Today and tomorrow I am featuring an encore of my Joan Crawford essays in honor of the new Todd Haynes HBO version of Mildred Pierce: My unplanned and diverting Joan Crawford essays ends here with my unexpected appointment with destiny (and a large bus) that drops me in front of Joan Crawford's home used in "Mildred Pierce". This stupifying adventure of coincidence and prayers never made being answered started when a friend invited me today onto the James M. Cain - Birth of Noir Tour thru Cain's haunted world he wrote about in the three seminal Noir classics set in La Ciudad de Los Angeles (L.A.'s real name: The city of fallen angels): "Double Indemnity", "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "Mildred Pierce".Leaving Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena - hosted by experienced and passionate urban archeologists Kim Cooper and husband Richard Schave of Esotouric - our bus toured began on the grimy streets of downtown L.A. skid row where many a Cain character got his bearings and start in L.A. after getting off the bus. John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice starts here, working at the produce mart where the many weathered structures are the same 60 odd years after Cain first described them and Hollywood filmed there.
From there it was up Normandie and into Hollywood of the 1940s and Walter Huff's apartment building that still remarkably looks the same as it did in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. It was there Phyllis Nirdlinger (Barbara Stanwyck) and Huff (Fred MacMurray) seal their fate and make plans to kill Nirdlinger's husband.
I found out that streets I use as shortcuts through Atwater were the actual streets where Huff and Nirdlinger murdered their victim while driving to the train station. I was surprised when I discovered the untouched Glendale Train Station lurking on a remote cul de sac that I pass almost every day. It was here where Huff carried out "the fake" accidental death of Mr. Nirdlinger's fall from a moving train. We were in Mildred Pierce territory as well, so after eating pie we headed to the actual house used for the exterior scenes on a neighboring street (pictured at top).
No Noir tour can be complete without a visit to the morgue to identify the dead, and this unique tour climaxed with a visit to the Disneyland of Death: Forest Lawn of Glendale. It's the proud resting place for many a Noir contributor, both real and imagined, but today we paid our respects to Mildred Pierce Director Michael Curtiz, Cinematographer Ernest Haller, and the great producer Jerry Wald. Themed death parks offer us the solace that the next haunted world is well organized and a planned community in which all is forgotten, there are no more scores to settle, the dark night of our wretched mortality has passed quite successfully, and at the end you're given a new suit that's fresh and unwrinkled so you can begin again, but this time remember to be nice to everyone.
James Mallahan Cain never like being considered one of the great Noir writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: "I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim. 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." (preface to Double Indemnity)
Born to Irish Catholic parents with a love of opera (instilled from his mother), James M. Cain is probably the one editor of The New Yorker who couldn't wait to ditch the gig and New York for Hollywood, which he did in the late 1930s. The 12 years in Hollywood produced a total of 7 novels, including the 3 mentioned here that are considered the best classic Noir writing of our time. His prose gave Billy Wilder his greatest film (Double Indemnity), Lana Turner her best role (Postman Always Rings Twice), and Joan Crawford her greatest triumph and an Oscar (Mildred Pierce). To say his writing defined our Noir haunted post-war world would be an understatement.
While Cooper and Schave keep the tour lively and moving, there are serious mentions of literary history such as Cain's noir invention "The Love Rack", the plot device of 2 lovers who fall for each other while planning and executing a murder. For me having been raised in the eclipse of James M. Cain's haunted world of grifters, murderers, women trying to climb ahead in a man's world, and decent men who fall prey to greed and avarice while under the spell of beguling dames, I felt their ghosts infecting me thru the dry wind that blew across me today, reminding me of the dust that is left when all ends and everyone is equal again six feet under the ground.
This surprisingly intelligent and extremely entertaining tour ended with a profound reading from the letters of German Opera Singer Lotte Lehman, who was a contemporary of Cain's mother Rose. It is a perfect metaphor for what is Noir, what is Los Angeles- the city of angels, and what is this haunted world we all inhabit in this ephemeral horizon: "I must say I prefer soaring between Heaven and Hell, between great exultations and deep disappointments. That alone can make life vital. It is far better to suffer under self-reproaches (and) to face one's own inadequacies clearly, and then to feel it really happened today- that was absolutely as I wanted to say and convey it! These climaxes of satisfaction with oneself are so rare and dearly paid for through a thousand curses of one's own judgement. Yet I would ten times prefer such a life to the contentment of the unambitious."
Kim Cooper took the tour pictures. Esotouric offers several tours of haunted L.A. which I suggest anyone who's interested in L.A. and its history check out. A Nathanael West tour is in the works which HauntedWorlds is especially looking forward to.
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