Literary interlude, with illustrations and commentary

    That thirty days had taught the punk a lesson. It had made him feel badly, costing Violet all that money. Every time she'd had enough saved to divorce the Old Man she'd have to spend it putting in the fix for him. He'd brooded about it the whole thirty days, and made up his mind that the first thing he'd do when he got out would be to steal the divorce money for her.

    He'd picked on Gold's Department Store when a goodly crowd was there.

    Sparrow had been stealing odds and ends off Gold's counters since he was in short pants. He knew the only gun in the store was an ancient cow pistol carried by the old man who runs the freight elevator. The elevator man is even older than old Gold; all he does is lean against the shaft, half asleep all day. It's like a pension.

    Sparrow had felt that if he could get the gun off the old man without getting himself shot straight through the head the rest should be fairly easy. He began drinking on the notion next door to Gold's, and, as the afternoon wore on, the more natural the notion had appeared. He wasn't able to understand why he hadn't thought of it long before. 

    But when he'd shuffled out of the bar and seen how swiftly the long street was darkening, he'd gone cold sober with the recollection of his recent thirty-day stretch and had to return, in a hurry, to the bar.

    He'd gotten drunk all over again on Vi's credit, which was good so long as Stash held down his icehouse job. But by nine o'clock the credit gave out and he'd been brooding on the idea so long he couldn't back out. To falter would have been to reneg on Frankie as well as on Violet, he felt. Both had done so much for him—and what had he ever done for either? Nothing. Not a thing. He never did anything for his friends but use up their credit and get them in trouble. He'd do something big for them all. Right now.

    So shuffled, cap yanked low, straight down the middle aisle—Ladies' Home and Fancy Footwear—to the freight elevator where the ancient house dick lounged in dreams of long-lost daily doubles. Sparrow shoved his combination flashlight pencil into the small of the old man's back, grabbed the gun, shoved him into the lift and snarled just like Edward G. Robinson, "Into the basement wit' the rest of the rats—copper."

    His glasses had clouded up, but he heard the door of the lift crash shut and the cables whining downward and the dozen-odd customers began turning slowly toward him like people in a slow-motion movie. In that moment he saw himself through all their eyes: a cardboard cowboy in horn-rimmed spectacles waving an oversized cow gun. He heard his own shrill voice carried away down endless nylon aisles on the scudding of the overhead fans.

    "Face the waw-awls, everybody!"

    He saw them turning, by ones and twos, old Gold with a steel washboard under his arm and the cashier's face white as a split apple against the parched black line of her brows just as she took a header and he hollered, "Leave her lay! She oney fainted!"

—Nelson Algren, The Man With The Golden Arm, 1947

A thought that frequently passes through my mind as I'm reading this: why on earth would anybody think to make a film out of it? Really. Because, as compelling as its characters are, it's not as if the text really runs on what you'd call narrative drive/momentum. It would hardly be inapt, based on this novel and on the short stories in The Neon Wilderness, to call Algren the James Joyce of the underbelly of Chicago. And of course by "James Joyce" I mean the James Joyce of Dubliners, not the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake or even the James Joyce of Ulysses. Yes, The Man With The Golden Arm has a story, and a fairly horrific and tragic one, but it's not really in so much of a hurry about telling it; it's more about presenting these desperate characters, showing their various enactments of desperation, trying to pull some meaning out of the whole sad, sorry mess they're all in. And there is something about the way Algren portrays his characters—who, as you see from the above passage, are very explicitly shaped in parts by the popular culture of their time—and tells their various stories, that actively resists the urge to filter the stuff into cinema. Still. The book was a "scandalous" best seller. A good many ambitious actors saw the role of a lifetime, or at the very least an Oscar nomination, in the role of Frankie Machine. A film was inevitable.

As a solid Preminger man, I cannot be accused of having any axe to grind when I state that there isn't a single solitary frame of his 1955 film of The Man With The Golden Arm that in any way captures the atmosphere of the Algren book. Marilyn Ferdinand, a very perceptive and lively film blogger who has a little bit of a truculent streak that can come up when you least expect it, is offended by the film version to the very depths of her Chicago soul; "Why I Will Never Call The Preminger Abomination By Its 'Title,'" she subtitles a 2008 post on the subject. it's not just the poor set design or the fact that Preminger and writers Walter Newman and Lewis Meltzer changed the story from a harrowing tragedy to one of redemption; it has to do with Preminger's feel, or lack thereof, for the material at hand. As Algren noted, a little bitterly (he was long haunted by what he considered the cinematic betrayal of his work): "...[T]he life of the common man has never filtered into Otto's brain and emotions; or into his talent such as he has. The book dealt with life at the bottom. Otto has never, not for so much as a single day, had any experience except that of life at the top."

There's something to that. Especially when you look at the second film Preminger made after Arm, an adaptation of Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse, and note the sheer seeming effortlessness with which that film immediately evokes the world of the privileged European leisure class. For Arm, Preminger had to invent a world of which he had no real knowledge. He was not really up to the task.

And yet. There are certain aspect of the film that are exactly on target with respect to the book. Never, as I said, as far as atmosphere is concerned. But Preminger's casting of Arnold Stang as Frankie Machine's hapless "punk" cohort Sparrow, and the way costume supervisor Mary Ann Nyberg dresses Stang, down to those tortoise-shell spectacles; Stang seems to step straight out of the book.

 

It is possible, reading Arm, not to picture Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, and Kim Novak as you seep up the actions and thoughts of Frankie Machine, Zosh, and Molly. (In the book, the last of these characters has black hair and is for all intents and purposes still a teenager, which helps.) It is not possible to read of Sparrow and not think of Arnold Stang. 

Interesting, too, that the book and the film are now so culturally intertwined that the front cover of a "50th Anniversary Critical Edition"  of Arm has a cover taken from Saul Bass's legendary opening title designs for the film.   Not something that Algren would likely be pleased by. 

Does all this mean that Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm is a bad film? It's not a personal favorite of mine, but Chris Fujiwara mounts a typically complex, cogent positive account of it in his critical biography of Preminger, The World And Its Double; reading some of its passages, you'd be inclined to believe that the film gets closer to the marrow of Algren's vision than it actually does, at least by my own lights: "Throughout the film, the drama is interiorized, psychological, played out seemingly among the mental images of beings and things (the second shot in the film, a close-up from inside Antek's of Frankie peering through the window, already alerts us to the privileged emphasis that Frankie's subjective experience will receive throughout). Drawn to ever smaller spaces, the film seals itself off (as Schwiefka's marathon poker game seals itself from the sunlight) locks itself in (as Frankie has himself locked in Molly's bedroom when he tries to kick his habit). Camera movement in The Man With The Golden Arm tends to define subjective mental states rather than explore the contours and surfaces of an outer world, and it creates a suffocating atmosphere[...]"

I find the sets and the lighting too flat to really get there in terms of suffocation. I also feel that the atmosphere Algren goes for and get is richer; both suffocating and expansive. I understand—indeed, most of the time in my critical practice I insist—that a book and the film upon which it's based be taken and assessed as two entirely discrete objects. But I have to admit that reading Algren has kind of spoiled me for Preminger.

Comments

[James Keepnews]

No doubt you read Mike Newirth's essay on Algren in Vol. II, Issue #1 of our beloved and prodigally returned/beloved The Baffler. Chicago's premier prose psychogeographer -- the comparison to Joyce is very apt -- he certainly died unloved by that city (and just like Kerouac, on Long Island, of all indignities) and the post-Beat literary scene generally. Never did read The Man With The Golden Arm but that excerpt feels like it came more out of Burrough's Junkie than Preminger, much less anything else off the UA lot.

[MovieMan0283]

When I saw the topic I was going to mention Marilyn's essay, but I see that's what you had in mind all along. Is Preminger ever considered a "moral" director - not in terms of value judgements, but in terms of compassionate sympathy with his characters? I have to ask because there's too many of his films I've not seen (and those that do attempt this sort of identification/pity, like Bonjour tristesse, didn't really work for me). But when posing this question I always think of Anatomy of a Murder, which plays rape for yuks in a vaguely unsettling way which no one ever seems to comment on. Preminger, in my limited experience, strikes me as a filmmaker more interested in surface presentation (which has its virtues, don't get me wrong) than what's going on inside.

[Tom Russell]

I don't know if ANATOMY played the rape for "yuks". Certainly, the film is not without its moments of humour-- the delicate matter of what to call women's undergarments being a prime example-- and certainly pushed the envelope quite a bit, but I wouldn't put in the same camp as, say, the BILLY JACK car-by-the-lake scene (which definitely pays the attempted assault for laughs AT THE WOULD-BE VICTIM'S EXPENSE) and MOTHER, JUGS, AND SPEED.

My experience with Preminger is pretty limited as well, but those I've seen have never really lacked for sympathy or empathy in my opinion. ADVISE AND CONSENT oozes with empathy, I think, for both its former communist and its homosexual senator; it doesn't make villains out of either, but presents them as men compromised by, and regretting, their pasts.

[Fuzzy Bastard]

"It is not possible to read of Sparrow and not think of Arnold Stang. "

Put me in mind of HEART OF DARKNESS. I can read that novella and not picture Brando as Kurtz, or the narrator as Martin Sheen. But I cannot read about "the little Russian" and not picture Hopper (or at least Piglet-as-Hopper). One of the many cases where a Hollywood film gets the marginalia more right than the main text.

[Glenn Kenny]

MovieMan: I, too, am gonna have to take exception to the idea that "Anatomy" trivializes rape and/or plays it for "yuks." Yes, the sidebar discussion of what to call "panties" is one of the broadest bits in all of Preminger, but it's also one of the most self-reflexive, spoofing the prudishness of the Breen Office and nudging the audience a little. From that point on, the issues at hand are treated with the seriousness due them. (It may not be material to your perspective, MM, but the film's punchline—spoiler alert—could be said to cast doubt on the idea that there was even a rape in the first place.) Look at the film again (it's always worth revisiting) and get back to me. I really don't know where else in the film to look for what you're objecting to.

As for your other observations: yes, I think it was Andrew Sarris who spoke of Preminger and his camera as masters of objectivity. Fujiwara's reading of "Man" is somewhat at odds with that. Subject for further research, for sure.

[joel_gordon]

I'm not sure if the dialogue trivializes rape, but the camera's empathy for Remick certainly doesn't. In particular, her cross-examination brilliantly puts the viewer into a vulnerable, submissive position against Scott's prosecutor. The way that Scott knowingly blocks her view of Stewart, and the way that we, the viewer, can barely see Stewart pop up from behind Scott to make his objections, is deeply unsettling. Sarris is mostly right about Preminger, but there's nothing "objective" about that cross-examination at all.

[Victor Morton]

Idle thought ... would Lana Turner have worked in ANATOMY OF A MURDER, or would she have come across as too sexy?

Or to be more precise, would her iconography as a sex goddess tilted the issue of the wife's behavior and her husband's view of her into "overdetermined" territory. I think Lee Remick, who's more "girl next door"-looking but not unable to play up the lady of at-least-the-late-afternoon act, is the perfect balance.

Felix culpa.

[jbryant]

I think the film endorses the view of the Judge, who gives the court spectators a moment to get the giggles about the panties out of their system, because there's nothing funny about case.