Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Film Adaptations from the fiction of Cornell Woolrich





































STREET OF CHANCE, THE LEOPARD MAN, PHANTOM LADY, MARK OF THE WHISTLER, DEADLINE AT DAWN,Fall Guy, THE CHASE, THE GUILTY, BLACK ANGEL, FEAR IN THE NIGHT, I WOULDN’T BE IN YOUR SHOES, NIGHT HAS 100O EYES, THE WINDOW, REAR WINDOW, OBSESSION, NIGHTMARE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Woolrich








































Note this blog tremendous list of noirs covered http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2005/01/noir-of-week-list.html
























Plot
After a fight with his wife, Scott Henderson, a handsome and successful 32-year-old civil engineer, picks up a mysterious woman in a bar and they go out. The woman refuses to exchange names, becoming the phantom lady of the film.
When Henderson returns home, he finds cops waiting to question him because his wife has been murdered with his necktie. Henderson and the cops try to find the phantom lady who can provide him with an alibi but fail. It's up to Carol, Henderson's loyal secretary with a secret to trace the phantom and set Henderson free.
In what may be the film's most famous sequence, rhythmic inter-cutting between Elisha Cook, Jr.'s frantic drumming (dubbed by Gene Krupa) at a seedy night club and the leering responses of sexy secretary Ella Raines climaxes in a heated sexual encounter without actually showing a sex act on the screen.
















PlotThe Whistler, the unseen mystery-story narrator of radio fame, relates another tale that he's gleaned from "walking by night" in Mark of the Whistler. Richard Dix stars as a drifter who poses as the owner of an unclaimed bank account. Dix's new identity brings him nothing but misery as he falls victim to the actual claimant's startling secrets, lost loves and dangerous enemies--including one bent on killing for revenge. The second of Columbia's Whistler series, Mark of the Whistler was an enormous improvement on the first film, with a healthy number of unexpected plot twists within its 60-minute time frame. Mark of the Whistler was based on a story by Cornell Woolrich and directed by future horror specialist William Castle. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide








http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_at_Dawn This noir attracted my attention as to the comments on the film Critical reaction
[edit] Plot
Alex Winkley (Bill Williams), a young Navy sailor, wakes up from a night of drinking in New York City and finds he has a wad of cash. His memory is hazy, but he knows he got it from a woman he had visited earlier in the evening, Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane).
With the help of a dance hall girl, June Goth (Susan Hayward), he attempts to return the money, only to find out that the woman from whom he got the cash is now dead. The sailor isn't sure if he's the killer or not. Alex and June, along with a philosophical cabbie (Lukas), stay up all night attempting to solve the murder mystery before the sailor has to catch a bus to the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia in the morning. Their deadline is at dawn.
During the film, there are many false leads and red herrings, involving a blind piano player named Sleepy Parsons (Miller), and a young couple. Bartelli had been in the business of blackmailing men with whom she had had affairs, so there are many possible suspects. The woman's brother Val (Calleia), adds a touch of menace to the plot. The surprise ending resolves all issues, including the relationship between Alex and June.








http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(1946_film) This noir attracted my attention as to the comments on the film : Critical reactionFilm Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward notes: "Phantom Lady excepted, The Chase is the best cinematic equivalent of the dark, oppressive atmosphere that characterizes most of Cornell Woolrich's best fiction." [1]The film was entered into the 1947 Cannes Film Festival.[








Plot
This dream-like film noir is about Chuck Scott, a World War II vet now a penniless drifter tormented by bizarre dreams, who takes a job as driver to Eddie Roman (Cochran), a vicious gangster. Roman tests his new driver, Scott, by taking control of his car in the back seat, unbeknownst to the driver. Roman has an accelerator in the back seat of his car so that he can "take over" total control whenever he wants. This bizarre trick not only unnerves his new driver but Roman's right hand man, Gino (Lorre). Scott passes the test and gets the job. Things get tough for Scott when he falls in love with the gangsters wife, who has attempted to kill herself. They run off together to Cuba and a bizarre chase begins.








Main cast

Robert Cummings and Michèle Morgan
Robert Cummings as Chuck Scott
Michèle Morgan as Lorna Roman
Steve Cochran as Eddie Roman
Lloyd Corrigan as Emmerich Johnson
Jack Holt as Cmdr. Davidson
Peter Lorre as Gino








Critical reaction
Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward notes: "Phantom Lady excepted, The Chase is the best cinematic equivalent of the dark, oppressive atmosphere that characterizes most of Cornell Woolrich's best fiction." [1]
The film was entered into the 1947 Cannes Film Festival.[
















Plot
The film tells the story of two roommates. One of the men, who suffered a head injury in battle, meets a girl and starts dating her. When he finds out she's dating other men around town he dumps her and starts dating her sweet twin sister. The sister ends up missing and later is found murdered on an apartment rooftop. Her boyfriend is accused of the crime. [1][2] The film is based on Woolrich's short story "Two Men in a Furnished Room." The film about twin sisters shares a similar plot to The Dark Mirror released a year earlier.
This film was produced by oil millionaire Jack Wrather, who was also married to lead actress Bonita Granville.
[edit] Cast
Bonita Granville as Estelle Mitchell/Linda Mitchell
Don Castle as Mike Carr
Regis Toomey as Detective Heller
John Litel as Alex Tremholt
Wally Cassell as Johnny Dixon
































Black Angel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the 1946 film.
Directed by
Roy William Neill
Produced by
Tom McKnightRoy William Neill
Written by
Cornell Woolrich (novel)Roy Chanslor
Starring
Dan DuryeaJune VincentPeter LorreBroderick CrawfordConstance DowlingWallace FordJunius Matthews
Distributed by
Universal Pictures
Release date(s)
August 2, 1946 (U.S. release)
Running time
81 min
Language
English
Black Angel is a 1946 black-and-white film noir mystery film based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich. It was directed by Roy William Neill, who directed many of the Sherlock Holmes film series. This was his last film.
Contents[hide]
1 Plot
2 Reaction
3 Main cast
4 Pop culture
5 References
6 External links
//
[edit] Plot
A falsely convicted man's wife, Catherine (June Vincent), and an alcoholic composer and pianist, Martin (Dan Duryea) team up in an attempt to clear her husband of the murder of a blonde singer, who is Martin's wife. Their investigation leads them to face-to-face confrontations with a determined policeman (Broderick Crawford) and a shifty nightclub owner (Peter Lorre), whom Catherine and Martin suspect may be the real killer.
[edit] Reaction
Dark City: The Film Noir, by Spencer Selby, calls Black Angel: "Important, stylish B-noir, featuring Dan Duryea as the ironic central character."
Writer Cornell Woolrich hated this adaption of his story which, aside from the conclusion, differed greatly from his book.
[edit] Main cast
Dan Duryea as Martin Blair
June Vincent as Catherine Bennett
Peter Lorre as Marko
Broderick Crawford as Captain Flood
Constance Dowling as Mavis Marlowe
Wallace Ford as Joe
Junius Matthews as Dr. Courtney
































Plot
Bank teller Vince Grayson (DeForest Kelley) dreams that he stabs someone in an octagonal room of mirrors and locks the body in a closet. When he wakes up, he discovers marks on his throat, a strange key and a button in his pocket, and blood on his cuff. Cliff Herlihy (Paul Kelly), his police officer brother-in-law, tries to convince him it was just a dream. Then, one day, while trying to find shelter from the rain, the pair finds themselves taking shelter in the strange house from Vince's dream. After being rescued from an attempted suicide by Cliff, the detective uncovers clues that point to an evil hypnotist (Robert Emmett Keane) manipulating Vince.
























A young married couple is living together in a tiny one-room apartment in New York City. They both have dreams of making it big as dancers but lately they haven’t been able to get a break. The wife works at a dancing school at night, where she dances with lonely men for tips. The husband pounds the pavement every day looking for dancing work but not finding any. Making matters worse, the man is worried about his wife staying out all hours of the night with the guys at the dance school. I guess the “Ortiz Dance School” is the 40’s equivalent of a “Gentleman’s Club” today. The woman flirt with the men and the men walk out of the place with a smile on their face, perfume on their clothes, and a pound lighter in the wallet.








Tom gets hotter and hotter as he waits for his wife Ann to return one night. When she finally does, she tells him she stayed to talk to “Santa Claus”’; a man who tips her well at the place. The dancing couple eventually makes up and goes to bed. Just as the lights go out, cats in the alley below begin to howl. Tom, a little drunk, throws his shoes down at them to shut them up. His wife tells him it’s his last pair of shoes – his tap shoes- and that he must go down now and get them. He goes out to get them but doesn’t find the shoes. In the morning, the shoes are at their doorstep. Happy that he can go out with a pair of shoes, the incident is forgotten.This then leads to Tom getting arrested for murder when the cops find a shoe print of his by a recently found dead body.








Tom is tried and convicted. He’s sentenced to death “the Tuesday after Christmas.” So while the rest of the world is celebrating the holiday season, Ann counts down the days to Christmas… and to the day her husband will be killed. Finally, out of desperation Christmas Eve, Ann offers herself to “Santa Claus” – who also turns out to be one of the policemen that arrested her husband- in an attempt to get him to find the real killer. Ann promises to marry Judd if he can get Tom released. They seal the pact with a kiss.








Actors Don Castle and Elyse Knox play Tom and Ann in the film, but the real star is third-billed Regis Toomey as the obsessive Judd. Usually when you see Toomey in a film he plays a straight-as-an-arrow cop, so when he turns out to be Ann’s creepy “Santa Claus” –and later even more- boy was I surprised.This is a treat of a film. The mystery story, at first confusing and unbelievable, turns out to be logical and clever. The film was directed by William Nigh, who knocked out a large amount of films in the 1930s including a handful of Mr. Wong mysteries. Nigh’s direction is stagy but some of the outdoor scenes, especially when Ann meets Judd at night by flashlight, have a shadowy film-noir look.








recently got my hands on “I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes,” another one of Woolrich’s unremitting nightmares turned into a very entertaining B-film. It’s interesting to see how dark this film is, even with an ending that is unsurprisingly upbeat.









































































In my former post, I presented a bio on Cornell Woolrich and stated that motre films were generated from his crime novels into noir films than perhaps any other writer at6 any time, incluiding the titles above referenced.
























Woolrich World was a tenement building where death groaned under the
floorboards (?The Corpse Next Door,? ?The Body Upstairs,? ?The Kid and the
Corpse?). It was a land of derangement (?Walls That Hear You,? ?The Screaming
Laugh,? ?Dark Melody of Madness?), where the body count piled up like garbage
bags on weekends (?Graves for the Living,? ?Preview of Death,? ?Death Sits in
the Dentist?s Chair,? ?Death in the Air,? ?Dead on Her Feet?), and where the
deceased could be you or I (?Through a Dead Man?s Eye,? ?The Death of Me?) — or
the author. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/columnist/corliss/article/0,9565,557218,00.html#ixzz0buUa3IS9

That?s not true of Woolrich?s prime-time crime fiction; his great
decade was the 40s, with 11 novels and dozens of powerful short pieces. But you
don?t read Woolrich for the writing, exactly. You read it for the atmosphere,
the smoky, urban settings that enshroud his helpless or conscienceless
characters. (For a sturdy starter set, pick up ?The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus,? with ?I Married a Dead Man,?
?Waltz into Darkness? and five short stories, including ?Rear Window.?) Woolrich
deals in moral ambiguity on its way to becoming moral invisibility. In Woolrich,
love and death — the act of love and the act of death — can be the same thing.
The author?s triumph is to make the subjects and stories so varied (and thus
suspenseful) while the tone is constantly dark, menacing, inescapable. This
world-view is so consistent, it must be personal. In his fiction, the mystery
man wrote his own autobiography, one page at a time.
And, one frame at a
time, Hollywood put it in the minds of the mass audience. Woolrich fiction
inspired three near-classics of the 40s: ?Phantom Lady,? ?The Window? and ?No
Man of Her Own.? Alfred Hitchcock expanded one Woolrich story, originally called
?Murder from a Fixed Perspective,? into ?Rear Window.? The most recent
adaptation: the 2001 ?Original Sin,? another version of ?Waltz into Darkness,?
with Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie. (I?ll address the Woolrich film oeuvre
in my next column.) Read more: The Woolrich mood translated into other languages. Francois Truffaut
made two Woolrich films, ?The Bride Wore Black? and (from ?Waltz into Darkness?)
?Mississippi Mermaid,? in consecutive years. German wunderbrat Rainer Werner
Fassbinder turned another Woolrich story into the sadomasterpiece ?Martha.?
Japanese melodramas and Italian ?gialli? have turned his fevered words into hot
images. Since the 1940s, his prime crime time, not a decade has passed without
at least one Woolrich movie.
None of this made Woolrich famous, or rich.
Nothing could make him happy. But then, who said that life was going to be fair?
The most one could hope for, in the Woolrich world, was to find meaning in
misery. In his 1943 novel ?Black Angel,? the heroine, whose quest for justice
turns her into an avenging angel, meets a sensitive drunk who falls in love with
her. For that love, he kills himself. The woman feels no guilt, only
satisfaction. ?I gave him something to die for,? she says. ?It?s better to die
for something than to live for nothing.? Read more: http://www/
In 1930, while still in Los Angeles, Woolrich wed Gloria Blackton, a
daughter of movie pioneer J. Stuart Blackton. The marriage was doomed from the
start. In a 1933 story, the Cleveland Plain Dealer described the groom as ?a
precocious, sensitive and strange young man ... who rarely before had been known
to seek the companionship of women.? (Can you read the smirks between the lines
and across the decades?) According to Gloria, Cornell kept his distance at even
the most intimate moments: ?He sat two feet away from me on a couch and asked me
to be his wife.? The marriage was not consummated; as the Plain Dealer
judiciously put it, ?He loved his wife too well to kiss her.?
After two
years he walked out, going back to New York and mother Claire. He left behind a
diary, which Gloria discovered. Woolrich may not have robbed Gloria of her
virginity, but he was not celibate himself. The diary itemized his many
homosexual pickups ?in sordid and dreadful detail,? as Blackton?s sister Marian
told Nevins. Woolrich also wrote that ?it might be a really good joke to marry
this Gloria Blackton.? Humbert Humbert?s diary, detailing his loveless wedlock
with Charlotte Haze and his lust for her daughter Lolita, was no crueler than
Woolrich?s nasty punch line to this prank of a marriage. ?The Bride Wore Black?
was seven years ahead of him, but the discarded diary was Woolrich?s first (as
the French would say) roman noir — black novel. Read more: If Woolrich was brutally indifferent to his wife?s feelings, in his
fiction he could instantly bond with those in desperate need — perhaps because
there was such a person in his own life, one whose hold on him he could not,
would not break. ?I tried to move out,? he recalled late in his life. ? In 1942,
I lived in a hotel room for three weeks and then one night she called me and
said, ?I can?t live without you, I must live with you, I need you,? and I put
down the phone and I packed and I went back to that place for the rest of my
life, I never spent a night away from her, not one. I don?t care what they
thought of me, what they said about me but I just didn?t care. I don?t regret it
and I?ll never regret it as long as I live.?
No surprise ending here. That
person, of course, was Claire Woolrich, his mother. He lived with her until her
death in 1957. Most of him died with her. Read more: The distinguished British film critic Philip French writes admiringly
about ?the hard-boiled novels of writers such as Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich
and David Goodis who never got between hard covers and who went unrecognised in
America until long after they'd appeared in Gallimard?s Serie Noire and been
adapted by the directors of the Nouvelle Vague.?
This is true of Thompson
but not of Goodis, whose early novels (like ?Dark Passage,? made into a Bogart
film) were published by Dutton and Morrow. It is certainly not of Woolrich.
Simon & Schuster issued the first three ?Black? novels. (He left that house
when his sympathetic editor suggested he might want to work on one paragraph.)
So prolific that he needed pseudonyms, he wrote under William Irish for
Lippincott (?Phantom Lady,? ?Deadline at Dawn?) and George Hopley, his middle
names, for Farrar Rinehart (?Night Has a Thousand Eyes?). His six early
?straight? novels had also been published by reputable firms. It?s one thing
that sets him apart from Hammett, Cain and Chandler; they came up through the
pulp magazines.
And unlike Hammett with the Continental Op, Chandler with
Philip Marlowe and, for that matter, Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes,
Woolrich had no continuing characters, no detective-hero whose adventures must
end with him alive. Woolrich?s stand-alone stories necessarily left the reader
in suspense about the ending, which could be happy, tragic or just plain
perplexing. If there was one constant, it was that the anvil of Doom could crush
the hero at any time. To a Woolrich protagonist, then, paranoia is just common
sense.
The flip side of paranoia is persecution, sadism. Woolrich, after
all, thought this stuff up and wrote it down. He devised and used those
instruments of psychological torture — his stories. Read more:
More important than suspense to Woolrich, though, was his characters?
gnawing anguish. Hitchcock dealt in the ?transference of guilt? that allowed an
innocent man to be thought culpable. Woolrich dealt in the escalation of guilt,
where the not-quite-innocent stumbled into traps that punished guilty and
innocent alike. This sounds less like Hitchcock?s thrillers of unease and more
like an even darker Hollywood genre.
Is Cornell Woolrich the godfather of
film noir? Some piquant arguments can be made in support of that proposition.
Consider:
1. Woolrich?s first true crime novel, ?The Bride Wore Black,? was
published in 1940. Thirteen of his novels and short stories had been adapted for
films by the end of the 40s, the decade when the bleak moral and visual tone of
crime melodramas were codified into what eventually became known as film noir.
(But not in Hollywood. Not then. As critic Richard T. Jameson has noted, if
Nicholas Ray ran into Joseph Losey on the RKO lot at the time, he wouldn?t have
said, ?So, you?re working on a film noir??) No 40s masterpieces were spun from
Woolrich?s s oeuvre, but at least three B+ suspensers were: ?Phantom Lady,? ?No
Man of Her Own? (based on the novel ?I Married a Dead Man?) and ?The Window?
(from his story ?Fire Escape,? also known as ?The Boy Cried Murder?). Read more: .More important than suspense to Woolrich, though, was his characters?
gnawing anguish. Hitchcock dealt in the ?transference of guilt? that allowed an
innocent man to be thought culpable. Woolrich dealt in the escalation of guilt,
where the not-quite-innocent stumbled into traps that punished guilty and
innocent alike. This sounds less like Hitchcock?s thrillers of unease and more
like an even darker Hollywood genre.
Is Cornell Woolrich the godfather of
film noir? Some piquant arguments can be made in support of that proposition.
Consider:

2. ?The Bride Wore Black? does have a detective-hero on a traditional
quest. He tracks the righteous, serial-killing heroine of the title, who goes
about eliminating five men she blames for the death of her husband on their
wedding day. And, like Hercule Poirot (or Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe), he not
only nabs the murderess but reveals a plot twist that surprises her and the
reader. After that, Woolrich started breaking rules. The detectives or cops in
?Phantom Lady,? ?Fire Escape,? ?I Married a Dead Man? and ?Nightmare? and ?Black
Angel? (two more Woolrich tales filmed in the 40s) usually serve only two minor
functions: to deride or try to block the hero?s quest and, when the mystery is
finally solved, to validate the hero?s initial intuition. In ?Rear Window,? the
police lieutenant played by Wendell Corey has this same drab task. He?s nothing
more than the cop on the beat, telling the hero to move along, then
congratulating him for successfully completing a job the cop should have done.
Read more: 3. Woolrich not only dislodged the detective from his traditional
pedestal — as the solver of the puzzle, the good guy who nabs the bad guy, the
knight on the mean streets, the arbiter of ethics, the reader?s surrogate whose
very presence is a guarantee of narrative clarity and the restoration of order
in the chaotic world of crime — but challenged the very notions of hero and
quest. Now the hero could be the villain, or the dupe; the quest itself could
prove to be deranged, as the moral moorings of standard detective fiction fall
away. That dark view was reflected in the humid nightscapes of film noir
cinematography, just as Woolrich?s tilt of perspective was mirrored in the
movies? oblique camera angles and paranoid worldview.
4. Who done it? Who
cares? (Nevins decides that it?s finally impossible to know who the murderer is
in ?I Married a Dead Man.?) Granted, the identity of killers was not something
every crime writer paid attention to; Raymond Chandler acknowledged that even he
didn?t know who killed the chauffeur in ?The Big Sleep.? But Woolrich pretty
much dispensed altogether with the ratiocination of traditional crime fiction.
The point was to show a web of doom enfolding the fly. The identity of the
spider — best friend? bitter woman? Fate? blind chance? — didn?t matter to him.
It did matter to the film adapters of his work; they often invented other
murderers, different motivations. Read more: 5. The thriller novels that Woolrich published under his own name
beginning in 1940 and continuing through the decade — ?The Bride Wore Black,?
?The Black Curtain,? ?Black Alibi,? ?Black Angel,? ?The Black Path of Fear? and
?Rendezvous in Black? — were known informally as the black series. In French,
serie noire. In 1945 the Paris publisher Gallimard introduced a thriller line,
including many translations of U.S. tough-guy fiction, and dubbed it Serie
Noire. Some Woolrich novels were among the titles issued. The following year, as
Lee Horsley notes in his book ?The Noir Thriller,? ?the French critics Nino
Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier wrote the two earliest essays to identify a
departure in film-making, the American ?film noir.??
6. From that bleak soil
sprang many of the impulses used by French filmmakers of the 40s and their
wayward children, the Cahiers du Cin魡 critics who became New Wave directors.
They revered Hitchcock (Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer all did books
on the director) and plundered American pulp for their movies. Chabrol, who
would build a career on elegant domestic crime films, adapted Stanley Ellin?s
?The Key to Nicholas Street? into ?A Double Tour? / ?Web of Passion? in 1960.
Jean-Luc Godard said he was trying to make ?a normal gangster film? with his
spiky debut feature ?Breathless,? which he dedicated to Monogram, the defunct
U.S. cheapie studio. Godard based ?Band ࠐart? on a Dolores Hitchens crime novel,
and ?Pierrot le Fou? on a Lionel White. Truffaut?s ?Hitchcockian? films were
really esoteric pulp films, from his second feature ?Shoot the Piano Player?
(from the David Goodis novel ?Down There?) to his last, ?Confidentially Yours?
(from Charles Williams? ?The Long Saturday Night?). In 1968-69 he did his two
Woolrich adaptations. Read more: Fredric Dannay, the crime writer (he was half of Ellery Queen) and
editor, and a Woolrich supporter who generously reprinted many of his early
stories and published his later, lamer ones, was obliged to remark on the ?long
march of implausibility? in his friend?s novels. Nevins agrees that, ?As a
technical plot craftsman he is sloppy beyond endurance.? But, trying harder, he
works up a labyrinthine rationale for these strings of coincidences and lapses
of reason. He says that, in the Woolrich universe, life is unfair, death comes
without knocking to the innocent and guilty and alike. Does life outside fairy
tales and detective fiction have happy or even sensible endings? No. Woolrich?s
nightscape is not paranoid; it?s realistic. It?s a place, just like ours, where,
Nevins says, ?logic doesn?t exist.?
Chandler took a middle position. In a
letter to his publisher Blanche Knopf, he declared of ?Phantom Lady? that it
?has one of those artificial trick plots and is full of small but excessive
demands on the Goddess of Chance.? But that ultimately wasn?t crucial to
Chandler. He called the book ?a swell job of writing, one that gives everything
to every character, ever scene and never, like so many of our overrated
novelists, just flushes the highlights and then gets scared and runs. I happen
to admire this kind of writing very much.... it is the pace that counts, not the
logic or the plausibility or the style.? Read more: Woolrich, for all his ingenuity, often dealt from a standard deck of
mystery-novel tropes, like the fatal ace of spades that cues doom in ?Black
Alibi? and ?Waltz into Darkness.? Threatening or dishonest telegrams, or
anonymous notes pushed under the door, set several plots pinwheeling. Innocent
men are convicted and condemned to die with such regularity, you?d think they
were black.
Then there?s the leg-injury motif, which stretched the length of
Woolrich?s career. Alan Walker, the metaphorically-surnamed hero of Woolrich?s
first novel, ?Cover Charge,? is crippled in a car accident on his wedding night.
Pauline Foy, heroine of the 1931 ?The Time of Her Life,? is injured in a car
crash and (Nevins notes) ?undergoes a leg operation with only a cigarette as an
anesthetic.? Jeff Jeffries, hero of the story later known as ?Rear Window,? has
broken a leg and is defenseless against the murderer he has spotted across the
courtyard and who is just this moment entered Jeff?s apartment. I haven?t read
?For the Rest of Her Life,? the last Woolrich story to be published in his
lifetime, but in Fassbinder?s film version, ?Martha,? the main character is
injured in a car accident. In the hospital someone says, ?She?ll never walk
again.?
And now, a last vignette from Woolrich?s gnarled, noirish life...
Read more: In 1967, because of ?an ill-fitting shoe,? he developed gangrene in one
leg. Instead of having it treated, he bore the pain by drinking himself into a
stupor. When he finally sought medical advice, it was too late: the leg had to
be amputated above the knee. He died within the year.
Honestly, what are the
odds? Read more:
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