David Goodis: A Life in Black & White

DAVID GOODIS: A LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE: Finally available in English in the United States! If you're a fan of classic noir fiction, grab a copy of Philippe Garnier's legendary biography of David Goodis (edited and published by Eddie Muller), on sale from Black Pool Productions (not available on Amazon). Source: blackpoolproductions.com

David Goodis is the mystery man of American crime fiction. A cipher even to people who knew him, Goodis would have vanished from the annals of America literature were it not for the extraordinary esteem afforded him by French readers. At a time when none of his books were in print in the United States (the 1970s)--all were available in France, lauded as classics of noir-stained existentialism.

A prodigious producer of pulp fiction in the late 1930s and early '40s, Goodis scored an immense success with his second novel, Dark Passage, published in 1946.

It was immediately snapped up by Warner Bros. and turned into a hit movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Goodis was promoted by Warner Bros. as the next big thing--the latest incarnation of Hammett. He struggled to live up to the hype, writing several unproduced original scripts and a remake of Bette Davis' 1940 hit The Letter, released in 1947 as The Unfaithful. But Goodis had his own ideas about what--and how--he wanted to write--as well as a few personal peccadilloes--that drove him back to his native Philadelphia, where he spent the next decade churning out paperback originals for low-end publishers.

And it's those books--dark, stream-of-consciousness nightmares (Cassidy's Girl, Black Friday, Down There, The Burglar, The Wounded and the Slain)--that are his literary legacy. Goodis was back in native Philadelphia, churning out manuscripts for Lion Books and Gold Medal Paperbacks, when he was approached by first-time film director Paul Wendkos to adapt his 1953 novel, The Burglar, into a screenplay. It's his only screenwriting credit after he'd left Hollywood.

After achieving international success with his directorial debut, The 400 Blows (1959), 27-year-old Francois Truffaut surprised the film world by choosing as his next project an obscure American paperback called Down There, written by Goodis in 1956. Well, everyone was surprised but the French. Their "New Wave" filmmakers often turned to the work of American crime writers for inspiration. They'd read translations of the novels in the Serie Noire, a line of crime novels wildly popular with French intellectuals. Adapting these books allowed a new generation of French directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, to honor an American genre they revered--in both its literary and cinematic form. Goodis may have had no literary cachet in the States, but in France he had a reputation as a poet of the urban demimonde, the master of existential despair. Source: www.noircon.info

“Ralph stood on the corner, leaning against the brick wall of Silver’s candy store, telling himself to go home and get some sleep.” That’s the opening line of The Blonde On The Street Corner, a 1954 novel written by David Goodis. Of course, Ralph doesn’t go home. Instead, he spots a blonde across the dark street and gawks at her. She eventually calls him over to light her cigarette, which he does. Now, at this point, one might expect that Ralph would be irresistibly lured into a tight web spun by this dazzling femme fatale, resulting in his eventual moral destruction. But Goodis doesn’t write that way. Ralph knows that she’s married. She propositions him right on the corner, but he rejects her. “I don’t mess around with married women,” he tells her. Then he goes home. Source: www.davidgoodis.com

While Goodis toiled in his little room at 6305 N. 11th Street in Philadelphia, filmmakers mined his ever-increasing wealth of material. OF MISSING PERSONS was made in Argentina and NIGHTFALL in Hollywood. Warner Brothers’ television division used one of his stories for an episode of their “Bourbon Street Beat” series and Goodis adapted a Henry Kane story for “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.” The closest Goodis came to reigniting his Hollywood flame came in 1957, with the film adaptation of THE BURGLAR. Shot in the streets of Philadelphia by his friend Paul Wendkos, Goodis helped write the screenplay based on his own work for this inventive film noir.

Delayed after completion and overlooked upon release, THE BURGLAR didn’t fulfill the promise of a Wendkos/Goodis creative partnership. Goodis may have labored in the penumbra of obscurity in the United States, but his existential and essentially bleak portrayal of the empty American dream caught the attention of European intellectuals in general and the French Nouvelle Vague in particular. In 1960, Cahiers du Cinema writer-turned-director Francois Truffaut brought Goodis’s Down There to the cinema in SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER. Source: www.davidgoodis.com