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James M(allahan) Cain (1892-1977) | |
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American journalist, screenwriter, and novelist - identified with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and others as a central member of hard-boiled school of crime fiction. However, Cain's own opinion was "I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise". Three of Cain's novels-THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1934), DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1936), and MILDRED PIERCE (1941)-were also made into classics of the American screen. His books continued to appear after World War II, but none gained the success of his earlier work. "I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort." (Cain in preface to Double Indemnity) James M. Cain was born in Annapolis, as the son of an educator and an opera singer. He studied at Washington College, in Chesterton, Maryland, earning his B.A. at the age of eighteen, and masters in 1917. Cain worked as a clerk, a meat-packer, a singer, and a teacher. During World War I in army service he was the editor of the 79th Division newspaper Lorraine Cross in France. Decades later he returned to his war experiences in the short story 'Taking of Mountfaucon'. "And what we was walking over was all shell holes and barbed wire, and you was always slipping down and busting your shin, and then all them dead horses and things was laying around, and you didn't never see one till you had your foot in it, and then it made you sick. And dead men. The first one we seen was in a trench, kind of laying up against the side, what was on a slant. And he was sighting down his gun just like he was getting ready to pull the trigger, and when you come to him you opened your mouth to beg his pardon for bothering him. And then you didn't." After the war Cain wrote pieces for the Baltimore American (1917-18) and Baltimore Sun (1919-23), where he covered political and industrial strife in the West Virginia. From 1923 to 1924 he was Professor of Journalism at St. John's College, Annapolis. In 1924 he became the editorial writer for the New York World under Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). Cain conducted a column which formed the basis for OUR GOVERNMENT (1930), a sharp analysis of the American policy. 'Who's going to know if it's all right or not, but you and me?' In 1928 H.L. Mencken, whom Cain had met while working for the Baltimore American, published in American Mercury his story 'Pastorale'. Following the end of the World, Cain joined New Yorker staff in 1931 for a year. However, he found the environment uncongenial and moved to Hollywood. From 1932 to 1947 he lived in Southern California writing for films, but he did not have much success and he drank too much. Raymond Chandler called him "a Proust in greasy overalls". His shoert stories were published in such magazines as the American Mercury, Redbook, Esquire, and Ladies' Home Journal. Several of these stories were collected in THE BABY IN THE ICEBOX (1981). Cain secured writing credit only on three films. His most important works, including The Postman Always Rings Twice, were adapted for the screen by other writers. Cain's style was sparse, and he believed that it was the way novels should be written at the time of the Depression. The original title of The Postman Always Rings Twice was Bar-B-Q, but Cain's publisher, Alfred Knopf, disliked it. However, there is no postman in the story which was based loosely on an actual case. The protagonist is a California drifter, Frank Chambers, who falls in love with Cora Papadakis, the fatal wife of a diner owner. "Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn't any ravaging beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips struck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her." Frank and Cora murder the husband and make his death look like accident. Cora dies in a car crash and ironically Frank is convicted of murder for her accidental death. The book was daring enough to be banned in Canada and in Boston and to arise a trial for obscenity. Lana Turner played Cora in Tay Garnett's film version of the book from 1946. The screenplay was written by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch. Cain was impressed with Turner's performance, saying it was even finer than he had expected. The 1981 remake with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange was more faithful to the book than Garnett's version. Nicholson did not soften his character, Frank. "He's a sadist who solves every problem with violence," Nicholson said in an interview. "I don't particularly want a guy who murders a man the fucks his wife on top of her husband's body to be all that charming." The sex scenes arose much attention in the United States, where the film was dismissed by the critics and failed at the box office, but in other countries it was a hit. Double Indemnity, a tale of an adulterous couple who try to commit the perfect insurance murder, appeared in abridged form as an eight-part serial in Liberty (1936) magazine. Cain used some detail for his work from the 1927 Snyder/Gray murder case. Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray murdered Albert Snyder-they used window-sash weight, chloroform, and picture wire. The murder weapons attracted much attention when they were put on display at the New York Police Academy. In Cain's story Phyllis Nirdlinger seduces Walter Huff, a salesman with General Fidelity in Los Angeles. Her husband signs his policy application and Walter kills him, but stages it as suicide. Walter's boss Keyes has his own suspicions about the whole matter. Walter finds Nirdlinger's daughter Lola attractive and plans to shoot Phyllis, but she tries to get him first. Lola and her boyfriend are blamed. Walter confesses all to Keyes, who secretly arranges them on the same cruise, where he expects they will kill each other. Huff, like Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice, is caught in a trap by sex and violence. The story was filmed by Billy Wilder, who hired Raymond Chandler to write the script. Cain also participated in story conference and wrote: "A young guy named Joe Sistrom was Paramount's producer on the picture... He sat there unhappily in a sulk and the suddenly said, 2All characters in B pictures are too smart." I never forgot it. It was a curious observation, putting into words - vivid, rememberable words - a principle that when a character is too smart, convenient to the author's purposes, everything begins getting awfully slack in the story, and slick. Slack is one fault and slick is another. Both are bad faults in a story." (from On Sunset Boulevard by Ed Sikov, 1998) Double Indemnity (1944), film directed by Billy Wilder (1944), starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, screenplay by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder, cinematographer John F. Seitz. Wilder first offered the role of corrupt insurance man to Alan Ladd and George Raft, among others. Wilder's film is among the best achievements of film noir. The director signed Raymond Chandler to write the screenplay for him, Charles Brackett with whom he had worked earlier, did not want to touch the book. Chandler altered the story, changed names, and used flashback. "...Cain's dialogue in his fiction in written to the eye," Chadler explained. "Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's dialogue it in the same spirit as he has in the book, and not the identically same words." Cain's comment was generous: "It's the only picture I ever saw made from my books that had things in it I wish I had thought of. Wilder's ending was much better than my ending, and his device for letting the guy tell the story by taking out the office dictating machine – I would have done it if I had thought of it. There are situations in the movie that can make your hands get wet." (from On Sunset Boulevard by Ed Sikov) The game between a self-assured male protagonist and a cunning woman has inspired such directors as Robert Siodmark (The Killers, 1946), Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past, 1947), and Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, 1981). In the original ending to the film, MacMurray is convicted for murder and Robinson witnesses his death at a gas chamber in San Quentin. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce was also filmed, and won an Oscar for Joan Crawford in her role as a career woman. Cain's book centered on a ambitious woman, who loses her wealth through the intrigues of her ex-husband, her partner, and selfish daughter. The story is told in a third-person narration, but Cain later confessed that it did not suit him - his book did not have the right bite. The protagonist is portrayed mostly in sympathetic light in spite of her hard character. Michael Curtiz's film adaptation from 1945 is considered essentially a film noire piece, "where it's a woman, Crawford, rather than a man, who is led by a greedy, manipulative, evil femme fatale - in this case, the woman's daughter, Blyth - down a fatalistic path of deception, money for greedy people, murder, and doom (only here an optimistic ending is added)." (Danny Peary in Guide for the Film Fanatic, 1986) Cain was very critical of Hollywood's treatment of writers, and he set up the short-lived American Authors' Society to seek better deals with the studios. In his own life Cain had troubles to pay the bills and his divorces cost much money. Love gave the author troubles from the beginning of his career. After Cain's marriage to Aileen Pringle ended, he married for the fourth time in 1947 and settled in Hyattsville, where he remained until his death. His fourth wife was the opera singer Florence Macbeth Whitwell. Cain's works after WW II include BUTTERFLY (1947), a story of incest, illegitimacies, and murder in Kentucky, THE MOTH (1948), his personal favorite set in Baltimore, and historical novels PAST ALL DISHONOR (1946), and MIGNON (1965), set in the years after the Civil War. In his later years Cain occupied himself with the study of Shakespeare's sonnets and classical music. In 1970 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. James M.Cain died on October 27, 1977, in Hyattsville, Maryland. "This was going to be such a lousy murder it wouldn't even be a murder. It was going to be just a regular road accident, with guys drunk, and booze in the car, and all the rest. " (from The Postman Always Rings Twice) Cain generally preferred a first-person narrator, avoided moralizing, and his characters were often self-destructive, or used by stronger women. Many stories were set in Glendale, a Los Angeles suburb. An admirer of the short-story writer and sports reporter Ring Lardner, he imitated Lardner's style in 'Icebox', published in 1933 and made into a film entitled She Made Her Bed. In France Cain was regarded as one of the most important American writers. The Postman Always Rings Twice is said to have inspired Albert Camus' existential novel The Outsider. However, Raymond Chandler was not very enthusiastic about Cain and wrote (unjustifiably) to his publisher: "James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way."
Selected bibliography:
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