We've been talking a lot about respecting (or not) Chandler's
source material for movies. Well, Chandler himself adapted a
couple works for the screen.
As for the notion that only someone who respects an author
and his work should work on adapting him, here's Chandler on
the author of Double Indemnity, which he adapted with Billy
Wilder:
"But James Cain -- faugh! Everything he touches smells like a
billy goat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif,
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. Nothing
hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with the
smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of
slops at the back door. . . . Hemingway with his eternal
sleeping bag got to be pretty damn tiresome, but at least
Hemingway sees it all, not just the flies on a garbage can."
(p. 23, letter from 10/22/42, all quotes taken from F.
McShane (ed.), Selected Letter of Raymond Chandler)
While that may make me want to read Cain, Chandler clearly
didn't mean it as an endorsement. And he continued in this
estimation, even while adapting Cain:
"What you said about me and Cain is very nice. It has always
irritated me to be compared with Cain. My publisher thought
it was a smart idea because he had a great success with The
Postman Always Rings Twice, but whatever I have or lack as a
writer I'm not in the least like Cain. Cain is a writer of
the faux naif type, which I particularly dislike."
(p. 26, 1/26/44)
A month and a half later, Chancler wrote Cain a polite letter
thanking him for an inscribed copy of a novel (I'm assuming
Double Indemnity, since they discuss the already completed,
but not yet released adaptation). In the letter, Chandler
discusses how Cain's dialogue seems natural on the page, but
not when spoken aloud. (p. 27-28, 3/20/44)
Ten years later, Chandler is still bashing Cain:
"Some crazy idiot at Little Brown sent me a book called Freak
Show. I haven't the slightest intention of reading it nor
have I the faintest idea why they published it. So it may
easily be a bestseller. I would say the guy might be a road
show James Cain except that James Cain is a road show James
Cain." (p. 363, 5/6/54)
Pretty clear that Chandler did not respect the author or the
work he was adapting. Made a pretty great movie, though, one
even Cain thought improved upon his novel.
Most of Chandler's correspondence on Strangers on a Train
seems to be concerned with money and how he was not paid for
a week he had food poisoning. However, he does make one
passing reference to Patricia Highsmith's novel in his
collected letters:
"Even if my script was not as perfect as it might have been
with more discussion of knotty points, he got it pretty
cheap, considering how little there was to go on. The book
had one idea, and that was all."
(p. 224, 9/28/50)
And a letter about writing the screenplay strongly implies he
did not think much of the thriller genre, in general:
"For the most part the work is boring, unreal, and I have no
feeling that it is the kind of thing I can do better than
anybody else. Suspense as an absolute quality has never
seemed to me very important. At best it is a secondary
growth, and at worst an attempt to make something out of
nothing." (p. 222, 9/13/50)
There are a number of letters of complaint about Hitchcock's
(even one to the director himself) being threatened by
Chandler's distinctive style, ignoring the plausbility the
author had tried to inject into the project in order to make
a "Hitchcock film." Chandler considered having his
screenwriting credit withdrawn, due to his script's
being
"castrated."
As for his own work in Hollywood, Chandler worked on a screen
treatment of The Lady in the Lake:
"Am working on a screen treatment of The Lady in the Lake for
MGM. It bores me stiff. The last time I'll ever do a
screenplay of a book I wrote myself. Just turning over dry
bones." (p. 53, 8/18/45)
Chandler begged off the project, leaving it to someone else
to adapt him.
And Chandler was well familiar with Hollywood changing his
endings. He was even complicit in it. The story of his work
on The Blue Dahlia is well know, how he had to entirely
change the ending of his original screenplay, writing a
ridiculous trick-shooting scene to change whodunnit. Yes, he
may have grumbled about it, but he did it.
Mark
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