Faulkner and Film Noir

[randy_byers]

Meant to blog this last week, but Bright Lights Film Journal has reprinted a fascinating article by Daniel Barth called "Faulkner and Film Noir" about Faulkner's experience as a screenwriter. It's actually about much more than that. Not only does it talk about similarities between Faulkner's fiction and the fatalistic hardboiled writers whose works were adapted as film noir, but it also traces the influence of the French symbolists (and Poe) on Faulkner and in turn his influence on French writers such as Camus and Gide. Faulkner apparently admired the great French director Jean Renoir, and I hadn't realized that one of the scripts he worked on was The Southerner (1945), which Renoir directed in his brief wartime sojourn in Hollywood.

An interesting slice of literary history that draws together names I hadn't seen connected before. I wish he had found a way to work in Leigh Brackett's comments about working with Faulkner on the screenplay of The Big Sleep (1946), but now I can't find them again myself. And it also makes me want to read Sanctuary, which is treated as a minor novel by most literary critics but which Barth describes as very noir. It was filmed at Paramount as The Story of Temple Drake (1933), which is a notorious pre-Code movie that I've been dying to see since I first read about it in Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood -- Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934.

Comments

[mrhedgehog.livejournal.com]

I am also waiting for Temple Drake to get a DVD release. I saw it here in Stockholm, at the local movie club. They had a series of Pre-Code movies. There's a box coming in the beginning of December, Forbidden Hollywood, have you noticed that?

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did see that. I'm really looking forward to seeing the original cut of Baby Face and the James Whale movie, Waterloo Bridge. (Wish there was more Whale available in general, other than the horror films.) I've seen Red-Headed Woman before, and it's fun and cheerfully amoral, although as far as Jean Harlow movies go, I think I preferred Red Dust.

I think I read somewhere that there's some kind of rights issue keeping The Story of Temple Drake in limbo. It never got a videotape release either, as I recall. What did you think of the movie?

[mrhedgehog.livejournal.com]

Well, it must be more than 10 years ago I saw it. I remember it as very powerful, and beautiful looking. But the other movies in the series (Baby Face, The Sign of The Cross and Trouble in Paradise) was more "fun", in a decadent sort of way.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Bird of Paradise? Silly South Seas fluff, mostly, but wonderfully sensual.

There was a point where I was beginning to think that 1932 was actually the greatest year for Hollywood, and that was before I'd heard of "pre-Code" and decided that that was probably what I'd been sensing without knowing it. Sign of the Cross and Trouble in Paradise are both 1932, although I haven't seen the former yet. (Really want to, and I know it's now out on Region 1 DVD.)