by Lionel White
Filmmakers have also found use of White’s brilliant plotting skills although some have been quite ironic in their approach. French “new wave” pioneer Jean-Luc Godard adapted—or perhaps more accurately was inspired by—White’s 1962 novel, Obsession. Although it stars beautiful people like Jean-Paul Belmondo and the stunning Anna Karina, Godard’s wife, the cinematic style of Pierrot le Fou (“Pierrot the Crazy”) having no script and coming up with dialogue the morning of each day’s shooting could not be more opposed to White’s meticulous approach to plotting. The result may be a standout example of the Nouvelle Vague movement but as an illustration of White’s strengths of deep characters and intricate plots, the movie comes off as anything but. Still, Godard liked noir as source material and even made a film version of Donald Westlake’s/Richard Stark’s The Hunter, starring his Karina as a female version of Parker in the movie, Made In the U.S.A. (1966). Once again, though, the effect of the film is far different from that of the source book.
A better use of White’s work as the basis of film work is made in an episode of the overlooked television anthology series Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff. Season one, episode 21 is named after White’s 1959 novel, The Merriweather File.
Although it is impossible to film everything in a novel for even a two hour movie (and not likely desirable), it is obviously even more difficult to capture the essence in a one hour (minus commercials) television script. Even so, the show does a wonderful job of capturing the essence of the story at that length, giving the viewer more than just the gist of the plot.
Oddly enough, in the book version, White shows perhaps an unexpected versatility with his prose by not only telling the story in the first person from a non-criminal’s point of view, but also writing in a decidedly gothic tone. It combines crime, romance, sorrow and suspense in a tightly woven plot that keeps the reader guessing despite how many times White appears to give the simple and obvious answer to the book’s puzzle. You can almost smell the after-dinner brandy coming off
the dusty old narrator’s top lip as the oaken logs burn in the fireplace.
An even more faithful rendition of book to movie was given to us with White’s book, The Money Trap (1963). The book doesn’t start out with a ready made cast of criminals implementing their version of the “can’t fail” caper but rather with two policemen who stumble into something they find too tempting to pass up. One of the cops is motivated mostly by greed while the other, a no-nonsense salt of the earth grinder who had the misfortune to marry over his head, makes the noir-requisite bad decisions.
In 1965 Burt Kennedy, a director known mostly for his television work (mostly in westerns), worked with one-time blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein to bring us the big screen version of this book. It was one of five movies underrated actor Glenn Ford made with one-time pin-up Rita Hayworth, and also starred Elke Sommer, Ricardo Montalban and Joseph Cotten, who just happened to have been best man at Hayworth’s 1943 wedding to Orson Welles.
The black and white movie is a faithful adaptation of the mood of White’s book and the entire cast gives a nearly pitch perfect performance as the story focuses on how one man especially rises to his level of incompetency. And yes, the ending is quintessentially noir one—no one wins.
The Money Trap is certainly one of the two best films made from Lionel White’s books although it is far from the most famous and well-known. That award has to go to a movie made from the 1955 novel Clean Break. In fact, the film version eventually became so successful that subsequent editions of the novel were published under the title given to the movie. It became known as The Killing.
In the years before Stanley Kubrick became Stanley Kubrick, the man had been a photographer by trade as well as an avid student of film. He had made two small feature films, almost completely by himself, with the second, Killer’s Kiss, being the more notable and successful. It was a small film but it’s tone and style, especially done on a self-financed shoestring budget, caught the eye of United Artists. The best thing to come from that film was that UA told Kubrick that when he came up with something else, they’d like to take a look at it.
Alexander Singer, who later became a director himself, introduced Kubrick to his friend James Harris, a successful TV distributor who was looking into making a change and getting into the movie business. The two men became fast friends, each learning from the other, and formed their own production company with Kubrick being the artist, and Harris being a sort of do-it-all super-producer. This partnership went on for several years and it benefited both men as Kubrick learned more about production and finance and Harris going on to direct several films himself.
But when they first met, the only problem, as Kubrick told Harris, was that he had nothing to shoot. He came across Lionel White’s novel Clean Break and both men immediately appreciated all of White’s strengths as a writer and how it could translate to film. Everything they needed was there: the plot laid out scene by scene, using White’s third person technique to go from character to character; the characters themselves, a rag tag bunch of mostly non-criminals planning the sort of heist that had never been done before; and a gut punch noir ending leaving the reader that unique feeling of having been entranced by the dark poetry of noir.
Harris and Kubrick changed the title of their film to The Killing and tweaked the ending using a silly old woman in her dog in a way that we’ve seen far too many times in far too many productions. It’s an unworthy trick but Harris came up with it and Kubrick used it.
When the two men took the project to United Artists, they were asked if this was the movie with Frank Sinatra attached; he, too, had publicly expressed an interest in White’s book. When Harris told UA that no, they didn’t have Sinatra but they did have the book. Harris had already optioned the rights from White’s agent for ten thousand dollars, but while they had a property they had no star. This cooled UA’s ardor and they told Harris and Kubrick that they weren’t interested unless they had a bankable leading man.
The two men were facing a dilemma when out of the blue they heard from Sterling Hayden who a few years earlier had appeared in 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle, John Houston’s Oscar-nominated and award winning film based on the great W.R. Burnett’s book of the same name. Hayden, a serviceable actor known more for his looks than his acting ability (and whose role in Jungle was in some ways similar to the lead character in The Killing, Johnny Clay), reportedly despised acting but the money he made from Hollywood kept him in a series of boats, his real passion. (It may have been this fact that inspired White’s use of boating as a hobby for several of his characters.)
In any case, the studio agreed to put up $200,000 and clearly did not have a lot of faith in the movie, telling Harris that if they needed a bigger budget he’d have to come up with it himself. At the same time they cautioned against it. Harris believed in what they were doing and didn’t listen, putting up his own savings and borrowing from his family to put up an additional hundred and thirty thousand dollars to do the film the way that Kubrick thought it needed to be made.
The two men quickly drove across country, got settled into Los Angeles, and got to work. While White had laid out the structure of Kubrick’s film version nearly perfectly, Kubrick still needed someone to write dialogue. Unlike Houston’s version of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon where much of the diagram came directly from the book, White’s characters didn’t deliver the snappy chatter Kubrick thought was necessary. So he brought in another master of noir, none other than Jim Thompson.
Kubrick had admired Thompson’s earlier classic, The Killer Inside Me (1952) from Arnold Hano’s Lion Books. Hano would come up with basic plots and give them to his regular writers. The Killer Inside Me was one of those and Thompson hit it out of the park with his first-person portrayal of barely functioning psychopath Lou Ford, a law enforcement officer who couldn’t control his tendencies toward murder and sexual sadism.
Thompson came in and wrote the snappy sort of dialogue that White never seemed t
o have an interest in doing. The film became a critical darling but only turned out to be a mediocre box office draw. Time, as it has done for many works of art initially overlooked, has increased The Killing's—and Kubricks, whom many regard as one of the most brilliant filmmakers America has ever produced—reputation and status. The movie, though shot in only twenty-some days (twenty to twenty-four, depending on who’s doing the telling), has come to be known as a film noir classic.
Sadly for Thompson, a sufferer of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and a dependence on a drug-laced cocktail provided by a fad doctor, he believed he would be sharing a screenwriting credit with Kubrick. Like many other talented novelists that kicked around Hollywood searching for that big payday that never quite seemed to come, Thompson never found the sort of Hollywood success that other, lesser writers had managed. In many if not most instances, more pedestrian novelists seem to adapt to screenwriting better than their perhaps more talented book writing colleagues do.
In any case, Kubrick, already a follower of the auteur school of movie making where director trumps writer, gave Thompson an “Additional dialogue by” credit to Thompson. He was angered and didn’t feel it was enough so he took his case to the Writers Guild. The union ruled in his favor and as a result, Kubrick agreed to hire Thompson to work on his next picture at a generous weekly salary (though it turned out that Kubrick failed to give him even that).
The Killing still stands as a classic of film noir and despite Kubrick’s
I lower regard for writers, it follows Lionel White’s plotting about as well as it can, adding touches of voiceover narration to smooth over some of the viewpoint jumps in the book.
Another notable adaptation of a Lionel White book is the Herbert Cornfield directed version of The Snatchers. Cornfield only helmed a handful of films and probably peaked with the 1962 release of Pressure Point which starred Bobby Darin and Sidney Poitier. Cornfield found trouble with his next film, The Night of the Following Day (1968), that included a Marlon Brando who was magnetic as ever on screen but who lived up to every bit of his difficult reputation both on and off it. Richard Boone also starred in an eerily watchable portrayal of a sexually sadistic member of The Snatcher’s kidnapping mob and for a while, the performances of these two, plus that of the criminally underrated and underappreciated Rita Moreno, almost make this film rise above the tepid filmmaking style.
The looped dialogue and the dubbed sound effects give this production the feel of a foreign film even though the actors all spoke English. The soundtrack is distractingly separate from the onscreen action. Things like the constant sound level of ocean waves crashing the shore for every scene shot both inside and outside the gang’s hideout is one example. Even the soundtrack seems unattached to the happenings on the screen with a flute-heavy jazz score from Stanley Myers whose mood, particularly in the first half of the film, appears to convey the exact opposite mood of what was happening on screen—it’s perky when it should be somber, then later, vice versa.
And Brando, notorious for not bothering to learn his lines, clearly appears to have skipped reading large portions of Cornfield’s script. There are numerous stretches where he seems to ad lib with Richard Boone and others, often repeating the same thing over and over again with minor differences in tone or execution, as though he’s searching for just the right delivery in rehearal—only all the while being captured on film.
The ending of the film is most bizarre and very strange, barely comprehensible. Cornfield was trying for something that he called a “pre-cognitive dream” by having actress Pamela Franklin flash back to scenes from the beginning of the movie as she lay possibly dying in Brando’s arms. Brando fought Cornfield on this and the director had to settle on a shot he “stole” while Brando was making faces and clowning on camera.
Franklin’s looped wails and screams detract from the terror and dread hopelessness she’s supposedly feeling, and all in all, the sloppy soundtrack
crime a la white
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and weak script take White’s meticulously plotted book and turns it into a visual depiction that would probably work better as a silent movie with a different musical score.
Cornfield himself may not have entirely understood White’s book. At one point he said he had “cracked” the problem with the script when he decided to treat the victim in a new way. The only thing was that this was very much along the lines that White had originally written. In any case, Cornfield only managed two television dramas and one other movie after Night, all shot in France, where his heroes of the French New Wave had made their bones.
Where Kubrick saw White’s writing as a verbal storyboard for a film, Cornfield failed to recognize the fact that much of his work was already done for him in the source novel. This is one reason why, if you’d like to see faithful renditions of White’s brilliant stories on the screen, a viewer is much better off with The Money Trap, The Killing, or even the television version of The Merriiveatber File.
We also have Robert Steven’s version of The Big Caper (1957) starring Rory Calhoun and the beautiful Mary Costa (who went on to have a bigger career singing opera than she did acting in movies, where her biggest highlight is the voicing of Aurora in Walt Disney’s animated Sleeping Beauty (1959)). Here screenwriter Martin Berkeley takes just enough from White’s book to keep the story roughly the same—the biggest differences are in the natures of some of the main characters.
Where the movie falls flat is at the climax, an overwrought fight scene between Calhoun and James Gregory. The entire film seems to build up to the one dramatic confrontation that attempts to show a knockdown, drag out, no-holds-barred fight between the two principals, but it suffers from a major problem: it looks for all the world as though the scene had neither been properly choreographed or rehearsed.
Punches are thrown that clearly don’t pass anywhere close to their target, or a punch is thrown to the right but the person who’s hit flails in the opposite direction. In danger of being backed over with an automobile, reverse lights clearly coming on, Calhoun has time to get up, shake himself to his senses, run to the passenger side of the car, yank open the door and then pull the driver across the seat and out of the car so the unconvincing dance can continue. In this way a mediocre film builds to a ridiculous climax and any fan of White’s work can only walk away and wonder why it had to be done this way.
Two other oddities emerge from the world of filmmaking and Lionel White’s work. First, his 1959 novel Rafferty was made into a three and a half hour television movie in the former Soviet Union. Secondly, Obsession, the same White novel that was used as the basis for Godard’s Pierotte le Fou, also served as the inspiration for a Finnish movie called Karvat (1974), or in English, The Hair. Like Godard’s film, Seppo Hu-unonen’s version also leaned more to the comedic than to something resembling actual film noir.
White did try his hand at a few stories outside of actual noir. At the beginning of his career, his first book appeared as a Rainbow Books digest magazine called Seven Hungry Men! in 1952. The cover featured several taboos of the time, including a shirtless black man playing with a knife, a nasty expression on his face, alone in a cabin with a haughty white women wearing a high-slitted skirt and tipping a bottle of booze.
The back cover is almost equally scandalous—it shows a black and white photograph of a woman resembling the one from the front cover wearing nothing but a matching set of underwear and a wide open lacy peignoir. Shocking stuff for 1952’s America.
Unusually for White, the ending of the book has something of a happy ending, at least for the surviving characters. But when the book was reprinted in mass market by Avon in 1959, the title had not only been changed to Run, Killer, Run! but it had a more typical White ending. It was both romantic and noir and delivered with a subtle and bittersweet touch.
In 1966 White published a novel called Spy kill with Lancer Books that featured “freelance counterspy” Tom Marco under the name “L.W. Blanco” (“bianco” is the Spanish wor
d for “white”). The name and the book may have been an attempt by White to jump into the burgeoning post-pulp men’s adventure genre but regardless, the book necessarily has a more successful ending for Tom Marco’s first and apparently last appearance.
That same year, an entry in the long-running men’s adventure series featuring Nick Carter, Killmaster, an agent of a government agency known as AXE, was issued by Award Books. Carter was a character who had first appeared in a serialized story in 1886 and was the subject of a series of attempted revivals as he evolved throughout the pulp years, finally culminating in the Killmaster series of over two hundred and sixty novels, all written under the house name, “Nick Carter.”
White’s entry, The Mind Poisoners, was the eighteenth in the series and was begun under a pseudonym and then finished by a woman named Valerie Moolman, the author, co-author, or reviser of a number of other Killmaster titles. Could the pseudonym White used have been “L.W. Blanco,” and could the book originally have been intended as another Tom Marco book? Those answers may have been lost to time, but once again, as a series book, it once again ends at a happy ending—in more ways than one—for both Nick Carter and the woman he’s with at the time, Chelsea Chase.
White certainly fell prey to the prejudices that affected so many Caucasians of his era. His portrayal of minorities can be painful to read in the light of not only what should be a more socially enlightened society but one that’s also afflicted with the vapid insipidness of “political correctness.” Like most of his contemporaries, White’s use of stereotypes in light of today’s sensibilities don’t hold up anymore than you’d expect.
A bit more complex is how White treats his female characters. They can be good and they can be bad. They could be dumb or they could be razor sharp, brave or cowardly, virtuous or loose. One thing they almost always are is powerful. Rarely as powerful as a man, they usually have the power to undo any of them.
