Fits Like A Gun In the Hand: Raymond Chandler and Hollywood

"If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I should not have come." -Raymond Chandler

Part of the reason for the allure of Raymond Chandler was the fact that his material was a great fit for the movies, especially in the immediate post-WWII period where the advent of total war brought unexpected social changes to urban America and a sense of pessimism enveloped the screen in a type of movie that somebody French later called film noir.

Thanks to the emergence of Los Angeles as a great metropolis owing in part to the film and aircraft industry (and swarms of folks drawn to its warm, dry climate and varying geography) it became a "Place" in the American Psyche, most often identified with Hollywood. It's hard to separate Chandler from Hollywood, not least of which for the fact that he wrote screenplays for a variety of studios in addition to his work on novels and essays. He was in such demands as a writer that he wrote adaptations for both Billy Wilder ("Double Indemnity", 1944) and Alfred Hitchcock ("Strangers on A Train", 1952) . Both films were successful.

Oddly enough, and in true Hollywood style, neither of these scenarios were original stories by Chandler. "Indemnity" was from a novel by James M. Cain--Cain's work Chandler described in a personal letter as that of a "faux naif". No love lost there, apparently, although Cain's other major novel--"The Postman Always Rings Twice"--was adapted twice for major motion pictures, once for Lana Turner and John Garfield in 1946 at MGM and a 1981 Bob Rafelson directed remake with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange as the adulterous, murderous and unlucky lovers.

The Hitchcock work was based on a work by Patricia Highsmith, more well known today for her novels that inspired the Matt Damon vehicle, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (2000).

As book or movie, "The Big Sleep" is one of my favorite American urban epics, and I would be lying to you if that wasn't in part because of the influence of the 1946 Howard Hawks film with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Charlotte Sherwood, a daughter of an aged oil tycoon who happens to have a screwball sister who's mixed up in a pornography/blackmail ring. If you've never seen this film, it has been recently released on DVD and includes a great number of bonus features, including an excellent documentary about the making of the film and the unusual amount of re-shooting and new scenes that were added a year after .

But direct discussion of that movie belongs on a future blog. Chandler didn't have anything directly to do with the Bogart/Bacall vehicle. He was unavailable, under contract at Paramount Studios. There's a story that Howard Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking about a plot point in the story to help sort out the labyrinth of murders in the work: "Who the hell killed the Sherwood's chauffeur?" Ray was asked. The screenwriters couldn't figure it out.

Chandler wired back that he didn't know, either.

That might not have been a wisecrack. Chandler is not a mystery writer to be read for his ultra-tight plots. There' are mystery writers I've read who can do real watertight plots and get all their bases covered by that last chapter. Their prose is most often serviceable, but not memorable. With Chandler you don't care who killed the chauffeur or broke the lock on the hen-house door to hide the smoking gun or ran over the parson's dog back in chapter eleven. It's the smart remarks of Marloew, mixed with that loose-limb, ready-for-anything elan the detective has that stands out in your head after the story is finished--and that he can remain, like Henry Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion, just the same sort of guy with anybody who crosses his path.

If a rich client needs to get a reality check or someone shining his shoes needs a extra bill to improve his memory, Marlowe is always Marlowe. Like other private eyes of the time, he drinks too much and meets the human race with low expectations. And he gets hit a lot--especially from behind. Chandler didn't reinvent the form, of course, or do something others at that time weren't trying. He apparently just did it better. Maybe all that Latin they used to teach back in Dreary Old England (Plutarch and such) mixed with a dash of Sir Thomas Malory and Sir Walter Scott paid off for young Chandler when he was a student . How else to explain how well the character of Philip Marlowe manages to be stay above the sunshine sordidness of mid -century LA("A Man must walk down those mean streets who is not mean himself..., etc") and still have a detective who doesn't seem to be too nice to make a bad guy feel "like a bridge fell on him".

It's that singular prose, not the plots, with its apt descriptions of all realms of the human condition writ large and small (from millionaires to hired killers to bellhops) and places (from mansions and swank hotels to dope dens and seedy rooming houses) that keep you coming back for more of Chandler.

(part three coming soon)