Fri 9 Jan 2015
Reviewed by Dan Stumpf: HORACE McCOY – Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (Book and Film).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[4] Comments
HORACE McCOY – Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Random House, hardcover, 1948. Paperback reprints include: Signet 754, 1949; Avon, 1965.
KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE Warner Brothers, 1950. James Cagney, Barbara Payton, Helena Carter, Ward Bond, Luther Adler, Barton MacLane, Steve Brodie, Rhys Williams, Herbert Heyes, John Litel, William Frawley. Based on the novel by Horace McCoy. Director: Gordon Douglas.
In 1948, just two years after Lindsey Gresham wrote Nightmare Alley, successful novelist and screenwriter Horace McCoy penned the unforgettable Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, which is the sort of thing you’d get if Proust wrote for Black Mask: a head-long, careening, totally amoral thriller about an escaped con on a crime spree — typical hard-boiled stuff, but couched in syntax that requires a dictionary close at hand.
Ralph Cotter, the anti-hero of the piece is an alienated super-intellect (or a Sadistic Grad Student) and his first-person narration bandies terms like propliopith-ecustian (primitive) once or twice a page. McCoy laces the tale with ramblings like:
That sort of thing. And lots of it. Incredibly, McCoy also provides a fast, taut violent tale set in a vivid background of casual corruption and dreamy decadence. An exchange early on, between our “hero†and the cell-mate he will shortly kill before escaping from the chain-gang, sets the tone:
It will be your last, you Caresser of Calves, I thought. “Was it as nice as the others?†I asked.
And so it goes. McCoy parades his cast of killers, bought cops, paid-off politicos and shady ladies with an alluring personal style I found hard to put down and impossible to forget. Like Nightmare Alley, this is not to every taste, but for those who like this sort of thing, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is required reading.
By the way, there’s a bit in the book where the wealthy daughter of a powerful politician, intrigued by Cotter’s deadly charm, runs away with him for what they called in those days, a night of illicit passion. When her Dad and his rented cops burst in on them, they claim to have been married, then hustle to an out-of-state chapel before he can check up on them.
Hold that thought a minute, we’ll get back to it. Meanwhile, I should add that this review is based on the unabridged Avon reprint from 1965. The Signet edition is abridged by about a third and includes a snide comment from McCoy on Paperbacks and their readers.
Someone called the film of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, “Vicious and uncompromising.†Well, it is enjoyably vicious, thanks mainly to the punchy direction of Gordon (Tony Rome, Rio Conchos, etc.) Douglas, and there are some dandy turns from the likes of James Cagney, Luther Adler, and especially Ward Bond and Barton Maclane (who performed similar function in The Maltese Falcon) as a pair of badly-bent cops, but Harry Brown’s script throws w-a-a-y too many sops to the censors to keep its integrity.
For starters — literally — McCoy’s tale is presented within a frame, showing, the denizens of his shady universe brought to trial for their misdeeds. During the course of this proceeding, the characters get on the Witness Stand and relate the story in flashback, testifying to things they couldn’t possibly have seen and incriminating themselves and others with cheery abandon. And the Night of Illicit Passion? In the film, when Daddy bursts in on the young couple, they’ve already had their quickie wedding, and are lying in twin beds wearing pajamas looking about as depraved as Ozzie and Harriett.
I sometimes think only an artist of unflinching vulgarity like Gordon Douglas (who also directed Liberace’s only movie, Sincerely Yours, and did it with a straight face) could have taken material as gutless as this and still made a fairly worthwhile film out of it, and only with a cast as good as he got. Recommended, but with reservations.
January 10th, 2015 at 8:21 am
The Signet edition has the sexy James Avati cover that impressed me as a 13 year old. Unfortunately it is severely abridged and should be avoided at all costs. No wonder Horace McCoy made a snide comment about paperbacks and their readers…
January 10th, 2015 at 8:42 am
The same thought had occurred to me. It was a strange era when a publisher could use a cover as blatantly sexy as that to entice readers in, only to think it necessary to trim the text, presumably to protect their morality, as Dan seems to hint at in his review.
January 10th, 2015 at 4:55 pm
Anything good that actually made it into paperback was always touted as ‘unexpuragated’ even when there was nothing in it worth expurgating. Keep in mind when they first published LADY CHATTERLY (Avon I think)it was really the tame version and not the one that caused all the uproar.
It was sometime after the court decision in the sixties before there was any paperback other than an Olympia Press of that version.
And too, what Mickey Spillane could get away with because he was Spillane and everyone knew what they were getting was different than what a more mainstream book like this could get away with. The juvenile high school attitude to sex of a Hammer novel was entirely different than what McCoy was doing. Ironically Signet was also the publisher of Spillane and Erskine Caldwell and known as one of the racier paperback houses for that lineup. Signet was known for hard hitting racy books like FOREVER AMBER and other Winsor novels and KNOCK ON ANY DOOR.
The selling point for Signet was pretty much gritty and sexy at that point largely thanks to Spillane’s influence.
Makes what they did to McCoy even more ironic though.
Signet books were often the kind you didn’t want mother to find well into the sixties when they added Fleming and Bond (58/59) to the list. Those Avati covers are beautiful, but his brand of realism made them much racier than the more pulp like art of many other houses. Even McGinnis seemed more likely to pull out all the stops for his Signet work.
But to be fair this was still the era of the Legion of Decency, the Catholic League, and Banned in Boston, and they could seriously cut into sales and publishing is seldom about art or integrity. A hardcover that depended on smaller print runs could afford a bit of controversy, hardcover buyers were likely to buy it because it was banned, but a paperback that sold at the corner drugstore kiosk or newsstand was something else (am I the only one who misses newsstands with candy, pops, tobacco, magazines, beaucoup paperbacks, and newspapers from everywhere, and that section back in the corner you weren’t supposed to linger in?)it’s audience was imagined to be more blue collar, middle class, and unsophisticated, in short the old pulp audience.
The movie is visceral thanks to Douglas, but much better if you didn’t read the book. They were trying for another WHITE HEAT with Cagney who was badly miscast at this point as a young man on his way up no matter how good he was. In fact almost everyone in this film is too old for the part they are playing. This needed the Cagney of PUBLIC ENEMY, or at worst THE ROARING TWENTIES, not the Cagney of WHITE HEAT.
He gives a fine performance, but one that is only a suggestion of the character of the novel. Even the incidents that parallel the novel have a different interpretation because of the relative age of the actors as much as the censored script.
Though politics has nothing to do with this, it was an era when integrity was at a premium, and showing too much of it in a film or a book could be a high risk activity. Signet had pushed the boundaries with Spillane about as far as they would push in that era.
Not too long after this the world nearly came to an end because Otto Preminger let someone say ‘virgin’ in a film and Lucy’s pregnancy showed.
It’s a wonder half the good films and bad women and men we have on screen got there.
This is one of the last (perhaps the last) of the Warner’s gangster cycle — at least the true cycle that began with LITTLE CAESAR. After this nothing was quite of that genre in the same sense. There were a few tries but they were all elegiac or nostalgic, exposes mostly from the police point of view.
January 19th, 2015 at 4:24 am
Oddly enough I prefer the movie. The book is just too nihilistic for my tastes.