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Hard-boiled Noir

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    #51

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      #52
      Voorhees Cave in Paraguay.

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        #53
        Whoa... Impressive! I'm reading Pop.1280 right now as it goes.

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          #54
          Did you see Coup de Torchon?

          Greatest JT adaptation in history, that.

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            #55
            No, to my knowledge the only movie adaptations I've seen are Grifters and The Getaway. There's a lot of internal monologue in the two books I've read, which leads me to suspect they're not easy to film.

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              #56
              Dark Passage is probably best known as a Bogart/Bacall movie. The one where Humph spends the first twenty minutes or so either with his back to the camera or swathed in bandages until the plastic surgery wears off. He’s an innocent escaped con, rescued by the wealthy Bacall who, feeds him, clothes him, gives him money and lets him stay in her luxury apartment. Becoming Betty Bacall’s pet sounds like a result to me, certainly better than life in San Quentin. However Bogart’s character, Vincent Parry, is still determined to take it on the lam.

              I’m always wary of reading the book the film was based on. You know the story, have a strong impression of the characters, so there’d better be something else happening. Fortunately in this case there is. Dark Passage was only David Goodis’s second novel but you’d never know it. The fearful interior dialogue of a hunted man is extraordinarily accomplished. The two main characters are also subtly different from the movie. Parry is a timid unambitious man, who only shows neither intelligence nor courage until pushed to the wall. His rescuer, Irene Jansen, is no Bacall either. Small, mousey but also determined and complex, her motives remain opaque until the book’s conclusion. There are also important elements that don’t appear in the film at all. One is Parry and Jansen’s shared love of Count Basie. His music fills Irene’s apartment, each track is listed, soloists are mentioned, how the piece reflects or accents Parry’s mood is highlighted. Good stuff.

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                #57
                I'm not usually sold on 'neo-noir' as a genre. Too often the novels and films miss what, to me, is an essential point. It's not just that noir features stories about losers, it's that they're romantic stories about losers. To paraphrase Charlotte Brontė, it's not so much that they're real — they're not — but that they're emotionally true.

                One modern noir that gets it right is Miami Purity by Vicki Hendricks. It works in large part because the story's structure is a clear, and cunning, reworking of a classic, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. Cain had a good-looking itinerant wastrel looking for a job, show up at a cheap diner run by a run-down middle-aged guy and his trashily gorgeous but frustrated young wife. What follows is no surprise but it's brilliantly portrayed. Hendricks just flips the gender dial. She has a gorgeous and sexually voracious ex-stripper, who's trying to turn her life around, show up at a small dry-cleaners looking for a work. It's run by a blowsy middle-aged woman and her drop-dead gorgeous son. Null points for guessing the story's direction. But Hendricks is sharp enough to do more than just shuffle the sexual deck, There's much more going on here than that. It's always a surprise, even if you know the story's origins. As you'd expect there's lot of sex in the book, an awful lot! But none of it is erotic. It's either desperate or calculated. The conclusion is a surprise too, not so much in its result as in it's... ummm... mechanics. Highly recommended.

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