November is a month to give thanks for cigarettes and chiaroscuro lighting, for sardonic voice-overs and unhappy endings, for doomed detectives and frisky femme fatales. November is “Noirvember” at the Brattle Theatre and the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with both venues celebrating some of the most stylish and cynical crime pictures ever made. If you like watching hard-boiled, heartbroken guys getting played for patsies in smoky rooms with ceiling fans and Venetian blinds, these next few weeks are an embarrassment of riches, with a total of 20 terrific noirs screening between the two cinemas. Throughout the month, the Coolidge is devoting their primetime evening Big Screen Classics slots to 1950s favorites like “Kiss Me Deadly” and “In a Lonely Place,” alternating with the Coolidge After Midnite’s exploration of the 1990s neo-noir revival, including VHS-era staples “King of New York” and “The Last Boy Scout.” The Brattle is spending Thanksgiving week on the 75th anniversary of 11 films from 1946, an exceptionally robust year for film noir that included “Gilda,” “The Blue Dahlia” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Orson Welles was wonderful with actors and technicians but seemed to go out of his way to antagonize the executives. And in Hollywood—just like everywhere else—the suits always win. The studio re-cut “Touch of Evil” against the director's wishes, banishing it to the bottom half of a double bill with Hedy Lamarr’s “The Female Animal.” But the French were onto it right away, with jurors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut naming “Touch of Evil” the best film at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Welles never made another movie in Hollywood again.
Robert Altman reimagined Raymond Chandler's
The Long Goodbye (1953)
in the context of 1973, capturing the comedic side of the noir private eye in the process. The film was not well received by the audience or the critics. When Altman attended a question-and-answer session afterward, the mood was "vaguely hostile", reportedly leaving the director "depressed". Time magazine's Jay Cocks wrote, "Altman's lazy, haphazard put-down is without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at the idea of Philip Marlowe but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized. It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire". Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times found the film "inventively photographed... The problem is that the Altman-Brackett Marlowe, played by Elliott Gould, is an untidy, unshaven, dim-wit slob who would be refused service at a hot dog stand. He is not Chandler's Marlowe, or mine, and I can't find him interesting, sympathetic or amusing, and I can't be sure who will." The events of "The Long Goodbye" are lurid and often disturbing, but as Chandler's famous detective Philip Marlowe, Elliot Gould finds an exasperated side to the character that is hilarious. Between his playful cats and light-hearted banter with his beautiful Free-Love neighbors, Marlowe is hardly a traditional private eye. Marlowe receives a surprising visit from his old friend Terry Lennox, who enlists his help traveling to the Mexican border. Thinking nothing of it, Marlowe is later interrogated by detectives who accuse Terry of murder. Marlowe questions the validity of the accusations and decides to look into the case himself, leading to a series of misadventures involving pretentious authors and local gangsters. In 1973, Alan R. Howard wrote for The Hollywood Reporter: "
The Long Goodbye is a gloriously inspired tribute to Hollywood that never loses sight of what Los Angeles has become. But the scenes don’t mesh into a whole, the drama never becomes as powerful...
The Long Goodbye charts its own perverse course, throwing much (perhaps too much) of Chandler’s novel out the window."
Raymond Chandler, born in the U.S. in 1888, was classically educated in secondary school at Dulwich College in Dulwich, London. He read Livy, Ovid, and Virgil in Latin, and Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle in Greek. He translated texts from Latin to English, and then, after an interval, from English to Latin. He studied French and German, too, and he lived in each country to become fluent. “I’m an intellectual snob who happens to have a fondness for the American vernacular, largely because I grew up in Latin and Greek,” he has been quoted as saying. “It would seem that a classical education might be a poor basis for writing novels in a hard-boiled vernacular,” he said, “I happen to believe otherwise.” In
The Long Goodbye (1953) Chandler wrote: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline…” Source: www.slashfilm.com
Larry Harnisch: As Philip Marlowe might ask: Why am I looking for Michael Connelly books?
The Wrong Side of Goodbye, debuted in the United States on November 1, 2016, earning a bravo from Booklist and qualified praise from Kirkus. The novel is the 19th in the consistently well-wrought saga of LAPD Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, currently working as a private detective and volunteering with the budget-depleted San Fernando Police Department—after being forced into retirement at the end of
The Burning Room (2014) and filing a lawsuit against the department in
The Crossing (2015). In contrast, James Ellroy’s novel
Perfidia (2014), drew no more than mixed reviews. In The New York Times, Dennis Lehane offered an extended analysis of Ellroy’s career and the book, which begins a proposed Second L.A. Quartet, saying that
Perfidia was written in a “jumpy, feverish and anarchic” style, and deeming the book “erratic.” While Jonathan Shapiro, writing in these pages, called it “not the best, just good enough.” Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times declared, with some ambivalence: “
Perfidia is 700 pages of ultra-violent, often frenetic police procedural, macho swagger, anti-Semitic broadcasts and racist rampage.” The New York Review of Books passed on the novel altogether. Time might be leaving Ellroy behind. Like Connelly, I was in love with Chandler when I was in my 20s, but between then and now, my exposure was limited to viewing the films based on his novels.
Rereading Chandler for the first time in 40 years was like having lunch with an ex-girlfriend and feeling the old chemistry. The flawless descriptions and sharp dialogue that had been etched in my mind were there, along with the extraneous characters, strange plot turns, and other problems that I had forgotten and that had been untangled or eliminated by screenwriters. My friends in law enforcement say Connelly is their favorite writer; one LAPD sergeant confided that he was sure Connelly has someone inside the department because he portrays its inner workings so precisely. I worked with Connelly at the Times, along with his fellow mystery authors Miles Corwin and Denise Hamilton, and we’re amiable acquaintances. I was friends with Ellroy for about five years until he drifted away, as he does with everybody. He disappointed me in endorsing
Black Dahlia Avenger author Steve Hodel’s theory on the case, and when I last saw him, Ellroy broke the ice by joking: “Nobody mention Steve Hodel.” Connelly, a former president of the Mystery Writers of America, has an admirable reputation for encouraging other writers. Miles Corwin, in the acknowledgments to his
Midnight Alley (2012), calls Connelly “the ultimate mensch.” Still, the disparity between the two is more than a shelving issue at a bookstore. If you go to a bookstore cashier with a stack of Connelly novels, you may get a knowing nod. If you go to the same cashier with a stack of Ellroy novels you will get a wary look — and they may call security. Ellroy looks in the cloudy rearview mirror at a distant and darkly imagined Los Angeles — revisiting Chandler’s era, and using imagined facts, with disinterest if not utter disdain for accuracy. It’s no trick for someone grounded in Los Angeles history to find huge errors in Ellroy’s novels. He is hopelessly lost in even the basics of local government, having the Los Angeles City Council appoint an acting Los Angeles County District Attorney in
White Jazz (1992). Granted, novels aren’t supposed to be documentaries, but that is a historian’s spit take.
Anyone who writes about Los Angeles does so in the shadow of Raymond Chandler. Kenneth Millar, who used the pen name Ross Macdonald, reckoned: “Raymond Chandler was and remains a hard man to follow. He wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” And this is where Connelly and Ellroy are poles apart, the north and south of the same magnet. In public appearances, Ellroy is the carnival barker at a grotesque sideshow and Connelly is the friendly, self-deprecating author who is clinical in discussing the nuts and bolts of his writing. In 1977, Connelly was an engineering student at the University of Florida when he saw Robert Altman’s screen adaptation of Chandler’s
The Long Goodbye (1973). Connelly told The Wall Street Journal that
The Long Goodbye was “probably the most important book I’ve read” because it made him want to be a writer. The opening of
The Wrong Side of Goodbye intentionally echoes the beginning of
The Big Sleep and Marlowe’s interview with old and frail General Sternwood. Connelly fits happily into the post-Chandler school of L.A. mystery writers, though, unlike Chandler’s, his Bosch plots are crisp. He starts with a first line and a last line and improvises his way between the two, but there’s usually a clear organization: a main story and a secondary story, with Bosch’s relationship with his daughter and a bit of soap opera about his personal life used as ways to shift between the two narratives. After being fired in the crucible of daily journalism, Connelly writes in the clean, spare prose of a reporter, much like Tony Hillerman, another reporter turned mystery novelist.
There seems to be minimal difference between his earlier and later novels, except that he switched from third person to first person in
Lost Light and The Narrows (2004). He’s at his best in portraying the differences between the many male investigators and police officers who fill his novels. His female characters can be well drawn, but they are sometimes two dimensional with perfunctory backstories. One of the most fully dimensional female characters, though briefly seen, is Bosch’s daughter, Maddie. Make no mistake about it: Connelly can be as dark as Ellroy. Unlike Ellroy, however, his darkness is never unrelieved. Without light, there can be no shadows, and there is always some sunlight in a Bosch novel. Speaking to Nathaniel Rich for The Paris Review, Ellroy said: "Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Dashiell Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me." Did Ellroy, of all people, call Chandler’s books “incoherent”? Yes, he did. In Ellroy’s
My Dark Places (1996), which deals with his mother Geneva Jean's killing, he says that he graduated from high school in June 1962, but he told Rich that he flunked out in 11th grade. Either way, Ellroy is self-taught as a writer, an outsider artist with no training in perspective or color theory whose canvases are raw, highly individualistic, and deeply problematic. James Ellroy has had many influences, but none more powerful than Jack Webb’s
The Badge (1958), an otherwise obscure book that was given to him several months after his mother’s murder and, hence, was carved into the deepest recesses of his brain. From drawing on the Club Mecca bombing in his first book to using LAPD chemist Ray Pinker (a character in the TV show
Dragnet) in
Perfidia, the incidents, characters, and worldview of Jack Webb are hiding in plain sight throughout Ellroy’s novels. The later Ellroy books are dark, dense, and bombastic, turning the reader’s head into a punching bag, yet he did not start by writing word salad with noir dressing.
His debut,
Brown’s Requiem (1981), begins solidly in the post-Chandler school, with a heavy dose of racial epithets, until it takes a dark, violent, and sexual turn in the second half. Even
The Black Dahlia (1987) fits into the post-Chandler school. But in his next book,
The Big Nowhere (1988), Ellroy began using a staccato minimalism, reducing a sentence to one or two words. Ellroy developed this style over the rest of the L.A. Quartet—
L.A. Confidential (1990) and
White Jazz (1992)—until it evolved into the “word confetti” of the
Underworld USA Trilogy. I spent a Sunday afternoon sitting with
American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and
Perfidia, trying unsuccessfully to get started in any of them. Nobody is ever going to say that Ellroy’s books are page-turners.
American Tabloid is factually ridiculous, and all the characters sound like Ellroy: a writer’s monotone of words dug from a thesaurus. Even J. Edgar Hoover and Robert F. Kennedy sound like James Ellroy.
Perfidia features all of Ellroy’s excesses—the factual errors, the eccentric style, the homogeneous voice (even Kay Lake’s diary sounds like Ellroy), the disorganization—and none of his strengths in storytelling. And the clock is ticking. Meanwhile, Connelly keeps writing—He has gone on social media to reassure his readers that, contrary to what they might infer from the title of
The Wrong Side of Goodbye, this is not the end of Harry Bosch. Connelly says that Bosch looks into the abyss of humanity and makes sure he doesn’t slip in. For Ellroy, his characters have taken the plunge, and he has all too often gone with them. If you are unfamiliar with Connelly, if you are put off by the somewhat contrived name Hieronymus Bosch, or if you aren’t certain whether Connelly is an L.A. writer,
The Wrong Side of Goodbye will convince you otherwise. Source: www.lareviewofbooks.org
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