FILM NOIR READER 3 |
REVIEW by
Willard Manus FILM NOIR READER 3 is the best in this continuing series if only because it explores its subject through interviews rather than essays. Edited by Robert Porfirio, Alain Silver and James Ursini, the book (subtitled INTERVIEWS WITH FILMMAKERS OF THE CLASSIC NOIR PERIOD) includes q & a sessions with such directors as Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Robert Wise and Samuel Fuller, and such producers as Dore Schary. Screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring, cinematographer James Wong How, actresses Lizabeth Scott and Claire Trevor also contribute reminiscences and comments. |
"...Dymytrk is a miserable director...and he's a shit, anyway, because of the whole Hollywood Ten thing. He was a liar. He was one of the reasons I got in trouble. He came to me and asked for money, and I gave him quite a lot to take care of the wives of 'The Ten' who were in jail. Well, he later told the FBI all about this, and that was why they, the FBI, started following me around, just because of Dmytryk and the other directors I knew from RKO. I was there from 1944 to 1949, and many of those who were eventually blacklisted had come to my house: Joe Losey, John Barry, Cy Enfield." Billy Wilder also
weighs in with some uncensored observations. Here he |
Wilder on F. Scott Fitzgerald, another novelist struggling to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter: "...I remember
days at Paramount when we would have coffee every afternoon with him.
He was burned out. He was just hopeless, you know, One of the masters of film noir, Samuel Fuller, even pooh- poohs the genre itself: "When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Oxbow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir....I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me, it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross, whether it's Brutus doing it to Caesar or Bob Stack doing it to Robert Ryan (In the House of Bamboo) that defines what kind of drama it is." Actress Lizabeth Scott, who starred in several noir movies, rejects the very label itself. "What you call film noir I call psychological drama....It reflects the fact that there are so many facets in human beings. And that's why I don't know if anyone else calls it psychological drama, but I do. At that time, to myself, it was psychological and dramatic, because it showed all these facets of human experience and conflict: that these women could be involved with their heart and yet could think with their minds." (Limelight Editions, $22.50 ppbk.) |