A stranger in the studio

Al Clark. Raymond Chandler in Hollywood. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1996. Revised edition.

Raymond Chandler. Later Novels and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1955.

It has been said that, in his hardboiled crime fiction, Raymond Chandler had taken murder out of the rose garden and dropped it into the alley. Film director Billy Wilder turned to Chandler to be his partner in composing a screenplay based on Double Indemnity, a novel by another eminent crime novelist, James M. Cain. But as Al Clark records in Raymond Chandler in Hollywood, the Wilder-Chandler collaboration proved to be an unpleasant one.

A morose, touchy man, Chandler preferred to work alone; so he resented the script conferences which Wilder imposed on him. Indeed, he detested what he termed these painful jabber sessions. In addition, Chandler had a low opinion of screenwriting. "There is no art of the screenplay," he asserted in his essay "Writers in Hollywood," written after the picture was released in 1944. Screenwriting, as far as Chandler was concerned, was "a loathsome job," consisting of "beating the hell out of the poor, tired lines and scenes until they lost all meaning." He therefore grew testy and disagreeable as he worked with Wilder, and Clark frankly describes the petty squabbles which punctuated their work on the script.

Yet their uneasy personal relationship did not interfere with their successful collaboration on the screenplay. For Double Indemnity-Wilder and Chandler's pitiless, unflinching portrayal of two doomed lovers whose relationship ends in betrayal and death-went on to become both a popular and critical success. Chandler later wrote to his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, that his collaboration with Wilder was "an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life; but I learned from it as much about screenwriting as I am capable of learning, which is not very much."

Since Double Indemnity has since come to be regarded as a classic crime film, it is not surprising that the Wilder-Chandler screenplay is included in the Library of America volume of Chandler's Later Novels and Other Writings. This book also contains Chandler's essay "Writers in Hollywood," as well as the letter to Hamish Hamilton, mentioned above, in the section of the volume titled "Selected Essays and Letters." Consequently, this handy anthology of Chandler's work includes not only the best screenplay Chandler ever worked on, but some of his key writings about Hollywood as well.

Clark also considers Chandler's other screenwriting assignments, including Strangers on a Train (1951), a thriller on which he collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock. According to Clark, Chandler grumbled that he found the script conferences Hitchcock insisted upon frustrating, because Hitchcock was not as troubled as he was by questions of narrative logic and character motivation. To Chandler this explained why a Hitchcock movie sometimes loses its grip on logic "and becomes a chase." In any event, since Hitchcock jettisoned much of what Chandler wrote, Chandler abandoned Hollywood for good.

Nevertheless, Chandler's fiction continued to be adapted to the screen by other hands. Indeed, a total of ten films mined from his fiction were released between 1942 and 1978, most notably The Big Sleep (1946), in which Humphrey Bogart gave the definitive portrait of Chandler's private eye, Philip Marlow.

All in all, Clark's book presents a well-researched, witty, and intelligent study of both Chandler's screenplays and the films derived from his fiction by other screenwriters. In sum, Clark's volume makes it abundantly clear that despite Chandler's complaints about how the studios treated him and his work-his creative association with Hollywood yielded some first-class films.

Gene D. Phillips, S.J.

Loyola University of Chicago

Copyright Literature/Film Quarterly 1997
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