Wed 23 Mar 2022
A Book! Movie!! Review by Dan Stumpf: CORNELL WOOLRICH – Black Alibi // THE LEOPARD MAN (1943).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[7] Comments
â— CORNELL WOOLRICH – Black Alibi. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1942. Paperback reprints include: HandiBook #14, 194?; Jonathan Press, 194?; Collier, 1965; Ballantine, 1982.
â— THE LEOPARD MAN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943. Dennis O’Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell. Based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich. Producer: Val Lewton. Director: Jacques Tourneur .
So it was time to get back to the Classics, and in my book, that’s Cornell Woolrich. Black Alibi isn’t terribly well-structured — it consists mainly of a growingly repetitious series of rather lengthy vignettes of young girls going to meet untimely and violent ends at the hands of…. well, it’s a Mystery, isn’t it? — but it contains some of Woolrich’s richest prose, and that’s saying quite a lot.
Alibi offers scene after scene of startling imagery, deft metaphor, and everything else that makes the words a pleasure to read, even when the book itself gets a bit tiresome.
Black Alibi was filmed by the Val Lewton unit at RKO just a year after the book came out, and Woolrich never found an auteur more attuned to his peculiar sensibilities than Val Lewton. Lewton made “B” movies and Woolrich wrote pulp, but both men were compulsive poets, and The Leopard Man is one of the more meticulous Woolrich-to-film adaptations: bits of dialogue, trifling incidents, and minor characters from the book all show up on the screen under Lewton’s careful supervision and the classy direction of Jacques Tourneur, which seems to capture even the metaphors from Woolrich’s novel.
Given the faithfulness of this film, I’ve sometimes wondered about the exact contributions of the screenwriters, Ardel Wray and Edward Dein. It takes a certain amount of talent not to mess up a good story when putting it across the screen, so I can understand Wray’s contribution: she worked on a couple other Lewton films and a better-than average series entry, The Falcon and the Coeds. But I wonder what “additional dialogue” may have been contributed by Edward Dein, a writer whose dubious credits include Jungle Woman, Calypso Joe, and Shack Out on 101. Just one of those unexplained mysteries of The Cinemah, I guess.
March 23rd, 2022 at 7:52 pm
The mystery of exactly what you have to contribute to get a screenplay credit is one I’ve never quite cracked. There are rules, but exactly what they are and how they work I suspect even baffles some professionals.
That mystery aside the book and film work as mood pieces, and like much of Woolrich’s work if you are looking for cogent plot you may be reading the wrong writer. Some of his best work doesn’t really bear thinking about.
This was the last of the Irish titles I read, only because it took me longer to track it down. It’s not quite in the same class as the others, but clearly “not quite” only.
Lewton and Woolrich both seemed able to capture the inner logic of nightmare in their mediums. It may be that both men came along at exactly the right time to exploit that gift, that both had a pulp sensibility tied to a finer one that allowed a sort of art to creep into the more pulpish aspects of the story.
March 23rd, 2022 at 8:20 pm
I’ve been reading Woolrich’s short stories recently when I come across them in hard-boiled or noir-oriented anthologies — and enjoy them — but it’s been a long time since I’ve re-read any of his novels. Based on how well I remember them, my favorites have always been PHANTOM LADY and DEADLINE AT DAWN. Both are solid 10’s in my book.
March 24th, 2022 at 5:27 pm
[…] Woolrich is the focus of the latest post by Dan Stumpf at Mystery*file: a short review of Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943) and its source, Woolrich’s […]
March 28th, 2022 at 8:59 pm
Steve,
You should read CW’s first mystery novel “The Bride Wore Black”. It has a great twist ending I didn’t see coming. Of course I was very young at the time.
Still holds up as far as I’m concerned. One of his “Top Two” (along with Phantom Lady) as far as I’m concerned. As to the above review, a very good book and a really good noir movie, made by experts.
March 29th, 2022 at 2:52 pm
Strange you should mention THE BRIDE WORE BLACK, Paul. It’s at the top pf one of my TBR stacks even as I type this.
June 8th, 2022 at 1:34 pm
And you may be seeing a little more on that subject here soon…
December 21st, 2022 at 1:25 pm
I listened to “If The Dead Could Talk” last night, adapted from a Cornell Woolrich story.
It was a suspenseful love-triangle set, “under the big top”. Starring Dana Andrews. He did a good job.
But, I must have missed something in the narration. There’s something I that eludes me in the story construction.
The would-be murderer (played by Andrews) is a circus trapeze artist and –driven by jealous rage –he plots to kill his aerialist partner.
For fifteen or so minutes of plot development, we follow Andrews around as he gets himself a gun from a pawnshop; hides it, and works himself up to use it. He presses the pistol barrel up against the head of his intended victim at night, while the man sleeps. Trying to get himself used to the idea.
But: if you are an aerialist, and you want to murder your aerialist partner, why the heck would you use a gun at all? Immediate capture and arrest.
Whereas: if you just slip, (“ooooooops!”) and let the guy drop to his death, you’d not be suspected at all. It would be taken as a simple accident. A hazard of the profession.
Maybe someone here can fill me in on why the story took this shape.
Anyway it was a good listen.