Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2003

That Old Feeling: Fear Noir

By Richard Corliss

In 1947 Cornell Woolrich, the famous mystery writer, received a fan letter from his old Columbia University professor Mark Van Doren, complimenting him on the movie adapted from his novel “Black Angel.” Woolrich replied that he’d seen the film in a Manhattan theater and added, “I was so ashamed when I came out of there. All I could keep thinking of in the dark was: Is that what I wasted my whole life at?”

Twenty years later, just before his death in 1968, Woolrich remembered one thing about “Rear Window,” the most famous movie made from his fiction (which his agent had sold to Hollywood, along with five other stories, for a measly $5,000). “Hitchcock wouldn’t even send me a ticket to the premiere in New York,” the writer told his young agent, Barry Malzberg. “He knew where I lived. He wouldn’t even send me a ticket.”

Woolrich knew he was trading power for solvency when he sold his work to other media. In many years, film, radio and later TV versions of his work brought in the bulk of his income. In the 1940s he wrote 11 novels; Hollywood filmed eight of them within three years of their publication. True, Woolrich was not consulted when screenwriters gave his plots different endings (“No Man of Her Own”), different murderers (“Black Angel”). Authors rarely were then. Shakespeare and the Bible got rewritten with the same blithe abandon.

The fact is that Woolrich’s rep rests largely on the movies, good or bad, made from his fiction. Here, then is a festival of Woolrich films spanning seven decades and five countries. Most of the movies are available for purchase online, or can be rented from netflix.com. I found all but two in three Manhattan video stores (World of Video, Kim’s and, for the Indian film, Naghma House). A Woolrich starter set would comprise “Phantom Lady,” “The Window,” “No Man of Her Own,” “Rear Window,” “The Bride Wore Black,” “Kati Patang,” “Martha” and “Original Sin.”

If you have the video resources, get different versions of the same novel: François Truffaut’s adaptation of “Waltz into Darkness” and Michael Cristofer’s. Or the four films made from “I Married a Dead Man”: the Hollywood “No Man of Her Own,” the Indian “Kati Patang,” the French “J’ai épousé une ombre” and the Canadian-U.S. “Mrs. Winterbourne.” Compare and contrast, class.

These movies will introduce the novice to all manner of Woolrich obsessions. The hero who sees things no one believes (“Phantom Lady,” “Fear Is the Night,” “Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” “The Window,” “Martha”). The heroine whom love drives to deception (“No Man of Her Own”), murder (“The Bride Wore Black,” “Mississippi Mermaid”) or near-death (“Martha”). The obtuse cop (“Phantom,” “Black Angel,” “Fear,” “Thousand Eyes,” “The Window,” “Rear Window”). The letter with ominous news (“No Man,” “Rear,” “Mermaid”). The murderous or suicidal impulses on an el platform or train overpass (“Phantom,” “Thousand,” “The Window,” “No Man”). The race to prevent an innocent person’s death (“Phantom,” “Angel,” “Thousand”) — which, Woolrich made clear, was only a reprieve from the irrevocable death sentence we all live under.

Get a few of these movies, settle into the easy chair of modest expectations, suspend disbelief at crucial moments and fall into the vicarious nightmare of Woolrich’s fear noir.



Phantom Lady, 1944
Screenplay by Bernard Schoenfeld, from the 1942 novel by William Irish (CW)
Directed by Robert Siodmak

Man walks into a bar, starts talking to a tense woman in a hat with an elaborate feather; invites her to a Broadway show because he’s been stood up by his wife and has an extra ticket; agrees to her condition of anonymity; leaves her at the bar after the show; arrives home to find his wife dead and himself the main suspect. Who’s his alibi? Dunno. Where does she live? Couldn’t say. Did anyone see them at the time of the murder? Sure, lots of people — but none of them seems to remember the phantom lady. Innocence betrayed meets the no-name sex of a million quickie assignations. When he’s convicted of the crime, only his secretary and his best friend are interested in solving the murder.

In the first eight mins., Siodmak and Schoenfeld efficiently construct a gallows due for our rancorous architect hero, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis). The pickup, the revue they attend, the four people who noticed them — the bartender, the cab driver, the Carmen Miranda-style star of the show and her hepped-up drummer — are sharply sketched, with lots of oblique camera angles and warning shadows. The men waiting for Scott when he arrives home don’t bother to introduce themselves; are they thugs, or unknown suitors for Mrs. H.? They are detectives of the brutish sort Woolrich often painted: the menacing fatso (Thomas Gomez) and the wise-cracking sadist (Regis Toomey). Gomez: “Your wife was strangled with one of your ties.” Toomey: “Yeah. Knotted so tight it had to be cut loose with a knife.”

But Carol “Kansas” Richman (Ella Raines), the right-hand gal who’s obviously in love with her boss, has a deep Nancy Drew streak. She suspects that the people who saw Scott and the woman have been paid or intimidated to keep quiet; her mission is to try scaring or seducing them into talking. Her first mark is the bartender. She sits at the bar silently for several nights and spooks him into first planning to push her off the el platform and then fatally rushing into traffic.

The next one, the drummer Cliff (Elisha Cook Jr.), has a yen for hot jazz, fast women and funny cigarettes. Carol catches his wild eye with a perfunctory kiss or two and the promise that “I’m a hep kitten!” In a jam session with other sweating, hopped-up jazzmen — the film’s most famous scene — Cliff beats the skins in a masturbatory delirium. She accompanies him back to his seedy apartment, gives him another kiss and a brief lap-sit and ankles when he admits he was paid off.

The novel’s suspense came from its withholding of the news that [SPOILER ALERT] Scott’s upper-class friend Jack Marlow is the killer. You can’t obscure the star till the end of the movie, so Schoenfeld and Siodmak don’t waste time trying. From the moment Marlow (Franchot Tone) enters Cliff’s dingy digs and mutters, “What a place. You can feel the rats in the walls,” he has pearly psychopath written all over him. Especially his hands, which poke out of the shadows into harsh light. “How interesting a pair of hands can be,” Marlow muses, as Cliff sits petrified. “They can trick a melody out of a keyboard. They can mold beauty out of a piece of common clay... Yet the same pair of hands can do terrible evil. They can destroy, torture, even kill.” He glares at Cliff and takes off his scarf...

Tone spends the rest of the movie clenching, kneading, staring at his hands; he’s a nutso-virtuoso, an Ormandy or Orlac, conducting a symphony ... of Mur-der! It may be tough to keep from laughing at Tone’s aristo-path, and harder to wave away the plot idiocies. (How did Jack commit the murder and then track Scott into the bar and shadow his every move, so that he would be able to contact and bribe the witnesses?) Clear these hurdles and you’ll enjoy the climax, as Jack invites Carol back to his place, loosens his bow tie and twists it in his hands as he contemplates his most beautiful murder. Sure, it means his pal will be executed. But “What’s his life to mine? What’s any life to mine?” Tone is the vulture soaring over the carrion of Curtis’ loser-hero, but Raines is the film’s rock — pretty, plucky, blithely reckless. She plays a nice girl who’s a jeopardy freak.

Black Angel, 1946
Screenplay by Roy Chanslor, from the 1943 novel by CW
Directed by Roy William Neill

“Black Angel,” novel and film, has a family resemblance to “Phantom Lady.” A glamorous, unloving wife is strangled on the fifth anniversary of her marriage to a man she can’t stand. A husband is rudely interrogated by some loutish cops, found guilty and condemned to death. The woman who loves him struggles and connives to find the evidence that will clear him. There’s also a detective who is at first skeptical, then accepting, of the man’s innocence. (And [SPOILER] her partner in detection, who is played by the top-billed actor, turns out to be the killer.)

A couple of differences: the “Black Angel” loser is a lover of the murder victim, and the woman avenger, Catherine (blond, charisma-challenged June Vincent), is his betrayed wife. When her schlub of a two-timing spouse is sent to jail for the murder of showgirl-vocalist Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling), Catherine tracks down Mavis’ ex, a part-time songwriter, full-time drunk named Martin Blair (Dan Duryea). “I had to see you,” she implores, and he snaps, “Why? Because I had a wife who needed killing. And you had a husband who took care of it.”

Marty has a locked-room alibi — a pal had bolted the lush’s apartment door from the outside just before the murder was committed — and, as played by Duryea, is a sympathetic soul looking to redeem a promising life pissed away. He’s also falling in love with Catherine. So he joins forces with her as a pianist-singer duo at the nightclub of menacing Marko (Peter Lorre), who knew the dead woman. All this amateur sleuthing wins the initial contempt of detective Broderick Crawford, who snarls to Marty, “You just gotta play detective. Do I go around playin’ piano?”

The movie has a pretty twist in store. [SPOILER] Nice-guy Marty is indeed the killer — the janitor had let him out of his room, he went to Mavis’ place hoping for an anniversary reunion and, when she rudely rejected his affections, he strangled her with his scarf (overtones of Franchot Tone!) — but he doesn’t remember because his alcoholic stupor blotted out the deed. Now that all is clear, he wants to save the husband of the woman he loves. A killer racing against time to turn himself in: that’s a poignant twist.

The Woolrich original had a different twist in mind: the twisting of the woman’s righteous quest into soulless revenge, as, one by one, the suspects die off and our heroine grows callouses on her conscience. The book was a variation on Woolrich’s first novel, “The Bride Wore Black,” which was also the story of a woman who, having been infected by wrongful death, spreads the contagion around to other innocent people. (The woman may have transferred her husband’s betrayal onto other men.)

Woolrich biographer Francis M. Nevins, Jr., says this is the best film adaptation of a Woolrich novel. But “Black Angel” the movie uses only the situation, not the soul, of the original. It de-kinks the novel’s plot — just who is the black angel here anyway? — and the result is a B-minus remake of “Phantom Lady.”



Fear in the Night, 1947
Screenplay and direction by Maxwell Shane, from the 1941 story “And So to Death” / “Nightmare” by CW

In the “Black Angel” movie, a man has forgotten he killed someone. In “Fear in the Night,” a man dreams he killed someone, then wakes to find evidence indicating he really is a murderer. Vince Grayson (DeForest Kelley in his movie debut, 19 years before he became “Bones” McCoy on “Star Trek”) has memories of a mirrored room and a woman watching as he strangles a man. Vince’s policeman brother-in-law Cliff (Paul Kelly, who looks like the seediest possible Johnny Carson), refuses to take his complaint seriously: “If you want me to arrest you for murdering a man in your dream, well ... I’m off-duty when I’m dreamin’.”

Vince finds a house, and a mirrored room, that resembles his dreamscape; and Cliff learns that a murder was recently committed there. This being a thriller, they have to stay there to discover that the murderer was [SPOILER] a cuckolded husband who hypnotized Vince to kill the man she was fooling around with. Vince still isn’t sure if he did it: “I’ve got an innocent man’s conscience in a killer’s body.”

The movie isn’t much, but Kelley nicely conveys a doomed man’s look and walk, as if he’s wearing invisible shackles. His voiceover has the voluptuous tone of a bad dream, or bad pulp writing: “It seemed as if my brain was handcuffed... My stomach was riding a roller coaster... I was scared sick.” The film stretches its minuscule budget with effects like showing murder in Vince’s eyes — literally: the camera closes in, Kelley’s eye sockets turn black and we see the nightmare killing in them. Writer-director Shane would remake this film in 1956 as “Nightmare,” with Edward G. Robinson in the Kelley role. Apparently the same dream kept dogging Shane, and he had to film it, over and over, to get it out of his system.



Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 1948
Screenplay by Barré Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, from the 1945 novel by George Hopley (CW)
Directed by John Farrow

Another man with visions: he can see death coming but is powerless to stop it. Vaudeville mindreader John Triton (Robinson, in the first of two haunted Woolrich roles) has presentiments of doom for a child playing with fire, a newsboy heading into traffic, his own fiancee, her eventual husband. All of these quickly died. Now, 20 years into his premonitory curse, he has a forewarning of doom for his beloved’s rich daughter (Gail Russell). The world thinks Triton is mad, and he does too, but his conscience goads him to warn her that she will die under the stars — the night’s thousand eyes — at 11p.m. and that her death will be presaged by a gust of wind, a broken vase, a crushed flower, a lion and the words, “There’s no danger now.” The night in question, one by one, each element comes true...

The book’s intended victim was a wealthy tycoon, but the confluence of zany coincidences and logic lapses is the same. “There’s a ‘why’ in this too big to go down on any report,” the book’s detective says. “It seems to slip away each time you think you’ve got it pinned down.” In the baronial study, the girl, her lover (John Lund), the cop (William Demarest) and a few businessmen all wait for the witching hour. Then [SPOILER] a mysterious figure moves the minute hand on the grandfather clock ahead, and when that clock chimes 11 the girl and her protectors (who never look at their own watches) think all peril is over. That’s when the murderer strikes. Jeez!

“Night” was Woolrich’s prime mixture of the paranoid and the paranormal — a cocktail that rarely fizzes in this flat adaptation. You will make do with minor pleasures: Robinson’s walking-dead pallor as Triton (who calls himself “a zombie in reverse”); Russell’s fragile beauty (she would drink herself to death at 36); the movie’s last words, that “there are things on earth still hidden from us. Secret things, dark and mysterious.” Like the resolution of a Woolrich plot.



The Window, 1949
Screenplay by Mel Dinelli, from the 1947 story “The Boy Cried Murder” / “Fire Escape” by CW

Cities crush people, sometimes. They surely crush them together, making it hard to keep a secret. An apartment dweller can hear the bickering couple’s argument through the walls; he can tell what the family downstairs is eating from the fugitive aroma. If he’s up late on a sweltering night, he might glimpse a murder.

Nine-year-old Tommy (Bobby Driscoll) has taken his bedding to sleep where it’s cooler, on the fire escape outside the apartment upstairs. There he sees a woman (Ruth Roman) stab a man and, with her husband (Paul Stewart), take the corpse away. Tommy, who has the reputation as a fibber, can’t get his parents or the police to believe him. He’s in deeper trouble when his mother makes him apologize to the murderers. The next night, his folks have to go out overnight. “Don’t leave your room,” warns his mother. “I won’t, Mom,” he says hopelessly. “There’s no place for me to go.” But there’s a place for the killers to go: his place.

Prime-cut Woolrich: the accused must corral the killers to exonerate himself. And who could be more helpless than a child — alone, abandoned, unbelieved — pursued in the dark by a murderer? This atmospheric thriller, shot almost entirely at night, tautens the suspense like rough hands around a little boy’s neck. Driscoll was a Disney star (“Song of the South,” “Treasure Island”) who somehow knew the way to plant fear and grit on a winsome face. He makes “The Window” one of the most modest and satisfying Woolrich adaptations. Driscoll earned a special Oscar for his acting that year, but with puberty his value to Hollywood waned. He later said, “I was carried on a velvet pillow and dumped into a garbage can.”

A city like New York holds a lot of garbage, and a few secrets. In 1968 two children chanced upon a corpse in an abandoned Greenwich Village tenement. The body was buried as John Doe in a pauper’s grave. A year later, fingerprint tests revealed the man’s identity: Bobby Driscoll, dead at 31 of a drug overdose.

No Man of Her Own, 1950
Screenplay by Sally Benson and Catherine Tunney, from the 1948 novel “I Married a Dead Man” by William Irish (CW)
Directed by Mitchell Leisen

Helen (Barbara Stanwyck), a penniless pregnant woman who has been spurned by Steve (Lyle Bettger), the rotter she once loved, boards a train heading west. On the train she is befriended by a Hugh (Richard Denning) and Patrice (Phyllis Thaxter), a nice young couple are on their way to see his parents, she for the first time; Patrice, also pregnant, gives the hopeless woman her wedding ring to try on. Train crashes. Hugh and Patrice die. In a hospital, Helen gives birth to her baby. She is mistaken for Patrice and, quickly, accepted as her by the bereaving, loving parents (Henry O’Neill and Jane Cowl). For the sake of her child, she presses the charade and soon attracts the affections of the dead man’s decent, handsome brother (John Lund). Helen allows herself to be loved, to accompany him to a local society dance. Then a finger taps on the shoulder: “May I have this dance?” It’s Steve.

Even for Woolrich, that’s a pile-up, a virtual train wreck of coincidences. But it works, at least in this movie version (the first of at least four), because of the passion of the playing, the acuity of Leisen’s mood-setting and the power of a narrative suffused with dream and doom. The dream is that there’s a perfect world waiting to embrace the loneliest among us. The doom (cued in the first, sepulchral moments that introduce the film-long flashback) is that we’re charlatans, that people wouldn’t accept us if they knew who were really were, and that, any day now, we’ll be unmasked, caught, taken away from the dream we don’t deserve.

Stanwyck, one of the smartest actors to find stardom in Hollywood, played femmes fatales with sandpaper souls through most of the 40s. This time she must seem the forlorn victim, with no resources of sinew or cunning to save her — only the kindness of strangers. At 42, Stanwyck was 15 or 20 years too old for the part, yet in the first scenes she fairly glows with the misery of someone young enough to expect better of the world. She pounds Steve’s door but he won’t open it. He’s inside with another woman (Carole Mathews), who looks quite like the young, tough, blond Stanwyck. “Don’t ever try to brush me off like that,” she snarls.

Patrice and Hugh’s easy generosity stuns Helen, because the way they treat her is the opposite of the way life has. When she has her baby after the train wreck, she has her cause. It’s not a terrible deceit to take advantage of the family’s good nature; their idyllic town, Caulfield, is blessedly unreal, a dream, and who would arrest her for lying in a dream? What shakes her from this sweet sleepwalk is an anonymous telegram: “Who are you — where did you come from — what are you doing there —” Steve’s calling card.

The rotter, Steve, proposes an elaborate blackmail scheme: she has to marry him so he’ll inherit a third of the family wealth when the old folks die. Stanwyck’s face during the wedding ceremony, when she is asked if she’ll take Steve “as long as we both shall live,” is a marvel of malign conviction; the wedding vow is a death threat. Later, going to Steve’s place to kill him, she [SPOILER] finds him already dead. The brother has been tracking her; he dumps the body on a flatbed train chugging out of town, and the couple, now married, wait numbly for the knell of doom: a policeman’s knock on the door.

The movie is often fanatically faithful to the book, including the family’s phone number and the scene where the train pulls into Caulfield and through the window we see a sign with the town’s name revealed one letter at a time (D-L-E-I...). But the screenwriters had to devise an ending different from the book’s, where [SPOILER] Helen, her beau and his mother each takes blame for Steve’s murder, and all must be lying. So Benson and Tunney went to the short story (“They Call Me Patrice”) that Woolrich had expanded into his novel. There they found a more plausible, if less prominent killer: Steve’s baby-Stanwyck blond.

This solution was also used in the most recent version of the novel, the 1996 “Mrs. Winterbourne.” All you need to know is that, there, they play it for laffs. And that the role once taken by Barbara Stanwyck now falls to talk-show host Ricki Lake. To use a noir novel as the basis for a “While You Were Sleeping” wannabe comedy takes big steel balls, I guess, but there’s more nerve than verve here. The whole enterprise is suffocatingly sunny.



Rear Window, 1954
Screenplay by John Michael Hayes, from the 1942 story “It Had to Be Murder” / “Rear Window” by CW
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

“I didn’t know their names. I’d never heard their voices... Yet I could have constructed a timetable of their comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. They were the rear-window dwellers around me.”

From the start of “It Had to Be Murder” (available in the excellent collection of stories, most of them made into films or TV dramas, called “Rear Window”), Woolrich establishes his protagonist, Hal Jeffries, as a reluctant voyeur. He doesn’t want to sit in darkness watching people eat, argue. dance, dress, undress... but his leg’s in a cast, he’s not much of a reader, it’s a hot Manhattan summer with a breeze by the window, and if he leaves lights on they’ll attract insects. “Well, what should I do, sit there with my eyes tightly shuttered?” So he looks, and catches clues to what he thinks is a murder. Then the murderer pays a call on Jeff.

Adapting the story, Hayes and Hitchcock expanded its few snapshots of neighbors into a Woolrichian paranoia panorama: the songwriter from “Black Angel,” the dancer from “Phantom Lady,” the impish kid and fire-escape snoozers from “The Window,” the lovestruck newlyweds from “I Married a Dead Man” and, to be sure, the killer and killee from the entire canon. (As well as the hero who noses his way into fatal peril.) Those neighbors, bit players to Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff, are stars of their own silent movies; they mime love, flirtation, frustration, hatred, violence, all in long shot. And Jeff is the viewer, stuck in his chair like a moviegoer in his seat, watching (it was Woolrich’s original title:) murder from a fixed perspective. Since this Jeff is a professional photographer, he is also Hitchcock, choosing the shots, deciding what parts of the mystery are pertinent.

The film gives the crippled man “legs” — a support staff that can carry Jeff’s part of the story out of his Greenwich Village apartment and across the courtyard to the murderer’s flat, where they become characters in the movie Jeff is both watching and creating. This extended family comprises not just the standard skeptical cop friend (Wendell Corey) but a sassy maid (Thelma Ritter) who acts as the movie’s tut-tutting conscience: “We’ve become a race of peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” Most important is Lisa (Grace Kelly), the sexy society girlfriend who engages him in some of the more mature and unresolved romantic debates in Hollywood movies.

Lisa’s main function is to snoop around and get in trouble, thus [SPOILER] leaving Jeff alone when the killer Thorwald (young Raymond Burr) appears in the dark. In trademark Hitchcock fashion, Jeff uses his props as weapons — he snaps blinding flashbulbs at Thorwald. Just two things. 1. In a small apartment, those flashes wouldn’t blunt the killer’s sense of direction; he knows pretty much where Jeff is. And 2. Jeff frequently gets a closeup look at Thorwald through his camera’s telephoto lens. Why didn’t he ever take photos of the incriminating evidence?

In a rehearsal for “Vertigo,” Stewart ends up dangling from a high ledge; and in the last shot we realize that the Stewart-Kelly romance is also still dangling. The movie is a smoothly-told fable of the pleasures and pitfalls of voyeurism — how watching something can shorten your life. It was also, in 1954, an instant anachronism. Neither “Rear Window” nor “The Window” could not have existed in the age of air conditioning.



The Bride Wore Black, 1968
Screenplay by François Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard, from the 1940 novel by CW
Directed by Truffaut

A woman tracks down five men, one by one, determined to kill them for the crime she believes they committed: the murder of her husband on their wedding day. Julie, the crepe-draped bride of Woolrich’s first real crime novel, has a majestic grief. This avenging angel earns the reader’s sympathy as she locates her victims, plays the role of each man’s dream woman and dispatches them with brutal elegance. Her obsession is attractive but [SPOILER] murderously misguided, since the men were not her husband’s killers. A sniper across the street was. And her husband wasn’t the paragon she believed him to be; he’d been in a shady business deal with the man who killed him.

The movie’s plot hews closely to the book’s. There the heroine was Julie Killeen (the killer colleen); here, Julie Kohler (pronounced “colère,” the French word for anger). As Julie, Jeanne Moreau shows no emotion as she executes these men (with a push, a poison, suffocation, an arrow, a knife). The love that spurs her on is not so much post-coital as post-mortem. “I’m already dead,” she says. “I died the day he did. When I’m done I’ll join him.”

It gives pungent quirks to each of Julie’s victims: the wolf (Claude Rich) who has recorded the sound of his girlfriend crossing her silk-stockinged legs; the lonely loser (Michel Bouquet) who says he won’t touch Julie, but wants to be asked; the pompous politician (Michel Lonsdale) who suggests they have sex so that “You can say, ‘For one hour he forgot about France and gave himself to me’”; the skirt-chasing artist (Charles Denner) who is almost too charming to kill. But not quite. (Woolrich minutiae: Lonsdale’s son is called Cookie — the same name Ricki Lake gives her son in “Mrs. Winterbourne.”)

The film version has a softer, woozily sentimental view of the bridal couple; it shows them running through a meadow in ecstatic slow motion — really. And it dispenses with the novel’s resolution. Woolrich’s killer was the best friend of two of the men; in the film (where he’s played by Jean-Claude Brialy) his function is merely to cast a net of suspicion on the bride. [SPOILER] In the film, the killer is one of the group of five (brutish Daniel Boulanger), who is put in jail before Julie can kill him. Julie materializes at the artist’s funeral, is arrested and jailed. In prison, she is assigned kitchen duty, and commits her ultimate murder just out of camera range in the final shot.

The director, best known for “The Four Hundred Blows” and “Jules and Jim” (warm Truffaut), also loved psychological thrillers (cool Truffaut). This one is cool — freon cold. Truffaut did a book-length interview with Hitchcock, and “Bride” is supposed to be his homage to the Master of Suspense. But Julie, in her uninflected implacability, belongs less to Hitchcock than to Robert Bresson, the great French minimalist. His heroines — Joan of Arc, Mouchette, the suicidal young wife in “Une femme douce” — all bear the cross of living. All seek the transcendence of death.



Mississippi Mermaid, 1969
Screenplay and direction by Truffaut, from the 1947 novel “Waltz into Darkness” by William Irish (CW)

Jean Renoir said every author writes the same story over and over. Woolrich surely did. He’d latch onto a plot, then refine it, try correcting its flaws, in a later novel. In “Bride” he created a vengeance machine, a killer of all killers; in the 1948 “Rendezvous in Black” his bitter protagonist decides to kill, not the five men responsible for his girlfriend’s death, but the person each of the presumed guilty men loves most, so that they will live out their lives in grief, as he has. (In 1972 Italian director Umberto Lenzi filmed the novel — without this poetic twist, or much else in its favor — as “Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso” / “Seven Blood-Stained Roses.”)

Another example: “Waltz into Darkness.” Like “I Married a Dead Man,” it has a wife who appears out of nowhere, lies about her identity, wins the love of a decent man, and withdraws thousands from a new bank account to pay off a slime-ball who was once her lover. The difference is that Julia, in “Waltz,” is a killer bitch with a larcenous agenda and an ex-beau even creepier than Helen’s Steve. [SPOILER] This guy, Billy, has killed the real Julie, who was a mail-order bride on her way to rich, nice-guy Louis. His pretty accomplice takes Julia’s place, marries Louis, steals his money and runs away with Billy. When Louis catches up with her and they become a couple again, she [SUPER-SPOILER] makes a murderer of him, then poisons him.

Truffaut’s Julie (Catherine Deneuve) has the same curt amorality. When she learns that Louis (Jean-Paul Belmondo) has killed a detective who’s been trailing them, she glances at the corpse and says, “That’s one bastard less.” When Louis observes that “You see evil everywhere,” she replies, “It is everywhere.” Yet Truffaut wants Julie to be an alluring creature, so that Louis’ love for her is elevated from masochistic wimpery to amour fou. Or at least amour noir. “I know what you’re doing,” the ailing Louis tell her toward the end, “and I don’t care. I’m not sorry I met you. I’m not sorry I killed for you. I’m not sorry that I love you.” In the book and the movie, the woman realizes she loves Louis as he is dying from her poison. In the book, he dies; in the film the couple trudges off in the snow.

“Mermaid” is dedicated to Renoir, but actually this is Truffaut’s Hitchcock film. Like “Vertigo,” it’s story of a man in love with two women who are the same woman, and one of whom is dead — and who finally decides that he can love the second woman even though she impersonated the first woman and was responsible for her death. (Hope that’s clear.) But Woolrich’s novel came first.

Even on the page, the siren-sucker relationship is a lot livelier than in Truffaut’s frozen “Mermaid.” Which, by the way, never gets to Mississippi, or even to North America. The first setting is Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean; then Louis follows Julie to Marseille, and they finish in the snow of Switzerland. The movie’s emotional trajectory is also from hot to cold, earth tones to glacial whites. For a man obsessed, Belmondo plays it low-voltage; Deneuve is only the most gorgeous paperweight. The film has no heat, only humidity, and that in the early going. By the end, Truffaut has packed his movie in Alpine ice.

Another 32 years would pass before “Waltz into Darkness” found its true screen version. And for that, you must read this to the end.



Kati Patang, 1970
Story and screenplay by Gulshan Nanda, dialogue by Vrajendra Gaur, from “I Married a Dead Man”
Directed by Shakti Samanta

Leave it to the Indians to take the congested saga of “I Married a Dead Man” — distressed young woman, fatal train wreck, her deception of a loving adoptive family, extortion by the old beau — and pack it with three times the plot, plus songs. Since the movie is both fabulous and obscure, I’ll spell out what happens. This may take a while.

It’s the wedding day of our orphan heroine Madhavi (Asha Parekh), known as Madhu; she is to marry a man she’s not seen. Receiving a plaintive note from her low-life lover Kailash (Prem Chopra), she flees the ceremony (“I threw all social norms to the wind... burning my boats”) and rushes to his arms. They happen to be wrapped around his real amour, tarty singer Shabu (Bindu). Flummoxed and furious, she flees back to her rich uncle to beg forgiveness, only to notice that he’s dead, probably of heartbreak. She flees yet again, to the train station. There she meets old friend Poonam, whose husband died in a jeep accident and who is about to suffer a similar automotive auto-da-fe. In a hospital after the train wreck, the dying Poonam begs Madhu to assume her identity and give her son Munni the home he was destined for.

In the film’s first 16 mins., Madhu has called off one marriage, found the chance for another crushed in disillusion, and held two dead loved ones in her arms. The pace never slackens. The driver who is to take Madhu and the child to their new home steers her into a monsoon and steals her money. Enter Kamal (Rajesh Khanna), driving by; he overtakes the brigand, engages in a hilariously speeded-up river- and mud-fight, and takes Madhu to his place to dry off. Turns out Kamal was the dead husband’s best friend, and that this noble fellow is a heavy toper. He’s been drowning his sorrows since his wedding day, when the bride... whom he had never seen... never showed up. That heartless creature — is it Madhu?

Of course. But call her Poonam, please. The late groom’s father Dimanji (Nasir Hussain) and mother greet her and Munni warmly. Kamal is also warming to her, composing poetry in her honor (something about a kite buffeted by winds of fate — “Kati Patang” means a kite cut free) and swearing off booze after she lectures him on demon drink. Their idyll is interrupted when Shabu shows up, kootching at a night club, and makes rude allusions to Madhu’s turbulent past. Kailash soon appears, threatening Madhu while ingratiating himself with Dimanji and flirting with the family’s mischievous maid. When Madhu is told to sign some official papers, thus risking forgery and exposure, she thinks to flee a fourth time. But the voice of Poonam speaks from the grave: “Break these bonds of helplessness. Your place is at your Kamal’s feet.”

Strengthened, Madhu writes Kamal a note explaining all, but it’s intercepted by Dimanji, who suddenly suspects Madhu has designs on his estate. Kamal and Madhu frolic at the Holi fire festival, but when she returns home caked in gulal, Dimanji denounces her. She rushes upstairs to find Kailash in her room, again threatening her and her child. She grabs a torch and (as Holi celebrants do to chase away the childnapping demon Dhundha) thrusts the torch in his face. The maid comes in with a squalling Munni, and Madhu resolves to leave. Dimanji stops her. What’s to live for? she asks, and he proclaims, “Everything. The same child who needs a mother’s love... And the same old me, who... stands here before you, imploring. You came here as Poonam. Remain so.”

[BUNCH OF SPOILERS] Shabu discovers she’s pregnant and goes to a doctor for an abortion; he refuses. Kamal asks Dimanji for Madhu’s hand in marriage. Kamal’s father arrives to oppose the wedding but is persuaded by Dimanji to accept. Kailash sneaks into the kitchen and poisons Dimanji’s hot milk. Dimanji signs over much of the estate to Munni, then drinks the milk and dies. Madhu summons the local doctor, who arrives just after a policeman; the cop says that Shabu is claiming to be the real Poonam. In the police station, Madhu sobbingly confesses her true identity. She is suspected of poisoning Dimanji, and at the funeral his widow excoriates her.

[SPOILER MARATHON] Shabu visits the family and claims to be the real Poonam; as she leaves, the doctor enters and recognizes her as the woman who wanted an abortion. Kamal is told of Madhu’s letter to him and resolves to help her. When he discovers a bottle of poison outside the kitchen, the maid admits he dunnit. In the big confrontation scene, Kamal and Madhu spin lies to draw self-incriminating statements from Kailash and Shabu. They get it all on tape, and the case is closed. The next day, Madhu has left the family home to trudge into oblivion. Kamal catches up, sings her a love song and they embrace.

Khanna, often called the first Hindi superstar, is handsome in a Western way: strong but soft, like Rock Hudson, and appearing here in the sort of elevated weepie Hudson did in the 50s. Parekh — who, as Brian Naas of the natty Hong Kong-Bollywood website brns.com notes, had “eyelashes so long that you could hang your laundry on them” — won the Filmfare Award for Best Actress as Madhu. Everyone plays with brisk brio, but the story’s the thing, and how a national cinema attuned to melodrama could ravel so much intrigue around an already-baroque Woolrich plot. Track “Kati Patang” down. It’s amazing.

Martha, 1974
Screenplay and direction by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, from the 1968 story “For the Rest of Her Life” by CW

Vacationing in Rome with his spinster daughter, a middle-aged German suffers a fatal heart attack on the Spanish Steps. In the embassy after his death, the woman, Martha (Margit Carstensen) encounters a handsome blond man with a mysterious smile. He is Helmut (Karlheinz Böhm), an executive in the dam-building business, and soon they are married. Helmut has a few husbandly demands to make: brutal sex whenever he wants it, naturally, but also that they not have children, that Martha memorize books about his job, that she sunbathe until she’s blistered, that she never leave the house or use the phone when he’s away, that her mother be put in an insane asylum — the little requests any wife accepts in the grand compromise of marriage. Oh, and her pet cat: that has to die.

If the movie is faithful to the original, which I haven’t read, it’s a twist on typical Woolrich: a story of psychological torture from the victim’s point of view. The closest Martha-Helmut analogy in a Woolrich film is to “No Man of Her Own,” with Stanwyck getting the smooth laceration from oily Lyle Bettger — who looks so much like Böhm here that they might be evil twins.

What’s certain is that “Martha” is pure Fassbinder: one of his many valentines to sexual sadomasochism. Like “The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant” before it, “Martha” (whose heroine is named after Hollywood actress Martha Hyer) is indebted to Hollywood models. It’s reminiscent of “Gaslight” and other sadistic-husband dramas, but with the unique chills-and-fever Fassbinder touch. The German writer-director was impossibly prolific, turning out more than 40 features (16 of them with Carstensen) before his death at 37 in 1982. There’s not another moviemaker anywhere, ever, whose quantity and quality were so high.

The Woolrich story apparently concentrates on the heroine’s attempts to escape her husband in the company of a helpful man. What fascinated Fassbinder was not the escape but the imprisonment, which he makes a metaphor for any marriage, any intimate relationship. When Martha and Helmut meet in the embassy courtyard, she walks past him, both turn once, counterclockwise, nearly touching, as the camera revolves twice, clockwise, with the movement slowing to emphasis the mesmeric effect Helmut has on Martha. It’s the single most powerful and vertiginous shot in any Woolrich film.

They meet again back in Germany at a dinner party. He pursues her outside the mansion and, while her drunken Muter lurks in the bushes, woos her the only way he knows how. “You excited me... You’ve never slept with a man... You think you’re beautiful. I don’t. You’re too thin... and your body stinks.” She laughs and turns to him; they embrace passionately; from the rear, the mother screams. They whirl out of the clinch, as in an apache dance. Martha runs inside; Helmut swaggers back. Opera, melodrama, choreography and film dazzle in one intoxicatingly gorgeous 3min. 40sec. shot.

He insists that Martha take a roller coaster ride with him because “Fear exists to be overcome.” When it’s over, she vomits, and he proposes marriage. At her home, her mother takes a pill overdose and passes out, and Helmut violently embraces Martha. When she demurs, he throws her to the floor: “Never resist when I want to be nice to you!” That’s his strategy: asking nicely, then attack; insult, then purr his love, but condescendingly, as if he speaking to a dim child. (When she cooks what he’s said was his favorite dish — pig’s kidney with red wine sauce — he snaps, “Have you forgotten that I’m allergic to offal?”)

Helmut is a very sensible sadist. [SPOILER] He doesn’t want to kill her; he wants her around forever, to domineer and demean. Why would he try running Martha off the road as she drives away to what she thinks is freedom? He knows she can’t escape her destiny. Like Helen in “No Man,” she ends up in a hospital after a crash — she’s lost use of her legs — and has a handsome man to claim her. Helmut wheels her out of the hospital. What might be a toast to another couple is a curse to Martha: Long life to them both.



Original Sin, 2001
Screenplay and direction by Michael Cristofer, from “Waltz into Darkness”

Alan Jordan (Jack Thompson): “Love is to give, then want to give more. Lust is to take, then take more.
Luis Antonio Vargas (Antonio Banderas): “I want to give her everything, and I want to take everything from her.”

Count this as my Woolrich guilty pleasure. Withheld from release for a year, then spanked by most critics for its overripe dialogue, narrative improbabilities and nude couplings of Banderas and Angelina Jolie. Which is to say, people, that “Original Sin” is a melodrama, impure and simple. That’s clear from the opening moments, when Jolie’s photo- (and colla-) genic lips fill the screen, then part to intone: “This is not a love story. But it is a story about love, and the power it has over life. The power to heal or destroy.”

So, fully aware of the goofiness I’m about to write, I still aver that this version of “Waltz into Darkness” is yards better than the Truffaut. It’s clear Cristofer has seen “Mississippi Mermaid”: he throws in a few unobtrusive jump cuts in homage to Truffaut’s use of the device. But the Truffaut was an autopsy of Woolrich’s tale; this one is a revival. It understands the connection of two original sins. Indeed, the movie argues that lust is greed, the vice in avarice. Both are crimes without conscience, without remorse. “I just killed a man,” Luis declaims after he’s disposed the detective who pursued them. “I just bought a hat,” trills Julie/Jolie, “but I don’t dwell on it.”

Cristofer also improves on, or completes, a plot strand in the novel. You recall that Julie was controlled by Billy, who has murdered the real mail-order bride and sent Julie to impersonate her and steal Luis’ fortune. Billy appears only furtively in the novel and not at all in the Truffaut. In “Original Sin,” where he’s played by Thomas Jane, he [SPOILER] has multiple personalities: he’s Billy, and the detective (who faked his own death), and Satan in a play staged early in the film. The invisible battle for Julie’s loyalty, between Billy’s conniving evil and her husband’s dogged devotion, is now made flesh. “He says he loves me,” Julie tells Billy. “No one loves you,” Billy replies. “No one could. Except for me.”

At the center of the Woolrich, Truffaut and Cristofer versions is the truism that love can’t be explained, that it is no more the slave of logic than the course of human history (or a Woolrich plot). “I love you as I know you,” the dying Luis tells Julie. “I love you because I know you. As you are. Good and bad. Better and worse. No other love but you.” [LAST SPOILER] Cristofer can’t let such a declaration go unacknowledged, can’t allow this tanned, succulent pair of actors be separated. If Julie is to choose Luis over Billy, she must turn him into Billy: teach him the tricks of her trade, as women have since the Garden of Eden. This is a story of Adam falling in love with Eve, or with Evil, and getting love back. In her fashion.