More Graphic Noir

 

Walk on the Wild Side (1961) A Transitional Depression Noir / Quasi Road Film

Here's another Noir that isn't remotely like the novel its based on. 

Yea, it's got the characters names, from Nelson Algren's novel and various out of chronological order sequences, and that's about it. Another case where you could remake the film follow the actual plot and have a whole new film or even a miniseries, the novel comes in at 346 pages. 

Directed by  Edward Dmytryk (Murder My Sweet, Crossfire, The Sniper, also The Carpetbaggers, Bluebeard). 

The screen play was written by John Fante, himself a novelist with a Bunker Hill based classic "Ask The Dust" and Edmund Morris, with additional input from Raphael Hayes, and Ben Hecht. Based on Nelson Algren 1956 novel "A Walk on the Wild Side." 

The Cinematography was by Joseph MacDonald (Shock, Behind Green Lights, The Dark Corner, My Darling Clementine, Panic In The Streets, Pickup on South Street). Music by the great Elmer Bernstein.

Laurence Harvey as Dove Linkhorn

The film stars, Laurence Harvey (The Manchurian Candidate, Of Human Bondage) as Dove Linkhorn, Capucine (North To Alaska, The Pink Panther) as Hallie, Jane Fonda (Barbarella, Klute) as Kitty Twist, Anne Baxter (The Blue Gardenia, The Come On, The Outcasts of Poker Flat) as Teresina Vidaverri, Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity, Sorry Wrong Number, and many more) as Jo Courtney, Joanna Moore as Miss Precious, Richard Rust (Underworld USA) as Oliver the pimp, Karl Swenson as Schmidt, Don Barry as Bartender / Bouncer Dockery, Juanita Moore as Mama, John Anderson as Preacher, and Ken Lynch as Frank Bonito a customer "john" of Hallie's.

Jane Fonda as Kitty Twist

Anne Baxter as Teresina

Barbara Stanwyck as Jo

Capucine as Hallie

Joanna Moore as Miss Precious

Richard Rust as Oliver

The film begins with a very cool black cat credit sequence of a black cat on the prowl. The sequence has a great piece to accompany it by Leonard Bernstein. 

Opening Sequence....

We see a stark desolate highway. We see a man, Dove Linkhorn, walking towards us, wearing a cowboy hat jean jacket and jeans. Superimposed we see "Texas The Early Thirties" The Depression.

He's trying to hitch a ride. We segue to early evening. Dove spots a concrete culvert construction ditch strewn with unlaid sections beckoning shelter for the night. He drops down the embankment and pokes around the pipes calling "hello." 

He gets a female answer telling him basically to get lost. Out of a culvert pops Kitty Twist a transient from Kentucky.

Dove Linkhorn: What are you so mad about?

Kitty Twist: I'm cold and I'm hungry and a million miles from nowhere and in the middle of a wild dream - you wake me up.

It's sort of a cute meet. Eventually Kitty invites Dove into her pipe telling him she plugged up one end to stop drafts. 

Kitty Twist: You don't look like someone who'd disadvantage a girl. Come on, I don't bite.

In the morning they find out that they are both headed for New Orleans.

Kitty Twist: Where you headed for, Dove Linkhorn?

Dove Linkhorn: New Orleans.

Kitty Twist: Well, strike me blind. So am I. Oh, I am fed up with this great big, undone hunk of state. I'm going to New Orleans. They better nail it down when I arrive.

They hop an open boxcar in a freight drag as it is slowing climbing a grade. Kitty and Dove trade their life stories.  

Kitty Twist: I got a Ma, up in Kentucky. Like as not she's drunk herself to death by now.

Dove Linkhorn: Kind of bad, having a Ma like that.

Kitty Twist: Even if it stinks, it's home.

Later that day they have to jump from the freight as it slows down entering Beaumont, Texas, and then have to go back to hitching on the highway. Kitty stops a truck, but when the driver balks at taking Dove, Kitty tells the driver that he's her sick brother. They get to ride in the back. 

While rolling down the road Kitty tries to put some moves on Dove. 

Dove Linkhorn: I like you, Kitty, but I don't feel like foolin'.

Kitty Twist: Come here, and I'll make you feel like foolin'.

"I'll make you feel like foolin'"

Here is where Dove tells her that he's heading to New Orleans to find his lost love Hallie. We also find out that the reason he stayed in Texas and had not gone with Hallie, was to take care of his dying father for three years. 

Dove Linkhorn: I ain't seen her in three years. I'll never forget the first time I met her. We went swimming together. It was at night. The way she moved in the water, like a kind of a white flash. It was then I kissed her for the very first time. She gave me something I'd never known before. Something I ain't experienced since. Afterwards, in the moonlight, we danced like we was celebrating a miracle. A crazy kind of dancing. And then we sang and shouted like it wasn't real. As if it was in another world. Sometimes I think it never really happened to us.

That night the truck diver stops and drops off Kitty and Dove at a small roadside combo filling station / lunch counter that also has roadside cabins. It's within walking distance of New Orleans, he explains that they might run into trouble at the inspection station up ahead if he's carrying passengers. 

The establishment is called Teresina's. Kitty wants to keep walking but Dove tells her that he can't walk on an empty stomach, besides he smells good Texas chili cooking.

Inside they meet Teresina the proprietress. They order chili and coffee. Kitty gets jealous when Dove uses Spanish words when ordering the chili, asking him "what part of Texas you from, Mexico?"

                                            "What part of Texas you from, Mexico?"

While Kitty is eating, Teresina pulls a wad of cash out of the till. As she heads to the back rooms with the money, she stops to put on some Mexican music, making Kitty even more angry. 

When Teresina returns, Kitty fakes getting cramps from Teresina's cooking. Teresina offers Kitty her bed to lay down on, and Dove and Teresina help her to the room. Then , when Teresina and Dove go back out to the lunchroom Kitty hops up out of bed and starts searching around for the money. 

Meanwhile Teresina and Dove are outside servicing a car. Teresina pumping gas while Dove washes the windows. 

When they come back in a now fully recovered Kitty's ready to leave, telling Link to settle up with Teresina. 

When Teresina tells them it's 85¢, Kitty blows a fuse saying the food gave her cramps. Insulted, Teresina rips up the ticket and tells them to get out.

"Get out."

Outside and while walking down the road Kitty shows Dove a rosary she stole from Teresina. Dove upset with Kitty tells her he's done with her and brings back the rosary to Teresina. 

Back in the lunch counter. Teresina and Dove are drinking coffee.

Teresina Vidaverri: What is your religion?

Dove Linkhorn: My religion? It's a girl. Weighs about 119 pounds and gray eyes. She's French.

Dove explains to Teresina about trying to find his lost love Hallie, Teresina looks to see if she is listed in the New Orleans phone book. No Luck. She then tells Dove that he should run an ad in the personals and see if she sees it. 

When Dove tells Teresina that he'd have no way for her to answer his add, Teresina offers Dove a job with food and lodging in one of her cabins, then he'd have an address and a phone number, and she could use the help.

Here we cut to the French Quarter, New Orleans. It's afternoon and we see a legless man sitting on a four wheeled cart reading the personal ad Dove placed about Hallie by a newsstand. 

Karl Swenson as Schmidt

He buys the paper and goes scooting off down the street to a Creole townhouse with a large center court. There, the man reports to Jo Courtney a business woman that the personal ad is again in the paper.  

Jo leaves her office and heads up a courtyard stair to the second story balcony. She is watched by a handful of chattering women sitting around a table.

Jo walks along the balcony to room where Hallie lays sleeping. It's afternoon. Jo goes about opening curtains and letting sunlight into the room. Hallie laying on her stomach starts to squirm and reluctantly gets up out of bed.

Meanwhile, down in the courtyard an impeccably dressed man named Oliver enters and asks Mama. a black servant, the whereabouts of Miss Precious. Oliver is slipping on kid gloves. At about this point you start to get the impression that there's something a bit weird about this whole set up. 

We soon put two and two together coming up with the fact that Oliver is a pimp, that Jo is a madame and Miss Precious is one of the girls working the brothel. Oliver has heard that Miss Precious held out on a tip and begins to beat her.

Her screams brings Hallie running into the room. She fends off Oliver. She tells him to get out. .

Once Oliver departs, Hallie then sooths Miss Precious and tries to reassure her. Miss Precious wants to leave the house. 

Miss Precious: Hallie, let's get out of this place. Let's leave here.

Hallie: To do what? Where would we go? After three years of this easy life, I don't have energy for anything else.

Hallie then sooths Miss Precious and tries to reassure her.

When Hallie gets back to her room she complains to Jo that it was like beating a sick child. Jo replies that Oliver is important to the business she's running. Hallie threatens to go down to The Doll House one night and take care of Oliver herself. 

Jo responds by saying basically that she wishes that Hallie wouldn't go down to The Doll House at all. Humm, a little foreshadowing subtext right there. Stanwyck does look very butch as Jo. 

Hallie declares that she can't stand that kind of cruelty. Jo says ok she will see to it that he never touches Miss Precious again. Hallie plops down in an easy chair

Jo Courtney: My, we are depressed, aren't we?

Hallie: No, I'm bored. And I've only just gotten up. Maybe I ought to go back to bed.

We cut to Teresina's.

Teresina tells Dove she thinks she'll open the garage and let him fix things make him a partner. 

At about this time the phone rings and it's for Dove. The caller, a woman, lets Dove know that he can find Hallie at 904 Chartres Street in the French Quarter.

Of course Dove is excited and he gets directions from Teresina who knows what is there, but she doesn't tell Dove what he'll find. 

Here we cut to The Doll House during business hours. There's a jazz band playing and customers and prostitutes mingling. We watch Hallie come down to the main parlor to meet one of her regulars Frank Bonito.

Don 'Red' Barry as Dockery

Ken Lynch as Frank Bonito

The next day Dove heads into New Orleans. 

He finds the address and enters the central courtyard of The Doll House, where he meets Mama who gives him Hallie's room number.

He goes up the stairs and knocks on the door, is told to come in and finds Hallie her back to the door working on a bust of Miss Precious who is posing for her.

When he says hello Hallie, things doesn't quite go as he imagined it would. Miss Precious gets all excited for Hallie but once she excuses herself, Hallie explains to Doug that things aren't the same anymore.

Hallie explains to Dove that when she left Arroyo she went to New York City where she struggled with millions of people to make a living as an artist, until a woman bought one of her paintings. The woman invited her to New Orleans and she went and liked it, and when the woman set her up in this studio apartment she knew she was home. She's basically sub texting to Dove that she's bi-sexual, though Dove is oblivious to it. Of course it goes Noirsville.

The novel is quite different. It's comprised of just three chapters.

Chapter 1 

"Fitz Linkhorn barely managed to make a living pumping out cesspools, but his consuming vocation was "Born Again" preaching from the courthouse steps in 1930 Arroyo, Texas; it was a small, mostly Hispanic, and heavily Catholic town in the Rio Grande Valley. Fitz denounced all sins except drinking; because, being a drunk himself, he made sure he was both eloquently, and tastefully drunk as often as possible. He had two sons, Byron, who was weak and sickly, and Dove.

Dove had no education because his father had not wanted to send him to a school with a Catholic principal (And what else could there have been in Arroyo?). Instead, he was supposed to see movies with Byron to learn about life, but Dove never got to go; his brother did not have the price of a ticket. Dove got his education from the hoboes who hung around the Santa Fe tracks, telling one another what towns, lawmen, jails, and railroad bulls (deputized railroad police), to avoid.

Dove began hanging around the La Fe en Dios chili parlor in the ruins of the Hotel Crockett on the other side of town. The hotel was the place where Fitz had met the mother of his boys. The hotel was closed, but the seldom-visited café was run by Terasina Vidavarri, a wary woman traumatized by her marriage, aged sixteen, with a middle-aged ex-soldier who raped her with a swagger stick on their wedding night. She continued Dove's education by teaching him how to read from two books. One of the books was a children's storybook; the other was about how to write business letters. When he was old enough (to enjoy her teaching); Terasina broadened Dove's education, by her and him becoming lovers.

Byron blackmailed Dove into stealing from the café, and Terasina knew that Dove had taken money out of the cash register. She kicked him out, but not before he raped her. Dove then left Arroyo on a freight train in early 1931. Dove took up with a girl named Kitty Twist, a runaway from a children's home, and saved her life when she was about to fall under the wheels of a train. When they attempted a burglary in Houston, Kitty was caught. Dove got away on a freight to New Orleans. One of the first things he saw in New Orleans was a man cutting the heads off turtles that were to be made into turtle soup and throwing the bodies into a pile. Even with the heads cut off, the bodies tried to climb to the top of the pile. One turtle was able to reach the top of the pile before it slid back to the bottom.

"Dove didn't hesitate. 'I'll take the tarpon soup.' He didn't yet know that there was also room for one more at the bottom." (Wiki)

Quite different from the film, no?, and that is just the first chapter. 

Noirsville

Edward Dmytryk and Joseph MacDonald crafted an interesting and probably quite daring film during the slow disintegration of the Motion Picture Production Code. It flirts with a lot of previous taboo subjects, prostitution, lesbianism, and hint's underage sex. Today it comes off a bit lame since it's still using outdated subtext on themes that aren't so shocking anymore, but it still looks Visually stunning. I've read it's one of the first films with an outed gay character i.e., Stanwyck's Jo. Harvey's believable as Dove a Texas hick, Fonda is great as the teenage delinquent, and Baxter is wonderful as Teresina. 

Capucine as Hallie, is a bit out of place, the film's version of the story has Hallie as the first and only love of Dove who leaves Texas to follow her dream of becoming an artist. She comes off much more sophisticated than what her background is supposed to be.

In the novel Hallie is an ex schoolteacher, who is the star prostitute of Oliver Finnerty's brothel, and she was in love with a ex circus strongman whose legs were cut off by a train. So Hallie in the novel actually morphs into Jo in the film. 

I have the Algren novel ordered and will better be able to compared it to the film in more detail soon. It would be interesting to find out if the lesbianism was all invented by the screenwriters. 

From reading the novels synopsis it would be a real hoot if it ever got remade and actually did followed the novel.

Again, its a Noir visual treat even if it completely screws up the storyline of the novel. For me it rates about 7.5/10 as is.