DVR Alert: Film Noir Triple Feature

On Thursday, March 26, Turner Classic Movies will show three classics of film noir:

“Crime Wave” at 1:30 p.m. (EDT);

“The Killing” at 2:45 p.m.; and

“The Asphalt Jungle” at 4:15 p.m.

All three star tough-guy Sterling Hayden. Two are heist movies in which Hayden plays one of the robbers.

In Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing” from 1956, he is the leader of a

crew out to rob a race track. The picture was based on a Lionel White novel.

In John Huston’s “The Asphalt Jungle” from 1950 and based on a W.R. Burnett novel, he is the muscle protecting the master-mind of a jewelry store heist.

Hayden plays a cop in 1953’s “Crime Wave,” which I reviewed here.

All three are well worth the time.

If you miss any or all of them, sign up for Watch TCM, the Turner Classic Movies streaming site. Most films shown on TCM land on the site a few hours later and stay there for a week or more. The streaming site is free with your cable subscription.

High Sierra by W.R. Burnett

Those who have seen the 1941 movie, “High Sierra,” might skip the 1940 novel of the same name. The film follows the plot of the book exactly with a few edits and an extended finale. But those who skip the book will miss out on the pleasure of W.R. Burnett’s lean, hard prose, and some of the larger ideas overshadowing the characters.

Roy Earle, a career criminal and one-time member of John Dillinger’s gang, is released from an Illinois prison thanks to bribes paid by mob boss, Big Mac M’Gann. The boss wanted Roy free so he can lead a daring robbery of a Southern California resort. Big Mac planned the heist and recruited two young “jitterbugs” for the job, but needs a reliable old timer like Roy to run the show.

The young guys, Big Mac, and Roy himself think of Roy as old. He  lived a hard life that put miles on him, but Roy is only 37. Big Mac is feeling old, too, and wants this big score to be his last so he can go off somewhere and live out his days in grand style.

In debt to Big Mac for getting him out, Roy drives west to meet his two wild accomplices at a rustic hideout high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. During the journey, two things are on Roy’s mind: nostalgic memories of his boyhood on an Indiana farm; and Velma, the sweet 20-year-old granddaughter of an old couple who lost their Ohio farm and are making their way to California. This family is the living reminder of a life Roy longs for. He even has ideas of marrying Velma and living the simple good life he once knew.

But reality catches up with Roy when he meets the irresponsible men he is supposed to lead and the young woman, Marie, they have brought with them. Roy wants them to dump Marie, but he finds her smarter and tougher then the two hoods, and she soon winds up in Roy’s bed. It becomes a threesome in the bed when a scrappy little stray dog takes a liking to Roy and follows him everywhere.

This strange set up has nowhere to go but to hell.

The heist goes badly, the getaway away goes worse, Big Mac was terminally ill and dies, Roy has no choice but to turn the stolen jewelry over to a fence he does not know, and the authorities have a line on him, Marie, and Pard, the little dog they have taken with them.

When he was in prison, Roy’s cellmate, a convicted conman, jailhouse intellectual and self-educated philosopher shared books and ideas with Roy, including his theory of “the indifference of nature.”

Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada Mountains

Roy comes to understand this when he drives into the western deserts where the sun beats down, the wind blows the sand, and the land does not care if you are out of gas or water. The idea is further driven home when Roy is in the Sierra Nevadas, where the mountains do not care what happens to cars on roads with sheer drops into gorges or boulders or snow blocking the route. In those places, Roy gets a sense of his place in the universe. In the end, he is pursued high up into the mountains where he knows there is no escape.

High Sierra is another fine crime novel from a master of the form. If I have one criticism of the book, it is with the opening pages. The book starts with a surprisingly dull chapter of Roy Earle’s boyhood. Surprising since Burnett wrote some of the toughest, fastest paced crime novels of his era.

William Riley Burnett (1899-1982) was the author of The Asphalt Jungle, Little Caesar and many other novels and short stories, and quite a few movies. For a review of one of his lesser known books, Dark Hazard, click here.

(And if crime novels are your thing, please check out my book, Lyme Depot. Thanks.)

(For more posts on books, head over to Todd Mason’s blog.)

FFB: Dark Hazard by W.R. Burnett

The surprise read of the summer was W.R. Burnett’s 1933 novel, Dark Hazard. I fully expected to enjoy what I thought would be another tough-guy yarn filled with gangsters and gun molls. After all, Burnett made a splash with his first novel, Little Caesar, and went on to write other books populated by the underworld, like High Sierra, and The Asphalt Jungle.

Burnett knew his characters and the worlds in which they lived, and he wrote about them in a clean, hard style. But what surprised me was finding Dark Hazard had a soft heart.

It is the story of Jim Turner, once a high-stakes gambler and race-track regular who has fallen on hard times. It is winter, 1928 and he is making ends meet working as a night clerk at a third-rate Chicago hotel. He has a new, straight-laced wife who knows his past and is happy to see him making an honest – if poorly paid – living. The dull job is driving Jim nuts.

In a great twist, Jim meets a gambler who operates on an even larger scale than Jim ever did in his heyday. The gambler owns an interest in a dog track near Los Angeles and hires Jim to go out there and keep an eye on the operation. Jim jumps at the chance to leave wintery Chicago for sunny California.

At first his wife is happy out there. Then, two things happen. Jim, who swore off gambling for her, starts betting on the greyhounds. And Jim falls in love. He loses his heart to a champion dog named Dark Hazard. The more into dog racing Jim gets, the more he wants to buy and race Dark Hazard. His wife is not happy about any of these developments, nor about Jim’s new friends, a bunch of West Coast gamblers and sharpies.

The story follows Jim for several years through ups and downs, and winds up with an unexpected ending.

Burnett’s skill as a writer not only weaves a completely believable story out of these various threads, but also makes the ins and outs of dog racing understandable and exciting.

As Jim gets sucked back into the gamblers’ orbit, readers will worry about him on every page.

Not far into this book, it hit me I knew this story. Warner Bros. made not one but two movies in the 1930s based on this book. Around the time Warners bought the film rights to his 1929 novel, Little Caesar, Burnett went out to Hollywood to work on movie scripts.

After reading several of Burnett’s books, I’ve got to believe he was one of the writers who taught talking pictures how to talk. All through Dark Hazard, his characters’ dialogue is as sharp and funny and energetic as the roaring 20’s must have been.

(For more posts on books, check out Patti Abbott's blog.)

FFB: Round Trip by W.R. Burnett

Robinson, Burnett, LeRoy

A bit of a cheat here for Friday's Forgotten Book. “Round Trip” may be forgotten, but it is not a book. It is a short story by W. R. Burnett.

More than 20 years ago, I read Burnett's 1949 heist novel, The Asphalt Jungle, but never returned to his work until now.

“Round Trip” is the story of George Barber, a Chicago gangster in the 1920s. He is the muscle the owner of a gambling joint uses to collect unpaid debts. George is good at his job, but tired of the grind and tells his boss he is taking off on a little vacation. He takes the train to Toledo, a small city in north-western Ohio and not exactly a vacation getaway from windy Chicago. Cabbies, bellboys and hotel clerks treat him with disdain, which annoys George who is used to being treated with respect in his home town where people know and fear him. On top of that, he comes down with a bad cold. In Toledo less than a day, he gets a visit from some hard-bitten cops who send him packing right back to Chicago.

This 1929 story is told almost entirely through dialogue, and that dialogue, along with the attitudes of George and the other tough guys, is about as hard-boiled as it gets. Burnett’s writing style is straight forward and matter of fact, but it seemed he had a great ear for the slang and speech patterns of the underworld characters of his time. It is no wonder Hollywood grabbed him after his first novel, 1929's Little Caesar, came out. “Round Trip” was written shortly after Little Caesar and the death of Rico, the main character in that book, is mentioned in this story.

William Riley Burnett was born in 1899 in Springfield, Ohio, and died in 1982 in Santa Monica, California. After working in an Ohio state government job, and writing stories on his own time, he moved to Chicago in the late 1920s. There he met many of the real-life characters he later depicted in print and on screen. Warner Bros. bought Little Caesar, and produced it as a movie in 1931 starring Edward G. Robinson and directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Around the same time, Burnett moved to Hollywood. Over the next 52 years he turned out 38 more novels and wrote, co-wrote or contributed to more than 50 film and television scripts.

Now that I am reacquainted with Burnett, I want to read more and there are a several of his novels, including Nobody Lives Forever from 1943, now on my list.

“Round Trip” can be found in a 1995 collection called, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian.

(For more posts on books, check out Patti Abbott’s blog.)