What sin a name?

Why does Steve Carella become Steve Carelli in Cop Hater, the movie based on Ed McBain's novel of the same name? Why does Lew Archer become Lew Harper, other than Paul Newman's possible predilection in the 1960s for characters and titles beginning with H?

I can guess why Carmen Sternwood became Camilla in Michael Winner's 1978 remake of The Big Sleep; England is probably not exactly crawling with Carmens. But why does Ned Beaumont become Ed Beaumont in both movies based on Hammett's The Glass Key?

What are your favorite or most eccentric character name changes from the page to the screen? Bonus points if you know why the movie makers changed the name. In two cases I know of, authors wanted to retain the rights to a character's name.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A crime novel that's dated and progressive at the same time, and a question for readers

I'll post from time to time about dated aspects of crime novels, Ross Macdonald's freshman psychology, for instance, or Dillon's long virtual monologue in Chapter Six of The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

I inevitably contrast these with the scenes of Ned Beaumont being beaten and held captive in Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key. That novel appeared in 1931, but the scenes' brutality and Beaumont's despair would be just as fresh and just as harrowing in a novel published today.

Then there's W.R. Burnett's Little Caesar, published in 1929 and the basis of the famous movie of the same name starring Emanuel Goldenberg (left). The movie's dated dialogue disappointed me, and I'd long been curious about whether the novel was any different. It isn't, full as it is of lines like "I got lead in this here rod and my finger's itching."

At the same time, the book's opening segments alternate chapters of a heist being planned with glimpses into the minds and lives of its characters that seem utterly modern. (These include a micro chapter of Rico "Little Caesar" Bandello combing his hair that includes the famous description "Rico was a simple man. He loved but three things: himself, his hair and his gun. He took excellent care of all three.")

What crime novels and stories have you read that seemed dated and surprisingly contemporary at the same time?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders Night at the Movies

Remember when the family would gather round the television set for Saturday Night at the Movies, seeking to recapture the atmosphere of the big screen? Now you can simulate those golden days here at Detectives Beyond Borders! Here are this evening's presentations:

1) The Glass Key. The 1935 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel, starring George Raft, not the 1943 version with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. It features good performances by Raft and by Edward Arnold as political strongman Paul Madvig and lots of knuckle-gnawing by the female leads to indicate nervousness. In spots it captures the narrative intensity of Hammett's great novel, but its ending must be one of the weirdest in Hollywood's long history of tacked-on happy endings.   And why did both movies change the protagonist's name from Ned Beaumont to Ed Beaumont?

2) Private Hell 36. (1954) The cast includes Ida Lupino and Howard Duff, trying his best to look like Sterling Hayden.  The set-up: Two cops split thousands of dollars they recovered from a dead counterfeiter, and complications ensue. The movie is noir until its last two or three minutes, and then it either wusses out and capitulates to the era's demand for moral uplift, or it gets even more noir, depending on one's interpretation. It's a fine, ambiguous ending, in other words, and I wonder if director Don Siegel and the rest of the movie's creative team intended it that way.

3) Once Upon a Time. This 2008 Korean heist comedy is set during Japan's wartime occupation of Korea, which makes the slapstick antics of its Korean freedom-fighter heroes something of a brave move. Several scenes nicely portray Japanese condescension toward even Koreans loyal to the occupying government. Several characters go by both their Korean names and the Japanese names forced upon them by Japanese decree. Surprisingly affecting and resonant for a movie with so much slapstick in it.

4) (Jet Li's) Fearless. This 2006 Hong Kong film is apt to get viewers cheering. A romanticized biography of Huo Yuanjia, a martial artist who took on and defeated foreign challengers at a time when Chinese national pride was at a low ebb and foreign domination at a high.  In the movie, he wins their hearts and friendship in addition to kicking the crap out of them. China's current rulers probably like the character of Nong Jinsun, a businessman friend of Huo's who sells his highly successful restaurant and donates the proceeds and his time to the athletic association Huo founds.

(NB: I'm a Robert Osborne, not a TCM. I'll talk about the movies entertainingly and informatively, but you have to track them down yourselves. The Glass Key is available on YouTube, the rest on Netflix.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Memorial day

Dashiell Hammett died fifty years ago today. Time magazine included his 1929 novel Red Harvest on a list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005, and Declan Hughes called Hammett "the Bach, the Louis Armstrong" of crime fiction. "Everything started with him." I think he was right.

Courtesy of the Thrilling Detective Web site, here are some assessments of Hammett from three guys who knew a thing or two about crime writing:

• “If not the greatest, Dashiell Hammett is certainly the most important American mystery writer of the twentieth century, and second in history only to Edgar Allen Poe, who essentially invented the genre.”
  
  Tony Hillerman

• “When I was 14 or 15 I read Hammett's The Thin Man (the first Hammett I'd read) and it was a defining moment. It was a sad, lonely, lost book, that pretended to be cheerful and aware and full of good fellowship, and I hadn't known you could do that: seem to be telling this, but really telling that; three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that.”
  Donald Westlake

• “As a novelist of realistic intrigue, Hammett was unsurpassed in his own or any time. ... We all came out from under Hammett's black mask.”
  Ross Macdonald

More recently I was stunned by the immediacy of Ned Beaumont's beating in The Glass Key. The novel is eighty years old; the scene could have been written yesterday.

Again with a hat tip to Thrilling Detective, here's a Hammett bibliography to get you started reading Detectives Beyond Borders' nominee as the greatest crime writer ever. You could do worse than the Library of America's volume of Hammett's Crime Stories and Other Writings.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

History of violence

"Going on hands and knees into the bathroom when he had regained consciousness after the last of these beatings, he saw, on the floor behind the wash-stand's pedestal, a narrow safety-razor-blade red with the rust of months. Getting it out from behind the pedestal was a task that took him all of ten minutes and his nerveless fingers failed a dozen times before they succeeded in picking it up from the tiled floor. He tried to cut his throat with it, but it fell out of his hand after he had no more than scratched his chin in three places. He lay down on the bathroom-floor and sobbed himself to sleep."

***

All right, crime fans, when do you think that passage was written? (No peeking)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010