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Bogart and Bacall with one of the masters of hardboiled fiction, David Goodis. Dark Passage is undoubtedly the best known of his work thanks to them, but he wrote some of the best in the genre including The Burglar that was also turned into a great movie with Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea
Born on this day in 1907, actor and noir icon Dan Duryea. What's your favorite film of his, noir or not?
Nastassja Kinski in La Lune Dans Le Caniveau aka The Moon In The Gutter (1983)
David Goodis (March 2, 1917 – January 7, 1967)
Nightfall by David Goodis
The Point Men
About twenty years back…
… a moderately dreary Swedish novel about a girl with a tattoo became all the rage.
Yawn.
Nobody writes noir like Americans. Philadelphian David Goodis was one of the best.
It’s time to catch up.
Tonight’s Watch
DAVID GOODIS IN HOLLYWOOD
Despite the recent publication of an American Library edition of his work, it is unlikely David Goodis will ever be widely considered more than a second or even third-tier pulp novelist. Part of this, I’ve always suspected, can be blamed on the often disturbing and obsessive psycho-sexual themes that worm their way through many of his books. If you read enough of his books in succession, you’re often left feeling just a little creepy. Still he remains among my favorites, quite possibly for that very reason.
While writing furiously for the pulps in the early ‘40s (after publishing his first novel in ‘39), the Philadelphia-born writer moved to New York and started writing for the radio serials.
Then in ‘42, like so many other writers great and small, he moved to Hollywood, as that’s where the real money could be found. The sheen didn’t last long. After doing some brief and uncredited work on the script for Destination Unknown, he returned East for a few years. But he was back in Hollywood in ‘46 after Warner Brothers, having seen his novel Dark Passage serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, optioned the book and brought him out to write the screenplay, offering him a six-year contract as part of the deal. Goodis took the contract, but Delmer Daves, who’d been assigned to direct Dark Passage all but threw out his script and wrote his own.
The final film—the third with Bogart and Bacall, and also one of my favorites—stuck extraordinarily close to Goodis novel right down to the smallest lines of dialogue. The film was not very well received, either by critics or audiences.
At that point, however, Goodis had his contract and he was staying. In fact later that same year Warners released The Unfaithful, Goodis’ adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter starring Ann Sheridan, Lew Ayres, Eve Arden and directed by Vincent Sherman. The story of a wealthy woman who kills a man in self defense and the unpleasant back story that eventually comes out did not result in a great film despite Goodis’s classic noir dialogue and a lively performance from Eve Arden as a socialite gossip. Both Sheridan and Ayres were flat, and Sherman’s direction was uninspired. Sadly, it would remain the only original feature screenplay Goodis would ever see produced in his lifetime. He wrote several more (including an adaptation of The Lady in the Lake) but nothing ever happened with them.
Over the next ten years he wrote for television and sold the rights to other novels and stories to other filmmakers. One of his novels, in fact, Nightfall, would be made three times—in 1950. ‘51, and ‘57. Although he had nothing to do with the script, the 1957 version with Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Brian Keith, and James Gregory remains among the finest of the Goodis-inspired films, as well as one of the most complex and beautiful noirs ever made.
His script for The Unfaithful was shot again in 1956 with similar results as the original, but finally in ‘57 Goodis landed a job on a film that would do him justice (an especially good thing considering it was based on one of his novels). The Burglar, directed by Paul Wendkos (mostly known for his TV work) and starring Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield, tells the deceptively simple story of a heist and its aftermath, but in doing so comes closer than any other Goodis film made in his lifetime to capturing the feel and spirit of his books.
The film opens with Duryea and his small gang robbing the mansion of an obscenely wealthy spiritualist. it then splits into two tiers, as we follow both the thieves as they try to figure out how to fence the loot, and the cops as they try to track down the thieves. As things progress, we also learn more than we might like as Duryea’s back story bubbles to the surface, along with his obsessive desire to protect his sort-of stepsister (Mansfield). as his obsession becomes more blatantly incestuous Goodis really hits his stride. Most of his novels contain an ice blonde femme fatale, and who better to represent that on screen than Mansfield? In what are serious, gritty, and demanding roles, both she and Duryea give fantastic performances, and Goodis’s dialogue is sharp as ever. By the time we reach the downbeat if inevitable ending (on the Atlantic City Boardwalk), we’ve all but forgotten about the stolen loot, which is always a sign of a heist picture that rises above the fray.
Although he would do some more television writing and was still optioning books (including his novel Down There, which Truffaut would film as Shoot the Piano Player in 1960), by the end of the ‘50s Goodis was fed up with Hollywood—a town in which he was considered an eccentric—and went back East once again. After a decade in Hollywood, he had only been given (even partial) screenwriting credit on three pictures.
In 1967, in the midst of suing ABC for stealing the plot of Dark Passage and turning it into The Fugitive—Goodis died of a stroke, leaving behind a number of unproduced scripts.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s up to the present, Hollywood rediscovered Goodis, turning out over a dozen films based on his work. But I’m still waiting for someone to film his version of Lady in the Lake, which lord knows has to be better than the one we’ve got now. by Jim Knipfel
