilarious to incredibly sad. A deadpan Ferrell is terrific as the thoroughly defeated husband.  Short Cuts features bits and pieces from several Carver stories that are more vignettes than a cohesive narrative ranging from the bored trailer park wife as the voice on a sex talk hot line to the sinister, at first, insistent, persistent voice on the telephone demanding attention and payment for a what turns out to be a tragic misunderstanding involving a cake for a mourning family whose child had recently died. The baker is played to great effect by country and western singer, a non-actor and favorite of Altman’s, Lyle Lovett.  Given the fragmentary selection, a technique used to great effect by Altman in Nashville, there is a lot of hit and miss here but well worth seeing.

Daphne Du Maurier, of Rebecca fame (artfully filmed by Alfred Hitchcock with the indelible performance by Judith Anderson of Mrs. Danvers), had a short story immortalized by Hitchcock called The Birds. Reading the story and seeing the movie are quite different experiences. The short story is vaguely threatening by the end, hinting at the possibility of something larger but Hitchcock, offers us the something larger. The Birds is apocalyptic in ways distinctively Hitchcock. A nip by a sea gull slowly becomes a gathering of birds of all kinds sitting in playgrounds, on wires, watching, waiting, attacking. We don’t know why, never know what brings them, or how drastic the attacks will become given the untold trillions of birds there must be at any given time, it’s going to get nasty. One thing we know for sure: the future is dim for humanity once all of these birds attack.  The final scene as the car moves away from the ravaged home set upon by birds. The young sister is bearing a cage of love birds in the back seat while the adults are shell shocked and injured, like a family leaving paradise surrounded by millions of birds taking their potential destruction with them. The birds are everywhere, watching and waiting. It is one of the greatest, most threatening scenes in all of Hitchcock and nothing is happening at all.

Maybe I was spoiled by the adaption of Shirely Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House into the movie The Haunting. Four people, for various reasons, attempt to stay in the Hill House which proves to be as haunted as advertised.  We hear noises, see furniture moved around, doors open and close, spiral staircases come unbolted, swirling curtains becomes otherworldly wraiths but never, ever do we see the ghosts. The haunting is real and terrifying because we can hear it, sense it, know it, in our imagination without witnessing the ghosts themselves.  The suggestions rather than the gruesome aspects of a haunting, are more real in the imagination as we can conjure  images and fears far worse than anything we can be shown.

So, when I see a perfectly good novella like Don’t Look Back (du Maurier) turned into a grotesque horror show, I’m gravely disappointed. The movie begins by mostly following the novella, a tragic drowning of a child, an escape from home in England to Venice for a recovery (transformed into a work trip for the husband well played by Donald Sutherland) and restoration ( in the movie he’s a restorer of art works, get it?) The movie is working well, despite the sinister sisters they see while dining in a café who become a kind of omnipresent nemeses, (and where the title comes from Don’t Look Now comes from staying something to the effect, Don’t look now, those ladies are looking at us) haunting their relationship. There is a vivid sex scene in the movie featuring Sutherland and the Julie Christe as the wife, so realistic they were asked if they actually had sex (Sutherland said no) that will thrill fans of Christie’s. Does it add anything to the plot? Well, no, not really. Needless to say, du Maurier has no such scene in her story though she does hint at a strong sexual connection. I emphasize hints.

Upon reflection, the movie begins a gradual descent downhill from there as it deviates from the novella. A small, presumed to be a child, reminiscent of the child  they lost, seems to appear, and disappear with some regularity causing all sorts of obsessive magical thinking that their child is trying to reach them (aided by the sinister sisters, one of whom has second sight). Well, by the end they are both dead, though Julie’s character survives in the novella and Sutherland is murdered by the little girl who turns out to be an evil dwarf with a knife. Personally, I would have preferred not to see Sutherland bleed out from a slashed neck but the director wasn’t going for The Haunting, he was going for titillation as the sex scene clearly shows. Maybe I am too much of a pursuit. Maybe I should just watch Picnic at Hanging Rock again, another movie where nothing much happens on screen. All the really important  parts happen where no one can see them. And we never know exactly what happened (and why it is a great movie. And, the book is terrific too) but we are no disappointed. In real life there are very rarely neat, compact, easily understood endings.

One brief novel and short feature, The Sweet Hereafter, by Russell Banks is about as perfect at book and a move made from the book as one could ask for. Director Atom Egoyan follows the book letter by letter capturing the tragic consequences a school bus crash that kills three children in a small isolated town. There isn’t a false note to be had.

Way back in 1999, at an AWP conference in Albany, I went to a forum where three writers: Russell Banks, William Kennedy, and Scott Spencer, discussing their experiences with adaptions of their work. Banks had nothing but positive experiences with the Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, both of which were faithfully (mostly) recreated on the screen. Kennedy had mixed success with Ironweed, which drags on forever, though it is atmospheric in ways that are faithful to the novel and generally captures the sense of the book well. Cotton Club, which he wrote the screenplay for, was uninspired, unremarkable, and oddly flat, as I recall.  Spencer however was horrified by the ruination of his book, Endless Love, which was made into a mawkish mess that he can only cringe when he thinks about it. On the other hand, he pointed out, I drive a new Mercedes Benz, my house is paid off and I was able to put my kid through an expensive college.  Art be damned.

I think of other books made into movies that range from, why bother? (I’m thinking of Love Story which is beyond sickening saccharine sweet to the point barf bags should be handed out with the book And the movie. I am almost ashamed to say, I read and saw them both. Or the execrable Myra Breckinridge novel transferred to screen trying for camp but only manages, to be a complete disaster. You can’t manufactures camp. It either happens or it doesn’t, as lovers of Rocky Horror Picture Show know well. The less said about the cynical trashy aspect of the Myra the better.)

And what about another unfilmable book, say, Under the Skin, (by the terrific, versatile, writer, Michel Faber whose books are always intrguing and never remotely the same as his next book, the riotous, Tom Jonesian, The Crimson Petal and the White, will attest and I highly recommend everyone read)a marvelous speculative fiction involving an alien lamia (which I read again in between viewings of the movie to see if it stands up to the test of time and a second reading. It does) played by Scarlett Johanssen. Now the alien in the book borrows a dead body and it’s kind of a dwarfish, freaky, unattractive yet somehow alluring creature. And then there is Scarlett borrowing her own body. There is absolutely nothing grotesque about her and I have concluded that despite the abiding weirdness of the movie, there is nothing at all other than her to recommend it.  The plot is opaque, at best, even if you know what’s going on (though not quite in the standalone league of Black Dahlia). There are some important puzzling elements that are not fully explained like who is that guy on the motorcycle anyway (alien cohort?) that seems to be following her around as she picks up guys to dump into some black morass of ??? Just what this viscous mess is that these guys she picks up find themselves in is never fully explained but we know there are more than a couple of guys in there thinking they are going to get it on with Scarlett. Instead, they end up like specimens in a black mass, I mean mess.  And why are they there? Presumably as food. Are they being absorbed or what? Do we care? No. The only thing  that is remotely relatable is Scarlett trying to understand  the feeling/sensations of  the living body she now inhabits (has re-animated, apparently previously drowned. Once inside-how? Beats me, better not to ask- she gets her shot at being a “human,” with inevitable tragic consequences. The first time I saw it, I thought gee, he managed to capture the spirit of the book without the movie having much to do with the book at all. The  second time I saw it, I realized it was an unholy mess.) Even bothering to watch it twice suggests that I had been seduced by Scarlett. Maybe I am just waiting my turn in the sticky black forever/whatever.  Without her there was no movie as in it never would have been made which would probably have been a good thing.

And there are scripts that are like novels. I’m thinking of any number of Bergman “domestics among others. Some terrific writers wrote interesting screenplays that became not so good movies. Or great movies like Resnais and Duras ( Hiroshima Mon Amour) and Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad which won a major original screenplay award. (Marienbad is in a class all by itself. ) Even Sartre wrote screenplays. His Typhus, was never filmed though I found it a highly readable The Plague, in an African jungle. He also wrote a screenplay for a movie on Freud that is approximately the same length as Being and Nothingness, and about as readable. Screenplays that were made into movies that were much more enjoyable to read than to watch include Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor (might be more enjoyable to watch if you have had a passionate desire to see Brad Pitt choked to death by an ingenious machine that clamps around one’s neck and gradually tightens.  I have never had that desire. In fact, I actually like many Brad Pitt movies. I think by any given standards the movie of The Counselor downright sucks despite Cameron Diaz playing a perfect bitch that didn’t feel like acting.) Bukowski’s script for Barfly, is much funnier than the movie which generally felt joyless.  And Tarantino’s Hateful 8 was a play that showed all kinds of promise as a movie. I don’t care if you think Jennfier Jason Leigh plays a totally obnoxious bitch, I don’t want to see get punched in the face more times that I care to count. It happens so many times, in fact, that you think the director is reveling in just how daring he is by doing it. It isn’t daring, it’s misogynist. And the ending is something Seneca might have rejected as too gory. But that’s just me. I will say I have grown to love Pulp Fiction, despite the fact that it makes no logical sense whatsoever. I don’t think I’m out on a limb saying, continuity matters, and there is none whatsoever in Pulp Fiction.  I am also a huge fan of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (whoa Pitt is BAD in thatmovieif only for that  Bruce Lee take down scene. Leonardo is great too playing way against type.)The novel Tarantino he wrote fleshes out the movie is a great compliment (doesn’t even remotely feel like a novelization which are almost always terrible.) Which came first, the novel, or the screenplay?  Doesn’t really matter, they’re both good.

Which brings us full circle back to the unfilmable, no, not The Dead, which I found much more satisfying with a repeated viewings than the original time I saw it. Maybe like Under the Volcano,  I wondered if the epochal nature of Joyce’s story would be lost in the focus of the love story like in Under the Volcano.  The Dead is what the critic Thompson calls a talky movie. People arrive for the annual New Year’s Eve party at the spinster sister’s home in Dublin. They dance, they drink, they have dinner, they leave. The way they interacts with each other during after-dinner conversation in particular,  reveals essential natures of the guests and their relationships.  It is the end of an era but no one knows it yet, though Gabriel does by the end of the story/film.

Who is a social climber? who is a closet drunk? who is a prig? who is kind hearted and wistful? who is diplomatic and who is not? A brilliant ensemble cast gives depth to the characters and their relationships. Director Huston does hints of the all-important politics (Joyce like all Irishmen is obsessed with Politics. The funniest thing I ever heard about Ireland was said on a group bus tour of Ireland by our otherwise reliable guide, “The Irish are not a political people.” After 25 years working in an Irish pub, and reading innumerable books by Irish writers, I beg to differ), in a brief interlude between an Irish Republican beauty and the priggish Gabriel, a writer of essays and pro empire political tracts.  The sense is, 1904 is an epoch year; socially, politically, literally, in some cases. It may also be the effective end of the compatibility of the primary couple, Grette and Gabriel, played brilliantly by Donal McCann and  Anjelica Huston.  The movie succeeds by following the text of what could be considered the greatest story in the English language. Ultimately, the film is an elegy for the Irish way of life and it is the director, as much as it is Joyce, speaking from the grave in the final monologue( literally lifted from the Joyce story.)

The main reason that “Volcano” is unfilmable is rooted in the nature of the text. Lowry’s novel is a densely layered, a complex literal and figurative descent into hell. Representing the last days of a drunk, without the intellectual and emotional context of the novel, is a doomed effort despite the heroic performance by Finney (which Huston called the greatest performance ever by any actor.) We do not appreciate the depth of Firmin’s brilliant scholarly mind, his wit and intellectual strivings, his complex understanding of the world, all we see is this oddly likable (most of the time) man in throes of a suicidal drunk. There are glimpses of his wit and learning but they are only brief glimpses.  Mostly we wonder how this guy has managed to survive this long walking around a hostile environment with seemingly unlimited resources for buying drink.  If you really wanted to see a period movie about a drunk watch,Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. If you want to see a depressive in an asylum, one who doesn’t really belong in one, which adds another dimension to her horrible situation, that is essentially about  a person unable to live a life without love (a constant theme in Volcano) see Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit. (And by all means read the excellent books these movies were based on.)

Huston, of course, realized the time of the novel was perfect. The opening scene of Finney as the consul stumbling adroitly through the various moment mori in a cemetery is a classic. The Day of the Dead is a built-in setting for the haunted life of a person intent on proceeding on the way to the very heart of hell (under the volcano) where he will burn for all time. All the aspects of death in life or life in death if you prefer, are visible and it is as natural as can be because that is the point of the day is summoning the spirits of the dead to walk among us in life for a time. Spirits like dead man walking Geoffrey. These death images are, both projections of his inner being, and real.  He is warned not to go the feral Farolito bar where the worst of the worst in Mexico bet on cock fights, choose their whores, drink, and brawl, and eventually kill foreigners who make the fatal mistake of being there. Being warned never to go there is just the impetus his disordered mind needs to actually go there. Once he open the swinging doors of the Farolito, he opens the swinging doors to hell.

As I mentioned there is a multiplicity of themes, or keys to reading Volcano brilliantly outlined in a letter by the author to his protective publisher, Johnathan Cape. Lowry defends his choices for not altering a thing. Volcano can be read as grade B movie (script) an Aeneid like mythological descent into a literal hell, an examination of the Kabbalah and the labyrinth of the cosmos and man’s place in it, an in-depth psychological study of the human mind, a melodrama with a love story attached to it and so on. By choosing the love story as the hook for the movie, Huston makes the obvious accessible one for the viewer to latch onto. The idea of the unattainable love in the novel is far more interesting than the impotence of actually having to deal with it in real life.  That Cape decided not to change a word of the novel after reading Lowry’s defense says all you need to know about how well thought out this novel was. And why the movie doesn’t work.

We have shells of people instead of living, breathing people. The setting is real, the demons are real, but the principles are bit players in it except for Finney’s character.  Jacqueline Bisset is beautiful and game as Yvonne, but why would she come back to this man? He will never stop drinking, he will continue to hurt her as he did to the point, she divorced him. And there she is, sitting with him, following him, trying to save him from himself. And Hugo, the half-brother, the kind of character Leonard Cohen refers to in his song, Famous Blue Raincoat, “as my killer, my brother thanks for the hurt you took from her yes I thought it was there for good so I never tried.” Hugo, played by Anthony Andrews, fresh off his success in Brideshead Revisited, has had an affair with Yvonne. He is barely visible as the idealistic half, the separated at twin part, of Georffrey who is living or, trying to, the kind of life Geoffrey imagined he could have lived. Hugo as a shell and it’s the script’s fault not Andrews. It is Finney’s movie and enters the world so completely, that when he says with deep, conviction, “Hell is my preference…Hell is my natural habitat.” We believe him. The essence of him is on the page but not on the screen.

Despite valiant efforts by all, the project feels off from the conception; you can film and expressionistic, metaphysically based novel, in a realistic manner. It just doesn’t work. I wondered maybe even filming this in color was a huge mistake thinking of scenes in Treasure of Sierra Madre of the religious icons, the altars, the peasant shrines. Wouldn’t the demons, the walking skeletons, the Farolito sequence be so much better in darkness with shadows and natural light? But that’s not the movie that was made, that is the inner movie in my mind and we have to content ourselves with what we have.