Noir City, 2019

It’s January, the most terrible time of the year! But for Bay Area movie buffs that means another stroll down some of cinema’s meanest alleys, a concrete and steel universe of endless shadows and impenetrable smoke. 

Yes, it’s the 2019 edition of Noir City-San Francisco,the annual film festival founded and sponsored by the Film Noir Foundationand its founder, and master of ceremonies, Eddie Muller. It plays at gorgeous the Castro Theatre, San Francisco, starting Friday, January 25^th and closes Saturday, February 2^nd: twelve films over ten days.

This time, the festival fixes its gaze on noir films produced in the 1950s, when the genre was just at its peak before fading out of fashion. As in years past, it’s a jewel case of gems and oddities: a few premieres mixed with B-movie obscurities plus solid classics that bear repeated viewing.

Time and space allow me to see only a fraction of the program. Most of them I've seen before, some just recently, some not since I was a silver-faced tyke sitting cross-legged in front of the TV.

Of those unseen, I’d call the opening night feature, Trapped, starring Lloyd Bridges and directed by Richard Fleischer the most intriguing.  Its plot sounds a bit batshit (a convicted counterfeiter released from jail and sent undercover), but there are two good reasons to see it. 

One is Lloyd Bridges. You all know his sons Jeff and Beau, but their dad, your elders will also have you know, was a star back in Boomer days and a fine, well-respected actor who played mostly straight-arrow, second-tier leads, in the manner of other actors such as Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves and Robert Stack. He’s well remembered for playing Deputy Harvey Pell in High Noon, a role, it’s said, originally marked for Lee Van Cleef.

Lloyd Bridges achieved his greatest success in television: Probably his most famous role was as Mike Nelson in the TV series Sea Hunt, an underwater crime show that helped popularize scuba diving in the 1960s. (It inspired one of my older brothers to purchase scuba gear, which he never got to work properly, causing our mom’s blood pressure to swell to high triple digits: “I had you on bottom of the Hudson River!”)

Bridges spent the latter part of his career in television. He sprung to the spotlight once again in the classic 1980 spoof Airplane! Here, I assert, the sight of straight-arrow Lloyd Bridges sniffing glue while hanging upside down remains an inspired gag and a highlight of my long life at the movies.

The other reason to see Trapped is the direction of Richard Fleischer, who helmed the wonderful noir classic The Narrow Margin. Boomers remember Fleischer for directing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Disney and many other top Hollywood projects. (His best later film, to me, is the serial killer drama 10 Rillington Place, a superbly directed film.) Trapped is almost sure to feature some strong visuals from this master of noir.

As for the rest, I’d also like to see The Burglar, from a David Goodis novel, starring Dan Duryea. Goodis (author of Down There, aka Shoot the Piano Player) was a famously downbeat noir novelist and it would be interesting to see how closely the film captures his bleak view.

As for the known knowns, there’s a lot to see. Among them is one of three Sam Fuller films, Pickup on South Street. Here we’re graced with Richard Widmark as a Gotham pickpocket whose sticky fingers ensnare him in brutal Cold War intrigue. Widmark was a master at playing lowlifes—Night and the City, high among my favorite noirs, is great due partially to him. There’s also great work by Thelma Ritter as one of Widmark’s colleagues and, of course, director Fuller’s ultra-punchy style. (The festival also features Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono and Underworld U.S.A.)

I also recommend The Detective Story. From a play by Sidney Kingsley and directed by William Wyler, it’s social realism in the guise of noir. It follows a day in the life of a New York City precinct and its chief detective, Jim McLeod. It’s no Barney Miller, but a sad and distressing story of a veteran cop’s unravelling as the moral absolutes he lives by collapse in rubble.

William Wyler was not a noir director, but he was one of the master big studio directors of his time. His films are neglected, I think unfairly, by today’s critics for being “too establishment.”

Then there’s the performance of Kirk Douglas, an actor for whom, I’m sure, they coined the word “powerhouse.”  Douglas dominates the screen like no other star, but he has a way of making us squirm. Even his noblest heroes seem arrogant bastards, making McLeod the perfect role for him. Douglas was a great movie star who bravely embraced singularly unpleasant roles. As we reach the end of the “difficult men” era in prestige TV (The Sopranos, Mad Men, etc.), remember that Kirk Douglas was there before any of them.

You might get a kick out of Angel Face, a 1953 melodrama directed by Otto Preminger and featuring Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons. Mitchum plays an ambulance driver who gets mixed up in Jean Simmons’ scheme to murder her wealthy husband. The story behind the film sounds more dramatic to me but stick around for a shocking fiery climax.

The festival also gets a revisit from that old 1950s noir warhorse, Kiss Me Deadly, up there with The Big Combo as one of the most florid, perverse and looniest noirs ever. Directed by Richard Aldrich, it stars Ralph Meeker (an underrated, underused actor) as Mickey Spillane’s brutal, granite-fisted hero, Mike Hammer. (Fun fact: Meeker replaced Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway and is said by some to have been the better Stanley.)

Also worth a ticket is Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) featuring terrific work from Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan and direction from Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Haunting). On the surface, it’s the story of a bank robbery gone wrong. Underneath there’s real drama in the racial conflict between the two leads, a misery still well with us. It’s a case where a film’s underlying themes actually are weaved within the drama rather than being forced upon it.

Of the two real classics that close the festival, it’s impossible to say which is “Best of the Fest”, but Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil is definitely one of them. So much has been written about this film, it’s hard to say anymore, but suffice it to say, if you haven’t seen it, see it now, and if you have seen it before, see it again!

One parlor game I never play is “What’s Your Favorite Alfred Hitchcock film?” because the Master made so many great films it’s impossible to decide. Psycho for one, stands among his greats not only for its direction, stark atmosphere, terrific score, editing, and acting, but also the underlying anguish in the colliding fates of Marion Crane and Norman Bates, which gives the film a hint of unexpected tragedy arising from pulp material. Knowing what’s to come, their final scene together is a sorrowful moment.

Everyone rightly mocks the penultimate scene (with poor Simon Oakland bravely wrestling through cornball Freudian speculations). It's my bet that if you cut that scene, you wouldn’t lose a thing and be left with a perfect movie in Psycho. The worst thing about it then becomes all the terrible imitations that have followed in its wake and still assault us sixty years on.

Thomas Burchfield is the author of Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller, which was praised as “incendiary” by David Corbett (The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday; The Art of Character)! His contemporary vampire novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil andDracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he also published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

In the Beginning: "A Coffin for Dimitrios" by Eric Ambler

Before British author Eric Ambler came along, thrillers and spy yarns were mostly romantic affairs, populated by flag-waving heroes and brimming with manly idealism, jut-jawed jingoism, and, sometimes, a disturbing racism.

There were exceptions: Both Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent, 1904) and Somerset Maugham (the “Ashenden” stories,1928), laid some groundwork for a greater “realism.” But all that had to wait until Eric Ambler’s second novel, Background to Danger(1937).

A Coffin for Dimitrios (1938) was the fifth novel Ambler wrote in his pre-WWII period. It stands tall among his classics, and firmly alongside other novels of its era. It tells the story of Charles Latimer, a minor scholar and old-school English mystery novelist (author of such cosies as The Bloody Shovel and “I” Said the Eye). While vacationing in Istanbul in the late 1930s, he meets a fan, the sinister and charming Colonel Haki, who may or may not work for the Turkish secret police.

Colonel Haki is thrilled to meet of one of his favorite mystery authors but adds that “I find the murderer in a roman policier much more sympathetic than a real murderer.” For reasons left unsaid, he shares with Latimer a dossier detailing the violent career of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a profoundly unsympathetic thief, murderer, assassin and drug-dealer. There’s also an important detail missing from the dossier: Dimitrios is dead, his corpse recently found floating in the Bosphorous straits. Who put him there, and why, is the mystery at the novel’s core.

Perhaps a little ashamed of his sheltered life, Latimer leaves his cosy world behind to launch an obsessive and dangerous plunge into the mystery of Dimitrios. The trail leads him through a shadow-riven Balkan landscape still haunted by World War I and seething with criminal intrigue as it gears up for the next one. As he wanders dank alleyways and cobbled streets, he encounters a parade of gamy characters and cruel deceptions, all of it glued together by that simplest and most reliable of motives, greed. 

Ambler was a leftist radical during this period and salts his novel with numerous insights into the links between capitalism and crime. Along the way, Latimer winds up an early pioneer of the investigative practice of “following the money.” 

“The most important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination,” Ambler writes in one of his most famous quotes, “is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.”

While the novel risks becoming a finger-wagging lecture, Ambler’s eye for detail, character and pacing keep the narrative rolling. He knew when to shut up and let matters speak for themselves. The money trail, convincingly laid out, leads to a conclusion that may not be too surprising to jaded modern readers but remains convincing and thrilling, while taking a witty final turn.

Another unique feature is the hero, Charles Latimer. Latimer is no Richard Hannay or proto James Bond, but a fumbling naïve academic who barely knows which way to point a pistol. It was Ambler’s unique insight that the ordinary man, the chap who winds up way in over his head, raises the stakes and builds a better foundation for suspense. To paraphrase Ambler fan Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Latimer is a man to whom things are done as opposed to a man who does things to others. We worry what will happen to him and that makes for greater suspense than a thousand unkillable, unstoppable, immortal super heroes. Every man—and not a few women—like to think of themselves as Mr. Bond . . . but in reality we’re all closer, much closer, to being Charles Latimer.

Ambler’s steely gaze permeates the modern thriller. Alan Furst claims him as a direct inspiration for his pre-WW2 novels of intrigue (though Furst is much more the romantic), while his realistic approach to character can be found in Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Transcription. His name may not be spoken as it once was, but every thriller writer alive owes a deep debt to Eric Ambler.

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Thomas Burchfield is the author of Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  that author David Corbett (The Art of Character) called “incendiary!” His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night(e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand. He also published a two-part look at the life and career of the great movie villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Noir City 2018

This flu noir has kept me in the shadows so far this year, but there’s enough strength—not to mention gumption—left to urge you all to attend the 2018 Noir City Festival at San Francisco’s magnificent Castro Theatre. As always, it’s produced by the Film Noir Foundation (Eddie Muller, founder and president), and includes bar service in the upstairs lobby by Stookey’s Club Moderne.

As before, time and distance will also keep me from attending the entire event. But it won’t keep me from pointing you to some films I know are worth seeing and pointing you to others that might be worth our while (if I can get out of bed).

I haven’t seen This Gun for Hire (Saturday afternoon, January 27) for years, but my memory of it is a good one. Adapted (and softened up and Americanized) from Graham Greene’s novel by Albert Maltz and crime fiction pioneer W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar), it tells the story of hitman Philip Raven and how he winds up a target due to sinister double-crossing by, among others, the amazing Laird Cregar, an actor gone much too soon. It also features Veronica Lake as the love interest, which will be of interest to gentlemen who prefer blondes and dig the peekaboo hairstyle.

A genuine classic—one of two this year--is on tap for that same Saturday evening with Shadow of a Doubt, one in the long long line of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces. (Can any of you point to a single specific Hitchcock film as “his best?” Not me.) That Hitchcock considered this a personal favorite should be enough. I’ll add, in addition to mesmerizing work by Joseph Cotten as “Uncle Charley” (maybe his best role) and winsome Teresa Wright as his adoring niece (also named Charlie) there’s a bright seam of wit and humor revealed by the supporting cast featuring Hume Cronyn, Henry Travers, and an actress named Edna May Wonacott as Wright’s uproariously pedantic little sister. If you haven’t seen this . . . I mean really….

The following Monday January 29, features Conflict which I recall as a solid entertaining thriller with Bogart wearing the black hat as a wife murderer.

The following night, Tuesday, January 30) features The Blue Dahlia, the only feature penned first to last by Raymond Chandler. Once again, Alan Ladd and Veronica Ladd are teamed, accompanied by an excellent William Bendix and Howard daSilva. Censorship pressures at the time led to a fudged ending, but it’s still a good noir.

I Walk Alone (1948) will be shown Thursday night, February 1. Though declared a “lost” film, I recall it being broadcast on network television sometime during the 1970s and I caught up with during the 1990s, so how lost it was I can’t say. Lost or not, I recall it to be a pretty good noir thriller, with shades of Out of the Past. Burt Lancaster as an ex-con and Kirk Douglas, as his cheating ex-partner, face off over loot and Lizabeth Scott, as a torch singer. Lancaster vs Douglas? That’s two kegs of dynamite slammed together.

From there, there’s a big gap of unknowns until closing night with the other forty-carat classic, The Big Heat. Now, I am of the firm opinion that none of director Fritz Lang’s Hollywood films really hold a candle to his monumental German classics. But The Big Heat does stand among the finest of his later years.  Everything with Gloria Grahame and Lee Marvin is terrific. You may squirm a little at the domestic moments, but once those are blasted out of the way, the film turns cruel and relentless, as does Glenn Ford, a fine actor in an excellent role. It may well be the cruelest and most savage of all noirs.

Among those I haven’t seen, but wish and hope I can is Among the Living, with its shades of Jane Eyre; Flesh and Fantasy and Destiny two films that were once portmanteaud together before being split in two; both are said to contain shades of the supernatural, always a draw for me.

And any movie where Charles McGraw gets to play a lead, which seldom happened, is a must for his fans, as will happen with The Threat, where he plays an escaped con out for revenge. No doubt his enemies will be very sorry by the time he’s done with ‘em—if they live long enough.

The Who Pulled a Knife on Jerry Seinfeld

And, finally, there are three reasons to see Bodyguard: one: it’s a very early screen story co-credited to Robert Altman; two, it’s directed by a most excellent craftsman, Richard Fleischer. And three: will the notorious, most unnerving Lawrence Tierney finally lose it and destroy everything in sight? I can see the klieg lights coming loose as the crew flees in screaming terror.

Have a great time! Maybe I’ll see some of you at Stookey’s upstairs!

[This one is dedicated to the late Carrie Galbraith, a friend when needed long ago.]

Copyright 2017 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now out! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal and The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

"Now Speaks the Devil": The Story of an Unproduced Screenplay

Now Speaks the Devil was begun in 1984. First titled The Way, a first draft was completed around 1986, with a final draft completed in 1991, then re-edited again for its current publication by Ambler House (with the fine assistance of Bookbaby).

This was the second screenplay I completed and the first I considered good enough to show around Hollywood. My first, Under the Gun, was an ersatz “Dirty Harry” farrago about a right-wing cop forced to team up with a potheaded hippie to wage war against a gang of neo-Nazis on the rampage. I killed off the entire population of San Francisco in the course of 120 stupid pages. It remains a-moldering deep in the file cabinet.

I feel quite a bit better about Now Speaks the Devil, though it’s a sophomore effort.The plot uses that old reliable McGuffin—dirty money lost and found. Its initial spark was an article in, as I recall, The San Francisco Chronicle about a young Christian man who found $10,000 cash in a bag in an underground Muni station. After some undoubtedly intense prayer, he wisely decided to turn it over to the police. A month passed, no one showed up to claim the money, and so it became his.

Yes, that used to be the practice, once upon a time. The chap was likely the last ever allowed to reclaim found treasure before the policy was ended in response to the intensifying “War on Drugs.”

My muse immediately fell into “what if” mode. Might the young man be a fool in telling the whole world about his windfall? That whole world includes the money’s original owners. To my evil mind, he’d hung a “shoot me” sign around his neck.

I know if I were a certain kind of bad guy, I’d want that money back. And I’d stop at nothing to get it.

And so I set to work. The initial title was The Way.

THE VERY—VERY—BAD

One of my favorite Hitchcock truisms is “the better the villain, the better the movie.”

The villain of this piece was all saddled up to ride. He’d been already lurking the alleys of my brain since the late 1960s. Some regular visitors to this space and those who know me elsewhere, will already know who he is.

Namely, this guy.

Yup. That guy.

Sadly, by the mid-1980s, Lee Van Cleef’s thirty-year career was in its final fade. The great movie villain had not aged well and his films of the last ten years or so ranged from mediocre to unwatchable. I’d tired of seeing him in bad movies and had about given up.

Still, he remained an enormously charismatic, ideal bad guy. Now the Speaks the Devil was, in great part, an attempt to lift him from obscurity. It would be kind the kind of movie he should have been in: a sophisticated, solid thriller. He would have something better than decent to leave behind, a farewell worthy of John Wayne’s in The Shootist. A great movie? Maybe not. Just good. Most of the time, that’s good enough.

It might well have worked out that way, too. I named my villain Thornton and all his scenes are first draft, with only minor editing over the years.

Whatever else readers thought, everyone who read this loved to hate Thornton. I bet you will, too. He’s an avatar for movie villains everywhere.

THE INNOCENT

While I had my antagonist from the first keystroke, the protagonist, the mouse in this ruthless cat-and-mouse game, was struggle and nightmare from start to finish.

The young man in the original news article was, I recall, an Evangelical. My acquaintance with religion was about nil, though I admired traditional Christianity from a distance for its ritual and music. Nevertheless, my consciousness was mired in a swampy nihilism where all faith traditions seemed “the same” to me.

I created a family for this man, the classic stereotype from the 1950s: dad, mom, and two kids. I built them a house in the San Francisco suburb of Daly City. The theme of the necessary loss of innocence seemed to require they live outside of Babylon to make their naiveté credible.

I first named my protagonist “Zeke,” a diminutive of “Ezekiel,” which I plucked at random out of the Old Testament. Robert Redford could’ve played him, someone of wide-eyed and stubborn innocence, a very likable if dangerous naïf. He’s a cousin to Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest and characters in Eric Ambler—the ordinary man over his head in extraordinary circumstances, sometimes through his own fault. Even so, no matter how much he’s a fool, you don’t want anything really bad happen to him.

I tired of “Zeke” after awhile and called him “Buddy” for a time. Knowing little about Christianity, I had a devil of a time figuring out what kind of Christian he was. I visited a few denominations in San Francisco to get some clues, but came away with little. I read books by Jerry Falwell and Dinesh D’Souza in an attempt to see the world through his eyes.

There was also the problem with the money. By the time I started writing Now Speaks the Devil, Finders Keepers policy had ended. Now “Buddy” would have to keep the money and keep it a secret. This was a positive development. Now the story moved faster.

Further, as the members of the workshop I attended (conducted by James N. “Not the Author of A Million Little Pieces” Frey) pointed out, $10,000 was not enough money. The stakes would have to be raised. Ten thousand ballooned to two million.

In my first drafts, “Buddy” was a stiff-necked barking Fundamentalist. This did not go over well at all—rightly so. Readers were cheering too much for Thornton.

Though the criticism was right, I resisted it strongly, not just because I hated the Fundies (who were reaching their peak of national power then), but because I wanted to avoid making him a wan goody-two shoes. If I took that aspect out of him, I’d have to replace it with something else. What, I had no idea.

There were also tone problems. I was blanketed by the angry shadow of Sam Peckinpah at the time, giving the script a grim punchy tone that clashed badly with the inherent dark humor of the situation and my own strong comic instincts.

At the same time, I didn’t want a broad slapstick comedy. (That I’d take care of with Whackers.) Combining comedy with suspense requires careful stirring. Too much intensity in the suspense kills the humor while too much humor—or arch Po-mo campiness—can kill suspense. Young Frankenstein is hilarious, but it’s neither scary nor suspenseful. And Sam Peckinpah had only a minor touch for humor.

THE UGLY TIME

During the mid-1980s, feces started hitting my fan (some of it thrown by me). I became essentially homeless, sleeping on couches, living in hotels. “I get you,” one acquaintance put it. “Can’t cross the street without getting intercoursed.”

I wrote little during this time. Still I kept nudging at The Way (a title I didn’t like, and I bet you don’t either). At one point, I lost an entire draft off a large floppy disk. I was in another writer’s group, one I didn’t fit in with. (I have “fitting in” issues, as you may notice.)

One thing the group didn’t like about “Buddy” was his “weakness and ineffectuality.” He wasn’t “hero” enough. He had no weapons of his own with which fight Thornton, though I’d woven in a couple of supporting characters as allies (and who still remain, rough and charming). I was urged to refashion “Buddy” into an ex-Green Beret, armed with martial arts and automatic weapons: A Schwarzenegger vehicle in other words. Maybe they could attach Stallone. And then….

They’d nailed the problem, but not the solution. I could not imagine any war veteran acting so naively. And if he wasn’t naïve, then he’d be a criminal himself. By this point, my central theme—the loss of innocence—was pretty well baked in. Turning Buddy into an action toy would lead to an entirely different movie, a standard good vs. evil flick, rather than the good and evil story I wanted to tell, a very different proposition and a movie I wouldn’t be particularly interested in seeing, much less writing.

Finally, an idea bubbled up, inspiration unknown: What if “Buddy” were an amateur magician and toy shop proprietor? Now he’d have some skills and weapons to use against Thornton. Unconventional weapons, sure, but weapons just the same, clever ones, that reflected his character. That one decision further inspired a research visit to a Great America Park, near San Jose. There, I found my “Mt. Rushmore” climax.

One more Hitchcock truism to keep in mind: Imagination is more important than logic.

I was also finding the right tone between humor and serious suspense. The theme deepened and clarified, this story of a man clinging to childhood innocence far past the borders of wisdom. He was a character out of 1950s sitcoms, such as Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet or My Three Sons, living a blinkered life, siloed off from the rest of the world, fighting against the stream of time.

From that last show listed above, I lifted a new name for my protagonist: Chip.

CALM SEAS, QUIET HARBOR

In late 1990, I landed safely in an apartment in the Haight. Life settled down. I bought my first computer (using Wordstar). I sent a draft of the script to former magician, now noted stage hypnotist, John-Ivan Palmer for some tips on stage magic.

One day I was kicking around my desk, searching for a new title. I disliked The Way for that weak consonant and lack of relevance. My thoughts were also wandering around Thornton. I found it unnerving that such an evil man seemed to also to be some weird moral force—as though I were “giving the devil his due.”

… The Devil’s Due . . . now there’s a title! A brief search revealed it had been used only once, in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Titles are not copyrightable and there was remote chance of confusing the marketplace.

The Devil’s Due: not just a good title, but a great title—neatly alliterative, three words that said everything about this script.

If only I could have kept it….

ENTER THE ACTORS

One of my roommates at the time was a San Francisco actor named Michael Anduz. He loved the script, calling it “European” in outlook. He had a point: The script is ironic, humorous, and unsentimental, expressing, I think, a rather stern morality.

Michael was eager to play Thornton. He brought in a colleague, Claudia Rosa, and together they also acted out a couple of scenes with Chip and Ruth, his wife. It kept getting better.

Finally, Michael and Claudia talked me into having a bunch of actors from their theatrical troupe over to read it through. (I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve forgotten the troupe’s name. Michael and Claudia, if you read this….). The reading was a banging success—readers and audience gasped and shuddered; they laughed, they booed Thornton and cheered and applauded when he met his spectacular end. Grins all around.

At least, I had the blueprint for a good movie.

TO THE MARKETPLACE

And so, I sent The Devil’s Due out across the street, to the screenwriting marketplace, sending many dozens of query letters to agents, producers, and workshops, using the following high-concept pitch:

“The Most Naïve Man in the World finds $2 million in drug money in his garbage can. The Most Evil Bad Guy in the Universe wants it back. Or: Ozzie Nelson meets Alfred Hitchcock and Sergio Leone!”

Letters and scripts poured out, rejections poured back in. Many of the agents and other readers—a couple of them high up the ladder—enjoyed it, but as with much of my work, criticism ran the gamut: I was either standing up or sitting down too much; or turning left or turning right. For some, it wasn’t “political” enough. For others too “political.” And some of course, wanted an easy “good vs. evil” movie, not a cautionary moral tale.

Finally, though, like all my work, no matter how carefully crafted and pitched, The Devil’s Due failed to smell of money. And without that, where Hollywood’s concerned, ya got nothin’.

In that matter, I was as innocent as Chip. The days of producing a movie just because it would be good and provide satisfaction to its producers and a smart decent-sized audience, had long gone. (As one producer, recently quoted in The New Yorker, put it, “Don’t send me anything good.”) “Little thrillers” like this are far beyond the capacity of the giants in Hollywood nowadays, with no improvement in sight.

I kept writing screenplays through the 1990s. They mostly got better. But I grew older, too old to be taken seriously by the mighty and youth-obsessed. Unfair, unjust, unwise, unartistic. But that’s how it is.

THE DEVIL IN SUNLIGHT

The Devil’s Due slept in the drawer for over twenty years. Now, thanks to the revolution in publishing, I can put it in the spotlight for you, at least as an e-book.

As with the last two scripts I published, Whackers and The Uglies, I am, once again, ruining my Hollywood career!

What Hollywood career? I was old news a dozen years ago and they don’t read old news down south. From my view, Hollywood has become so Stalinist, agents have to fill out a release to read a menu. They sure won’t download an independently published script.

It will never be bought, never be produced, never light up a darkened theater or living room; just the inside of your head. This is a good thing actually, in that it enables me to break away a little bit from standard screenwriting rules to make it more readable for you non-screenwriting folks.

One unwanted change was forced upon me—the title. In 2015, a minus-budget horror movie called The Devil’s Due escaped to theaters. (One of those movies where, if they paid me to see it, I’d buy a ticket to another movie instead.)

Though that Devil sank like a stone, I took no chances. I’ve had severe problems with The Uglies being confused with a popular series of dystopian YA novels with nearly the same title by Scott Westerfield. With an assist from my wife, Elizabeth, I found a new title: Now Speaks the Devil, a good one (but Lord, I miss the old one!)

All of the original cast who acted out the movie on the screen of my skull have either passed on or aged now. Mr. Van Cleef and the great Alan Rickman are gone; and Jack Nicholson’s a little long-toothed. Right now, that brand of easy confident villainy, whose ancestry also includes Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains and Zachery Scott, seems out of fashion. One current actor who could capture Thornton’s fatal glamour and power is Hugh Laurie. I like to think actors would be lining up around the block to audition to play Thornton.

For Chip—a more challenging role—the dream of Robert Redford or Rick Moranis has also gone gray. Matt Damon, or someone like him, bouncing with youthful charm and breathless innocence, would do a great job.

In the years since, my outlook on life has changed a bit. Even so, Now Speaks the Devil still glows and sparkles, bristling with noirish charm and hair-raising thrills. It deserves the sharp-eyed audience of sophisticated thriller fans I’m always aiming for.

Whatever the “issues” in this sophomore effort, you’ll have a good time (even if it is a screenplay). It’s not perfect, but perfection is a mug’s game anyway. As Chip Adams himself has to learn.

And now, it’s time for the Devil to speak.

Copyright 2016 by Thomas Burchfield

Cover of Now Speaks the Devil by Cathi Stevenson/Bookcover Express; images by Adobe

Photo of Lee Van Cleef taken from ign.com.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up, will be published by Ambler House later this Fall 2016. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. Burchfield is also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, and Now Speaks the Devil (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon and other online retailers. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. Another script, Dracula: King of Nightmares, inspired by the Bram Stoker classic, will also be out later this year. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and enjoys a few beers at his neighborhood tavern. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.