By William Blick.
My novel is not so much talk about these movies as a story that inhabits their world, as if in the mind of a young spectator – an intelligent adolescent, say, old enough to have a growing awareness of the movies’ frequent unreality and still young enough to be thoroughly beguiled by their fantasies.”
–Geoffrey O’Brien
Geoffrey O’Brien’s most recent work, Arabian Nights of 1934, recreates the Pre-Code Hollywood era from the early 1930s. Pre-Code Hollywood was a tumultuous time wherein there were many taboos and controversial subjects addressed in films. The films may appear crude by others that followed because of technological advances and the progression of cinema as a narrative medium. As the Production Code began being enforced in 1934, filmmakers were forced to make creative and innovative choices to avoid being censored, but at the same time attempt to express themselves. There is no telling what trajectory Hollywood would have followed had there not have been the implementation of the Production Code.
According to O’Brien, the book is “not so much talk about these movies as a story that inhabits their world, as if in the mind of a young spectator – an intelligent adolescent, say, old enough to have a growing awareness of the movies’ frequent unreality and still young enough to be thoroughly beguiled by their fantasies.”
Arabian Nights of 1934 uses the rhythmic pulse of the films and of the bustling time frame to create an atmosphere that is both chaotic and exciting. As we follow the characters and their experience, it is as if they were actually living out these films. The result of the book is an innovative and dynamic approach to creating a narrative.
The book moves at a fast pace and as O’Brien states, “Pre-Code movies are often characterized by speed and brevity. Language was being unleashed in movies for the first time, and there is a sheer pleasure in fast, energetic, slangy talk”. The energy of the “slangy talk” propels the narrative Arabian Nights of 1934, which proves to be a purely feverish and hypnotic experience for all those who let themselves be swept up in the richness of O’Brien’s prose. I was quite mesmerized by the book, and I was fortunate enough to have a candid discussion about O’Brien’s latest work, his thoughts on film specifically related to Pre-Code Hollywood, and the cinema of works adapted from Jim Thompson, of all things. What follows is a series of questions and answers which highlights our discussion.
O’Brien’s knowledge of cinema, particularly film noir, and hardboiled fiction is vast. Jim Thompson is an enigmatic figure that has always captivated me since I first encountered his novel Pop.1280 many years ago. I found the composition of Thompson’s work fascinating. Thompson’s blistering prose, transgressive plot lines, and ultimately his scathing social commentary was something that I had not encountered in any of the other hardboiled writers. Along with O’Brien’s discussion about Arabian Nights of 1934 and Pre-Code Hollywood, I have addressed his book Hardboiled America, and along the same vein of thought, his thoughts on Jim Thompson, especially as they translate into cinematic creations.
O’Brien is a widely published poet, critic, and cultural historian whose books include Hardboiled America (1981), Dream Time (1988), The Phantom Empire (1993), The Times Square Story (1998), The Browser’s Ecstasy (2000), Sonata for Jukeboxes (2004), and Where Did Poetry Come From: Some Early Encounters (2020). He was for many years, editor in chief of The Library of America, and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, Artforum, Film Comment, and other periodicals.
What got you interested in the humanities, particularly poetry and film?
My early interests in literature and theater, in particular, were sparked by my parents’ large home library and by their involvement in theater (my mother was a professional actress and my father maintained a strong involvement in theater while establishing a career in radio). The house was full of books on stage history and Shakespeare, and an array of works by Dickens, Stevenson, Voltaire, H G. Wells, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Aldous Huxley, and many more, along with some anthologies of English poetry. Through the influence of the public library and other family members I developed an interested in mythology and, later, traditional Japanese and Chinese culture. When I was 13 we moved from the suburbs to New York City and I discovered movies initially through the Bleecker Street Cinema, was a few blocks away, soaking up their regular repertory of Eisenstein, Chaplin, Renoir, Kurosawa, De Sica, René Clair, Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, etc.; within a few years we moved uptown and there was the New Yorker with its offerings of Keaton, von Sternberg, Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Godard, Antonioni, and much more, including generous helpings of genre programming devoted to science fiction, gangster films, musicals.
What was the inspiration for Arabian Nights of 1934?
My sense of early 30s American movies as a unique phenomenon crystallized around a double bill of Forty Second Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 at the New Yorker in the early 60s. I was taken by my aunt, whose intense affection for these films also impressed me with a sense of the intimate involvement with movies felt by her and others of her generation. Many years later I devoted a lot of time to watching films from the period, thanks especially to Film Forum, Turner Classic Movies, and the Warner Archive reissues. I wanted to write a book which would not so much talk about these movies as inhabit their world, as if in the mind of a young spectator – an intelligent adolescent, say, old enough to have a growing awareness of the movies’ frequent unreality and still young enough to be thoroughly beguiled by their fantasies. I also wanted to evoke the spirit of an America just before my time, as registered both in these films and in the memories of people I had known who grew up in the era.
You describe two characters in the book as “astral surrogates” of your parents? How true to life is the book?
The characters Dorothy and Aloysius are fictional constructs but they draw on many bits and pieces of things my parents recollected later on, or which were consonant with my sense of what their lives had been like then.
The book moves through different genres and, finally, through different historical moments, gradually emerging from the alternate world of movies into the worlds of movie-making and movie-watching, as if finally coming out of the theater after a day at the pictures.”
How would you classify your style? It moves at a frantic pace. Were you trying to simulate the tumultuous times of those films?
Pre-Code movies are often characterized by speed and brevity. Language was being unleashed in movies for the first time, and there is a sheer pleasure in fast, energetic, slangy talk. The book contains a great deal of language of the period; I wanted it to be among other things a sort of lexicon of catchphrases, many of which lingered in the speech of adults I knew as a child. It’s a collage of what was floating through people’s minds as they sat in the dark absorbing all those thousand and one plot twists. The style aims to be direct and compressed. One scene folds rapidly into the next and the book moves through different genres and, finally, through different historical moments, gradually emerging from the alternate world of movies into the worlds of movie-making and movie-watching, as if finally coming out of the theater after a day at the pictures.
Why is Pre-Code Hollywood vital to film history? What was the effect of the Production Code?
The highly developed styles and techniques of silent cinema were suddenly confronted by the seemingly problem of having characters talk – what would they say, about what, and how would that change the effect of movies? There was an immense downloading of words from elsewhere – plays, novels, magazine stories, vaudeville acts, radio shows – and a lot of experimenting with how to combine speech with existing cinematic modes. As it happened, that moment coincided with economic catastrophe, which certainly contributed to the pursuit of raw-edged and sensational material to bring in customers. The Pre-Code period is best remembered for its enduring icons and stars (King Kong, Frankenstein, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy, Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar, Bette Davis, the Busby Berkeley chorus girls), but a sizeable bulk of its product was swept away both because of the Production Code and because of advances in technology which made the earlier films look primitive to later viewers. The great freedom and liveliness of the period has only become fully apparent in recent years. The Production Code, which replaced the earlier and vaguer Hays Code, came into full effect in 1934 and had an immediately perceptible effect on the content of American movies. The decades that followed were of course rich in great filmmaking, and it has been argued that the existence of the Code was a stimulus to art because it forced filmmakers to find subtler ways to get around its strictures. Be that as it may, we don’t know what films would have been made without the Code’s prohibitions, which not only cracked down on specific infractions but called for a generally applied moral code in which “crime does not pay” and good and evil would always be unambiguously identified. The notorious Baby Face (1933), in which Barbara Stanwyck rises from the depths and sleeps her way to the top, getting her revenge on a world that has abused her, marks the end of an era in which it was possible even to imagine such a screenplay – in fact the version now screened was never seen by most viewers in the 30s, who were given an altered ending in which misbehavior was duly punished. As I’ve written elsewhere, “The regularizing of morals turned out to be inseparable from the regularizing of aesthetics. In its tidying up of loose ends, the Code encouraged a cookie-cutter approach to structure and character that is with us yet, to which the anarchic unpredictability of the early 30s offers a bracing corrective.“ (See “When Hollywood Dared,” The New York Review of Books, July 2, 2009.)
Do you have a favorite period of films or a favorite genre?
There are filmmakers whose work I’ve gone back to and sometimes written about repeatedly, with different responses at different ages – Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Eric Rohmer, Akira Kurosawa, Buster Keaton, Louis Feuillade, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese—an impossibly long list that would stretch from Ozu to Jacques Becker to Allan Dwan. And then there are the genre films from all eras and all over (American, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, British, Mexican, etc.) among which there are always new wonders to find.
Can you talk a bit about your work with Library of America?
I started out as a fan and reviewer of Library of America’s first publications, in the early 1980s, and had the great good fortune to work as an editor there for 25 years. LOA originated from an awareness that American literary classics were not readily available in textually reliable, durable, well-designed affordable editions in any systematic way. What has been thrilling is to see that approach maintained rigorously over so many years – textual integrity being more of an issue than ever, it would seem – while at the same time LOA has expanded the scope of its publishing. Its list now embraces an extraordinary array of works ranging widely over fields and genres and historical eras. There is always more to the past than was apparent, so the project renews itself constantly.
In your first book Hardboiled America I particularly liked your discussion of Jim Thompson, whom you have described as a “Dimestore Dostoevsky.” Why is hardboiled noir vital to literary history in America and elsewhere? Can you discuss some of the film adaptations of Thompson?
Hardboiled America evolved out of the days I spent scavenging the used bookstores of lower Manhattan for old paperbacks. It wasn’t so easy to find the books of writers like Jim Thompson and David Goodis (I couldn’t have anticipated that Library of America would eventually publish both); the bookstores were disappearing too. When I started out exploring the hardboiled tradition, even Hammett and Chandler were often out of print. It seemed like an incredibly rich area that had gone underground, and I was content to spend several years immersing myself in those paperbacks; it was like walking around in a ruined city finding relics and artifacts strewn everywhere. Thompson was the most extreme and original of all the writers I came upon during those years, and his best books have a linguistic texture unique to them – a quality hard to adapt to film. Alain Corneau’s Série Noire, with a screenplay by Georges Perec, may come closest to the tone, especially because of Patrick Dewaere’s performance. James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet is very faithful to the book, yet it inevitably feels too literal. Thompson’s books take place in a borderline zone between the grittily real and the hallucinatory which is awfully hard to photograph.
William Blick is an Assistant Professor/Librarian at Queensborough Community College. He has published articles on film studies in Senses of Cinema, Cineaction, and Cinemaretro and on crime fiction at Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon. His fiction has appeared in Out of the Gutter, Pulp Metal Magazine, and Pulp Modern Flash.