Author Kevin Rush reflects on a favorite book of his adolescence
After my rant on another space against what Halloween has become, I thought I’d revisit what Halloween once was. A kid’s day of campy fright and copious candy? Of course, there was that, but there was also a sense of horror, closer to its original meaning. The word has Latin roots, stemming from the verb “to bristle,” as in hair standing on end, due to dread—and get this—veneration and religious awe. This is what separates classic horror from conventional slasher films. Horror is not just the fear of temporal harm or torment. It’s the dread of a supernatural force that attacks us on the spiritual level.
For me, nothing I’ve ever seen or read captures that definition so completely as Bram Stoker’s celebrated horror novel, Dracula. The horror Stoker depicts isn’t simply creepy or scary, it’s cosmically consequential. Deranged murderers wielding machetes or chainsaws are frightening, but they cannot touch their victims beyond the grave. Mourners can bury them believing they’ll rest in peace. But Stoker’s novel is horrifying, because he threatens the notion of eternal rest. Stoker creates a world of perverse religious veneration, where the Count is a false god, collecting souls as well as strewing corpses. Dracula is whom Jesus warned us to fear in Matthew 10:28: “…do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
I first read Dracula the summer after sixth grade. I was proud of myself for tackling such a huge book and the elevated language of Victorian England. It was corny for sure, but the melodrama was seductive. I also loved the form; Dracula is an epistolary novel whose story unfolds through diary passages and letters, depicting the points of view of various characters. As a kid who imagined he might someday write books, this model, artificial as it was, intrigued me. And gaining comprehensive vampirical knowledge from an authoritative source was pretty cool, too. Regarding Drac himself, what grabbed me most was not the relentless evil of the villain, but that all hope in overcoming that evil lay in the sacred instruments of the Catholic faith.
I decided to re-read Dracula to see what I’d think about it 50 years later. I found flaws in plotting and characterizations that I hadn’t noticed at 12 years old, and was much less patient with Van Helsing’s hugger-muggery and the lengthy, lugubrious passages reciting the characters’ inner turmoil. But bright as ever was the ardent hope that—through the instruments of faith, including the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist—these outmatched characters could triumph over a Prince of Darkness.
The story begins with Jonathon Harker in Transylvania on business. When the old innkeeper learns he’s headed for Castle Dracula, on the Eve of St. George’s Day, when “all the evil things of the world will have full sway,” she places a Rosary around Harker’s neck “for your mother’s sake.” The peasants cross themselves with dread and mutter words he takes to mean Satan, hell, witch, were-wolf and vampire. Later, as a guest in Dracula’s castle, Harker cuts himself shaving. His blood incites lust the Count cannot control. If not for the crucifix hanging from his neck, his host would have made short work of him.
It’s worth emphasizing that the crosses in Dracula are not the bare Protestant variety we see in the movies. These bear the corpus of Christ, which makes them, to Harker’s enlightened Church-of-England mind, “a symbol of idolatry.” But Stoker goes further in employing the Body of Christ, actually using the Eucharist as a defense and barrier against the Un-dead. Van Helsing, a Catholic Dutchman, crumples a host into a wad of dough to make putty to seal a vampire’s tomb. He gives his team of vampire hunters a piece of the host to guard their bodies. He also plants consecrated wafers in the crates of soil Dracula has imported, so the vampire cannot retreat to them for rest. This may seem like desecration, but Van Helsing says he has “an indulgence” for this necessary work.
Details of the story illustrate that Count Dracula poses a much greater threat than your garden variety homicidal maniac. The mad-house inmate Renfield devours insects alive because he craves life, but firmly denies any interest in consuming “souls.” That’s the purview of the twisted one he calls his “Lord and Master.”
Professor Van Helsing explains “When [the Un-dead] become such, there comes the curse of immortality; they cannot die but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying evils of the world.” This curse is the mirror opposite of the blessing of eternal life given the saints who intercede in this world for the cause of holiness. A victim’s soul is imprisoned unless, through “true death,” it can be set free. Catholics can understand “true death” as death to sin, the conquest of which leads to eternal life. Afterwards, “Instead of working wickedness by night and growing more debased in the assimilation of it by day, [the victim] shall take her place with the other Angels.”
Yet, even before death, a soul under the sway of a vampire is “unclean.”
Yet, even before death, a soul under the sway of a vampire is “unclean.” Mina Harker is brutally violated and, through no fault of her own, placed in immortal jeopardy. A touch of the sacred host to her forehead burns, leaving a shaming scar. In our current culture, this unfairness would prompt ceremonial book burning. But Stoker is willing to write for a world that is not always fair, and which requires heroic action, rather than student walkouts, to right an obvious wrong. To save a soul in jeopardy, we must place our own souls in jeopardy. Life doesn’t get more consequentially Christian than that.
As the Catholic Van Helsing explains, “Till then we bear our Cross, as His Son did in obedience to His will. It may be that we are chosen instruments of His good pleasure, and that we ascend to His bidding as that other through stripes and shames; through doubts and fears, and all that makes the difference between God and man.”
Though rarely recognized as such, Dracula is one of the great Catholic novels in the English language. I got severe pushback on that statement from someone whose opinion I respect. He asserted that Dracula does not edify, but at best encourages a superstitious faith. But that’s only true if we start to believe in vampires. Stoker is hardly encouraging the reader to take Van Helsing’s prescriptions literally. But taken as a metaphor, the Dracula tale strips away the mundane reality that clouds our vision and serves up the existential truth of human existence: we are in a life and death (undeath) struggle of good versus evil. In this way, Bram Stoker’s Dracula serves the true purpose of horror: to scare us straight and put us on the earnest path toward heroic virtue and perhaps even holiness.
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Help author Kevin Rush launch his next book by marking it “Want to Read” on your Goodreads account.
The Wedding Routine is a romantic comedy about Celia Cleary, a young ballroom dance champion from New Jersey, who makes her living choreographing wedding dances. Her business is failing, and her own romantic life is out of step, until she falls for a handsome French chef, who, much to her dismay, resolutely refuses to dance. Quick witted humor, well-drawn, relatable characters and the warm Catholic spirit of an old Bing Crosby movie combine for a smart, enjoyable, and uplifting read. But to get this book to the public, the author needs your help.
Also by Kevin Rush
Independent authors face an uphill battle getting their books to their intended audiences. That hill is even steeper for Catholic authors hoping to tilt the cultural axis back towards positive values, virtue, and decency. But there are tools at our disposal, and a powerful tool is Goodreads.com.
Owned by Amazon.com, Goodreads is a forum used by 125 million readers to find their next book. When a book trends on Goodreads, it gets noticed. So, how do we make it trend? You can help by following this link to The Wedding Routine and marking it “Want to Read.” You can also ask me a question about the book. When enough Goodreads members do this, the website includes the book in its internal promotions and emails, which generates valuable free publicity.
YA novel by Kevin Rush
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting more about the book, including how you can enter a Goodreads Giveaway contest to win a free copy.
Please take a few seconds right now to visit Goodreads and mark The Wedding Routine as “Want to Read.” Thanks so much for your support.
Disclaimer: Links in this column may be affiliate links. If you click on an affiliate link, the author receives a small commission on purchases for a limited time at no additional cost to you. These commissions help ensure future posts. Thank you.
Twisted psychology and dark humor in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Fight Club. By Kevin Rush.
If you’ve ever gotten into a roommate situation you’ve regretted, you can probably appreciate this week’s two books. In each, a new acquaintance appears mysteriously, moves in and creates mayhem. Sure, there are plenty of bad iterations of this basic plot—I’m looking at you, Single White Female—but our featured authors masterfully elevate their tales with haunting portrayals of human psychology at the breaking point.
Patricia Highsmith, whom we’ve discussed before, began her writing career authoring “real life” comic books, but gained prominence after her modestly successful first novel, Strangers on a Train, (1950) caught the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who quickly turned it into a solid thriller in 1951. In Strangers, Highsmith gave readers a glimpse into the mind of a creepy sociopath with ambiguous sexuality. Highsmith penned The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, again portraying a homicidal sociopath, but this time making his homosexuality more overt and audaciously placing him in the center of an antihero drama as the protagonist.
French filmmaker René Clément was first to bring Ripley to the screen as Plein Soleil in 1960, starring 25-year-old Alain Delon, who went on to have a very good career. It was also the screen debut of 20-year-old singer-actress Marie Laforêt, who later scored pop hits in France covering Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind and The Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black. Although the title means Broad Daylight, an apt descriptor for a brazen murder in the sunny Mediterranean, the film was released in America as Purple Noon.
Director Clément made several choices that turned what might have been a great film into only a serviceable crime drama. First, he cast French actors to play Americans, so the feeling of ex-pats in voluntary exile was lost. Clément also took many liberties with the plot; the story concludes with a nifty twist that is nevertheless 180 degrees from where Highsmith’s book ends. Clément does direct Delon’s portrayal of Tom Ripley to be enigmatic and self-involved, but in choosing to drop Tom’s homosexuality in favor of a heterosexual love triangle, he dilutes much of Tom’s motivation for his crimes.
American audiences are more familiar with Anthony Minghella’s 1999 version, The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon in the title role. The strong cast also included Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. More faithful to Highsmith’s novel, the film was moderately successful, but did not generate sufficient excitement for a Damon-as-Ripley franchise. Still, of Highsmith’s four subsequent Ripley books, two have garnered film adaptations and, at this writing, a Ripley TV series is in preproduction.
Ripley was a daring novel in its time. Despite a wealth of mainstream homosexual writers and a gay literary subculture featuring prominent homosexual characters, overt homosexuality was still very much taboo in mainstream fiction. Gore Vidal’s third novel, The City and the Pillar caused something of a scandal in 1948, by presenting a loving homosexual relationship as natural. In that respect, Ripley represents a step backward; homosexuality is again taboo. But Tom Ripley is the central figure, and Highsmith invites us to root for him, in spite his crimes.
Yet, in a post-Stonewall, post-Angels-in-America, post-Obergefell world, is Mr. Ripley still relevant? If this were an age where reasonable minds were allowed to disagree, readers could debate the validity of the implied nexus of homosexuality, narcissism, and sociopathy manifest in Tom Ripley. Today, surely, there will be voices in the Wokeratti calling Highsmith’s novel a dangerous slur and demanding that Ripley be cancelled. On the other hand, readers willing to accept Tom Ripley as Highsmith’s attempt at a unique, multilayered character, rather than a blunt, artless stereotype, are in for a treat.
This is a superbly crafted novel with tension throughout. It is horror on a grotesquely human level, as the author invites you into the mind of a sociopath, and entices you to pull for him. The reader, against his own will, finds himself emotionally invested in Ripley, and hoping for his best possible outcome.
If you’ve seen the 1999 film starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, you know I’m breaking the first two rules, but Fight Club, a bitter, shocking and often hilarious satire of maleness unmoored from positive masculinity, cries out for discussion. Directed by David Fincher, the movie got mixed reviews for its combination of tongue-in-cheek philosophizing and brutal violence but has proved popular with viewers. I haven’t seen the film since it first came out, but I remember enjoying it immensely until the ludicrous ending left me totally deflated. Shortly thereafter, many people, including some of my high school students, told me the book was much better. I declined to read it until this summer, specifically for this blog.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering whether—if you’ve seen the movie and already know who Tyler Durden is—there will be enough left from the bizarre characters and twisty-turny plot to hold your interest.
My answer is an enthusiastic yes. If you like a novel that grabs you by the throat and does not let go until you have feverishly devoured the last page, this book is for you. Stylistically, there’s much to admire in its art and construction: the staccato stream of consciousness, the jittery neurosis that pulses in every line, and layer upon layer of complications building like an anxiety dream you cannot awaken from. All these elements lead me to conclude that if Joseph Heller and Jack Kerouac had had a lovechild that they whipped with an electrical cord, he’d have grown up to be Chuck Palahniuk. But Fight Club is also a very timely novel that taps into millennial dysfunction. If you were disappointed by the movie’s ending, be assured the novel’s conclusion is much more satisfying. Finally, the book is short enough to tackle in a weekend, so there’s really no excuse not to dive in. Just don’t tell anyone where you heard about it.
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Why it’s more important than ever to honor the North American martyrs
In my childhood, priests were heroes, and the Jesuits were the mightiest among them. I recall my first-grade teacher, a Sister of St. Joseph, telling us, “If you saw one of the Fathers walking on the sidewalk with an angel beside him, you should say hello to Father first.” In fourth grade, I was tasked, along with a classmate, with writing a play on the life of St. Isaac Jogues for our American history class. I was awestruck by his willingness to suffer such cruel torture for the sake of the Gospel. And I was proud that a member of my family, my father’s cousin, was serving as a Jesuit missionary in Hiroshima, Japan. I wanted to study with the Jesuits, to be molded by them.
Well, the ensuing decades have not been kind to my early impressions. Widespread corruption, political machinations, and none-dare-call-it-heresy have scorched the bloom off the rose. But given that Tuesday, October 19 is the Feast of St. Isaac Jogues and Companions, I decided to drive up to The Shrine of the North American Martyrs for a few hours of prayer and reflection on those eight men whose lives so perfectly exemplified Our Savior’s command to “pick up your cross and follow me.”
The Shrine, built on the grounds of the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, has a Coliseum Church built in the round. Its brick exterior resembles a small college football stadium, while the rustic interior is decked out in timber in imitation of frontier forts. The square Sanctuary has altars on four sides dedicated to three Jesuits—the priest Jogues, and the laymen Rene Goupil and Jean de Lalande—who were killed in the vicinity, and St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk maiden, who was born in the village. The grounds, with memorials to the martyrs and paths for walking the Stations of the Cross and the Seven Sorrows of Mary provided ample opportunity for reflection. The old awe returned.
In The American Jesuits, a History, Raymond A. Schroth. S.J. writes that Isaac Jogues, a native of Orleans, France had entered the Jesuit novitiate in Rouen at 17. Though “small, delicate, sharp-eyed and fine featured,” Jogues passionately sought the most rigorous vocation: preaching “simply to the ‘savages’ of the New World.” Fr. Schroth describes how Jogues, at 29, arrived in French Canada:
“On August 14, 1636, young Fr. Jogues gazed up the [St. Lawrence] river in awe as a flotilla of Algonkian canoes heaved into sight. The savages brandished 28 scalps from their poles…. They had two prisoners—an Iroquois brave standing tall, proud, and naked in the canoe, and a native woman. As they pulled into the landing, the native women, many of whom had thrown off their clothes to swim out to the boats, surrounded the native prisoner, beat him with clubs, ropes, and chains, stabbed him with burning sticks, and crushed his fingers in their teeth. One who cut off his thumb had tried to force him to swallow it. When he failed to choke it down, she cooked it for the children to eat.”
Jogues had been forewarned of savage practices. The missionary Paul Le Jeune, S.J. had written in 1632 describing how captors inflicted “all the cruelty that the devil can suggest” on prisoners, culminating in cannibalism. Le Jeune warned that if the Iroquois captured his brother missionaries, “we would be obliged to suffer this ordeal.”
Jogues’ ordeal began on August 2, 1642, when on a return journey from Quebec, a force of Iroquois overwhelmed his Huron escort. Jogues had his chance to escape, but seeing Goupil captured, he surrendered rather than abandon his young companion. For three weeks, the Iroquois “paraded their 22 captives [naked] through the countryside,” stopping at various villages for rounds of torture. Sensing that Jogues was the leader, they abused him particularly. Natives “hacked off his left thumb and chewed his fingers to the bone.” (Jogues would later have to get special dispensation from the Pope to say Mass, since priests were only allowed to touch the consecrated host with thumb and forefinger.) Jogues and Goupil eventually found themselves in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, basically enslaved, but treated kindly by “some women.”
Goupil met his fate when he imprudently made the sign of a cross over a child, which an elder took to be a curse. Jogues then witnessed a hatchet splitting his friend’s head. Living largely on corn meal because meat in the village was offered to the devil before consumption, Jogues wasted away. However, he spent abundant time in prayer and reconciled himself to captivity, since his ministrations were a comfort to many, and he had managed to baptize “more than 60 persons.” Then, informed on August 18, 1643, of a plot to burn him alive, Jogues escaped and returned to France.
For most of even the holiest men, that would have been enough. But in less than two years, Jogues was back in New France. Again, he was captured, again with a lay Jesuit companion, Jean de Lalande, and brought to Ossernenon. One of the clans called for his death. They lured him to a lodge, promising to listen to him, but struck his head with a tomahawk as soon as he stepped through the door. Both Jesuits were decapitated, and their heads placed on display.
It’s easy to argue that Jogues was imprudent. His own superiors urged him to stay among the docile natives, where his labors could bear abundant fruit. But in risking all to reach out to the hostile tribes, Jogues embodied Christ’s sacrifice as Paul describes in Romans 5: 6-8:
“Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”
Fast forward some 240 years, and a different definition of Jesuit martyrdom begins to emerge. On November 16, 1989, a force led by Lieutenant Ricardo Espinoza, acting on orders from Colonel René Emilio Ponce, chief of staff of the Armed Forces of El Salvador, executed six Jesuit priests. They also killed two women witnesses, then tried to make the attack look like a Communist reprisal. Forces on the Left, with whom the priests were more than friendly, suddenly found religion, charging the Death Squads with the unthinkable crime of priest killing. The story went out that the Jesuits had been killed, because of their advocacy for the poor. They were martyrs. But not so fast.
The war in El Salvador had no good guys. Establishment forces were propping up a ruthless oligarchy that cruelly subjugated and exploited the poor. On the other hand, the insurgents were Communists supported by the Soviet Union looking to enslave the nation under Marxism. But instead of declaring a pox on both their houses and calling each side to the truth of the Gospel, the Jesuit intellectuals under Ignacio Ellacuría, president of the University of Central America in San Salvador, embraced the Communists. Somehow they had missed Divini Redemptoris, the 1937 encyclical by Pope Pius XI in which he declared “Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever.” Did Ellacuría et al. also overlook Communism’s 20th century’s global death toll? Or did they believe with characteristic Jesuit hubris that they could use an intrinsically evil system for the greater glory of God?
In adopting Liberation Theology, a twisted dogma that perverts Catholic social teaching and subordinates salvation through Christ to economic achievements, Ellacuría and comrades acted not as priests but apparatchiks, lending legitimacy to the Communist insurgency. It’s as though Jogues had gone over to the Iroquois. They corrupted the UCA to pump out Communist propaganda. They abandoned their roles as shepherds and peacemakers to exacerbate tensions in the ongoing war, all the time imagining their black robes made them bulletproof.
That’s not to say the Jesuits were legitimate military targets, and only a regime cribbing the Francisco Franco playbook for Communist annihilation would have dared attack them. Ultimately, the priests were victims of a war crime. They may even have been martyrs to “The Revolution.” But suggesting they are martyrs to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is cheap propaganda that taints the legacy of genuine martyrs like Jogues whom we must continue to hold in the highest esteem.
Since 1989, the downward spiral of the Society of Jesus has only accelerated. We now have a Jesuit pope who embraces every far-Left initiative from assorted dastards dedicated to a pantheon of anti-Christian causes, including abortion on demand, euthanasia, and sterilization. Having forgotten the lesson of Fr. Jogues, the Pope joins hands with pinstriped neo-paganists who would not only bite his hand, but gnaw his fingers to the bone. Meanwhile, formerly vaunted Jesuit institutions cover up crucifixes so as not to offend pro-abort politicians and corrupt their students with Critical Race Theory, a Communist doctrine so pernicious it makes Liberation Theology look downright Thomistic. And a periodical acting as the organ for Jesuits in the United States deigns to publish a turgid, ill-reasoned and historically illiterate apologia, entitled The Catholic Case for Communism.
In light of these circumstances, it’s crucial that we remember and celebrate the lives and sacrifices of the North American martyrs, who are the antidote to and the eyewash for the corrupting campaigns within the Society of Jesus today to bend the church towards the material world and hand out martyrs’ crowns where pity is the more profound response.
This summer I also had occasion to visit the National Shrine of Elizabeth Ann Seton, which I comment on here. Below is suggested reading for Catholics of all ages on St. Isaac Jogues and other American martyrs.
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Supernatural terror from The Exorcist and Frankenstein. By Kevin Rush.
We’re past the middle of October, so it’s a ghoulishly good time to look at horror films. Not that I’m a big fan of what Halloween has become. What had been a fun kid’s holiday has, in recent decades, metastasized into an off-putting celebration of adult perversity. Hollywood continues to turn out “horror” films, but gone are the good scares, replaced by stomach-churning, slow torture. Evil in all its banality that fails to deliver chills. So, this column is dedicated to those days when horror was entertaining and scary, rather than desensitizing and addictive. That last point is important, because Halloween was originally practiced as a warning against demons prowling the earth for the ruin of souls. Thus, it was good to be scared. Today, the darkness has become too seductive, and that’s not good, as our first film ably demonstrates.
In The Exorcist, a preteen girl starts to experience weird physical and mental phenomena after dabbling with a Ouija board. The unexplainable symptoms escalate quickly to life-threatening levels, forcing her distraught mother to seek out a Catholic priest willing to perform an exorcism. The 1973 film by William Friedkin set a new standard for horror with green projectile vomiting, the bloody and obscene use of a crucifix, and the type of head rotation you don’t see in Yoga class. The film shocked audiences, and might be blamed for Hollywood’s subsequent downward spiral into torture porn, except that it had a great story (allegedly based in reality) of unprepared humanity facing calculated supernatural terror. A well-crafted film, The Exorcist was considered the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar in the spring of 1974. However, the Academy went with a safer choice, The Sting, in what was considered a stunning upset. To date, no horror film has ever won Best Picture, despite what The Hollywood Reporter says about The Silence of the Lambs being a horror film. (It’s not!) But if you’ve seen the movie, and you know what Fr. Damien’s mother is currently up to, should you read the book?
Before making its way to the silver screen, The Exorcist had been a cultural phenomenon, a runaway bestseller, topping The New York Times Bestseller List for 12 weeks from July 25 to October 10. William Peter Blatty’s graphic novel (and by that I mean luridly detailed, not illustrated), inspired by a true incident from 1947, breathed supernatural urgency back into a flaccid post-Vatican II Catholic Church, which had thrown out the Redeeming baby with the medieval bathwater and was on the verge of becoming The Rotary Club with wafers. Having thoroughly researched Satanism and demonic possession, Blatty pulled no punches in depicting the malicious evil of mankind’s original and most deadly adversary. Suddenly, Satan was real again, prowling the world to devour human souls, and the obsolete rites of the Holy Catholic Church ministered by the thinning ranks of aged, hyper-orthodox priests were our last line of defense.
Book II of William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist series
But, beyond having met its moment in time, is The Exorcist a literary work of lasting impact? Maybe not, but it’s a taut thriller combining supernatural creepiness with the step-by-step deduction of a police procedural. The narrative of the book delves more deeply into the practices of Satanism and the metaphysics of possession, as well as the interior life of the characters, especially the conflicted modernist priest, Fr. Damien, who reluctantly accepts the possibility of actual demonic possession. One criticism of the film was that the special effects were over-the-top, eliciting reactions that took the audience, at least momentarily, out of the story. That’s not a problem in the novel, since you’re never distracted by a plastic mold of Linda Blair’s head or wondering if that shade of green is even possible. The book’s characterizations are ample, even with the secondary characters, and the plot twists are plentiful. This is a very absorbing, fast-paced novel that rushes to a very satisfying conclusion. So, yes, there’s much to be gained by going beyond the film and cracking open the book.
Frankenstein — The undisputed King of the Movie Monsters (not you, Godzilla), Henry Frankenstein’s creation looms large over the pantheon of horror. Since Boris Karloff’s iconic performance in 1931, Mary Shelley’s tale of horror has been shot countless times for film and television. But does our concept of Frankenstein, two centuries after the novel’s publication, comport with the creature and the story as Mary Shelley first revealed it? Well, if it did, there’d be no point to reading the book, would there?
Novel cover deceptively based on Karloff’s creature.
In the novel, written in 1818, there is no medieval castle retrofitted with a laboratory. Likewise, no chains hoisting a surgical table upward into the thundering sky so lightning can re-animate a gruesome cadaver stitched together from motley parts of recently deceased corpses. There’s no hunchback assistant, no Fritz or Igor, or even Eyegore, no graverobbing, no Abby Normal brain. Here, good Victor Frankenstein, relying on alchemy, crafts his monster in his college dorm room using “chemical materials” and “chemical instruments.”
But, you ask, did the movies get the look of the Monster right? That’s hard to say. Ms. Shelley provides little of the physical description of her monster other than “huge and hideous.” But he is not slow and lumbering, like Karloff. He moves swiftly and with agility. In fact, he can keep pace with Frankenstein as he tours Europe by carriage and sail. (It’s not clear how he’d fare in the Age of Steam.) And apparently, though huge and hideous, the Monster can traverse Europe largely undetected by townsfolk, while keeping close tabs on his creator, who the monster has demanded must make him suitable bride, so he doesn’t have to live in torturous isolation.
We know this because the Monster speaks. And not in grunts or monosyllables. Shelley’s monster is as eloquent as any Knight Royale in Mad King George’s Court. How he learned to speak is part of a narrative which relies heavily on willful suspension of disbelief, as do many plot twists which depend on ludicrous coincidences, against which happening the odds are astronomical! If you liked that last rhetorical flourish, you’ll enjoy the high-toned narrative seeped in the melodrama of the Romantic Age. Shelley’s narration is full of breast-beating and weeping, not to mention characters collapsing with hysterical fevers that incapacitate them for months on end. Who knew men in the Age of Byron were so delicate? Shelley sets the melodra-meter at a constant 10, occasionally turning it up to 11.
But is it readable, you beg me answer? I have to say it took me a while to get into, because the main story was slow to open, and the artificiality of the dialogue was a bit overwhelming. But eventually, the sheer force of the narrative wore me down and I got swept up in the story, accelerating my reading to the finish.
I can recommend reading Frankenstein for several reasons. First, it’s good to know where things come from. Frankenstein is an enduring legend, so it’s fun and helpful to understand the form of its origin. It’s also good to remember, in this age of stale remakes, that original works can be improved upon. Probably what saved the book from obscurity in the first decades of its publication where numerous stage adaptations that etched the story into the public consciousness. Elements added by outsiders, particularly the screenwriter, set designer and makeup artist of the classic 1931 Universal film, may not have been faithful, but they had an astonishing impact. In later decades, various film and TV treatments have repeatedly brought something new to the legend’s basic framework. Thus for hundreds of years, Frankenstein has remained a seminal tale for sparking human imagination. Finally, it’s good practice every so often to read elevated language, just to stretch our comprehension and vocabulary, and to appreciate how stylized language adds to the escapist value of a story.
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Ladd and Wayne craft icons in Shane and The Searchers. By Kevin Rush.
The Western is the archetypal American story. Its roots go back at least to the early 19th century and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. In those five novels, Cooper laid out the rules that future writers would assiduously follow: the unyielding land, the Noble Savage and his ruthless counterpart, and the frontiersman, whose identity is so closely tied to a changing landscape that once he tames the land, he finds he can no longer inhabit it. Drawing on existential struggles with nature and against our own human nature, Westerns gained popularity the world over. In Hollywood, they have made an indelible impact that has bled into other film genres as well. I’ve watched Western movies and TV shows all my life, but I’ve read very few Western novels. Today I look at two which served as source material for two of the greatest Western films ever made: Shane and The Searchers.
Shane: Mysterious stranger rights wrongs and moves on
Theatrical trailer for Shane.
Nominated for six Academy Awards, the classic 1953 film, starring Alan Ladd as the eponymous gunslinger, is thought by many to be a perfect western movie. This is largely thanks to Director George Stevens’ relentless tinkering in the editing room which delayed the film’s release for two years. Originally intended as a B picture, Shane benefited from Stevens’ meticulous, one might say obsessive, perfectionism, which ballooned the budget and forced the studio to promote the film as a major release. Thus, a classic was born.
An Oscar winner for cinematography in 1954, Shane is beautifully shot on location in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in breath-taking color. The solid cast includes Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, Brandon De Wilde (who scored a Best Supporting Actor nomination for a performance given at the tender age of nine), Edgar Buchanan, Elisha Cook Jr., and Jack Palance (also nominated for Best Supporting Actor).
I tend to be more critical than most about the casting of Ladd. He might squint and set his jaw like Randolph Scott or Gary Cooper, but his stature was no more imposing than Mickey Rooney’s. In the book, Shane is described as a slender man, not tall like the boy’s father, played to perfection by Van Heflin. But neither was Shane a shrimp. Shane is a man whose intensity and lithe animal reflexes make up for his spare frame. He’s also described as dark haired, unlike the blondish Ladd. Physical dimensions aside, Ladd does capture the essence of Shane as rendered in the novel, so I’m not going to be too critical. I just think there were better choices, such as Montgomery Clift, who unfortunately wasn’t interested. Clift passed on the role, forcing Stevens to settle for Ladd, who exploited the opportunity to forge his signature role.
Stevens also had to coax Jean Arthur out of retirement. He had directed her in The More the Merrier (1943), for which Arthur received her only Academy Award nomination, for Best Actress. She agreed to play the mother, Marian, even though at fifty, she was well past the character’s age. That isn’t an issue for me. I’ve always enjoyed Jean Arthur, and she gives a fine performance, looking very much like a care-worn wife and mother of the Plains. Sadly, Arthur immediately went back into retirement, emerging only for an episode of Gunsmoke in 1965 and a short-lived 1966 TV program, The Jean Arthur Show.
I found the novel Shane in the YA section of my local public library, where it had sat, judging from the paperback binding, unread since its purchase. Appropriate shelving, since author Jack Schaefer dedicates the work:
To Carl
For my first son
My first book
The fact that it hadn’t been read strikes me as a sad. Although Schaefer’s novel doesn’t break any new ground—his hero is cut from the Natty Bumpo mold, hewn from the frontier and destined to move West once the evil forces are thwarted and the area becomes too civilized—the book is eminently readable.
Click image to order Shane
The action sequences mix edge-of-the-seat suspense with abrupt and brutal violence that is vivid, but not gratuitous. The characters are well-drawn and multi-layered. It’s an engrossing, quick read. But should you bother, if you’ve seen Stevens’ film? I would say yes, because of the extra depth given the characters.
In true YA form, the narrator of Shane is a boy, named Bob Starrett, but called Joey in the movie. Well, that’s not quite accurate; the narrator is the mature Bob Starrett recalling the drama of his youth. Bob is an observant and imaginative lad, but there is much going on in the triangular relationship between the father, Joe, his wife, Marian, and Shane than exists in the movie, and much of it goes over the head of the juvenile witness. I don’t want to spoil anything, but let’s just say, its heavy stuff for a YA book.
My only complaint is that the elegiac descriptions of Shane are often over the top, beyond a boy’s hero worship. Reading certain passages, I was aware that Schaefer was consciously trying to create an iconic, one-name legend, and maybe working too hard at it. But, he obviously succeeded, so maybe I should keep that criticism, like my misgivings about Alan Ladd, to myself.
The Searchers: Relentless pursuit challenges the human soul
Theatrical trailer for John Ford’s The Searchers
Asked to name his three favorite directors, Orson Wells famously responded, “John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.” But while other gifted auteurs might expound on his artistry, Ford summed up his craft in three simple words: “I make westerns.” Born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1894, John Ford had already collected four Best Director Oscars by the time he made The Searchers. Only one, 1939’s Stagecoach, had been a western. But two of them, the aforementioned Stagecoach and 1952’s The Quiet Man, had starred John Wayne. So the 1956 re-pairing of Ford and Wayne in an epic western based on a recent popular novel was big news in Hollywood.
Unfortunately, The Academy did not get the memo. The Searchers was shut out of the 1957 Oscars, denied even a single nomination. Not that it was a banner year. George Stevens won Best Director for Giant, a film that has not held up nearly as well, and the Best Picture Winner was Around the World in 80 Days, which seems to have been shot in real time. Yul Brynner took home the Best Actor trophy for The King and I. Wayne would wait 12 more years for the recognition his turn as Ethan Edwards could easily have earned.
The snub mystified those involved, including Wayne who thought “Ethan Edwards was probably the most fascinating character I ever played in a John Ford Western.” Ford commented stoically that it “was a good picture. It made a lot of money and that’s the ultimate end.”
But today, The Searchers is generally viewed as one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, Western ever made. More than a chase story, its narrative of relentless pursuit plumbs the depths of the human soul, exposing ugliness we’d prefer to keep hidden before stumbling upon the redemption we desperately need. Its tough subject matter, starkly depicted, may have made too many demands on audiences in its time. The hero’s all-consuming hatred of the Indians was discordant ten years after the desegregation of baseball and immediately after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when enlightened minds were waking up to racial injustice, or at least denying they played any role in it. The comic hijinks, at times bidding us to laugh at abject cruelty, didn’t seem to nest well within the framework of a tragic tale. Yet, with the passage of time, a classic has emerged, a legend laced with ambiguities that keep calling us back for further examination.
I had seen The Searchers often on TV, in black and white and carved up for commercials, but never appreciated its greatness until college, when I saw a full-color, uncut version on the (reasonably) big screen. Though not a perfect film, with various parts seeming to struggle against the whole, The Searchers is an eloquent, complex and often enigmatic masterpiece. But even though Ford is the chief architect of the film (he discarded much of screenwriter Frank Nugent’s exposition-heavy dialogue), the lion’s share of the credit should go to the novelist Alan LeMay.
LeMay began his career as a journalist, but was soon able to make his fiction writing sell. A descendant of plains pioneers, LeMay wrote tales of the American West. After a divorce and remarriage, with three growing children, LeMay decided to go where the money was for writers: Hollywood. He arrived fortuitously in the wake of Stagecoach, which sparked a revival in the Western genre, and went to work as a story consultant for the sumptuously entertaining, yet oft-abusive Cecil B. DeMille. After his contract with DeMille expired, LeMay freelanced, eking out a living that careened from comfortable to destitute, never breaking out of the B-Movie rut, and always searching for the elusive next job that would elevate his stature. After more than a decade, he vented his frustration, declaring, “All I want of this business and this town is out of it.”
LeMay decided to go back to novel writing. He recalled hearing the legend of Cynthia Ann Parker, a young Texas girl kidnapped by Comanches in 1836 and rescued in 1860, after she’d lived as a spouse to the chief who had abducted her, borne him children, and adapted completely to Comanche life. LeMay plunged into meticulous research of the Parker story, discovering how the girl’s uncle had stubbornly and fruitlessly tracked her for years over countless miles of barren wilderness. LeMay changed various elements of the Parker history, such as setting his story after the Civil War. Focusing on the relatives’ quest to restore their family and exact justice, LeMay called his book The Searchers.
A few differences between the book and film are worth noting. The book’s narrative unfolds through the eyes of Martin Pauley, who is the central character. The uncle is Amos Edwards, not Ethan. Ford’s team changed the name to avoid any association with the popular Amos ‘n’ Andy radio show. The epic fight between Martin and Charlie McCorry does not take place before a scheduled wedding.
Parts were rewritten and enhanced to fit the talents of John Ford’s stock acting company: Ward Bond’s character is not a preacher in the book, and Hank Worden’s role as Mose Harper is a distillation of two characters. Both roles were tailored to the talents and personalities of the actors, and are less important to the book. The cameo given to John Wayne’s son Patrick does not come from the book.
The novel was a commercial success, selling more than 14,000 hardcover editions and garnering $50,000 from Reader’s Digest for serialization. The movie rights went for $60,000, the highest sum paid that year. But has the book held up?
I can say unequivocally that I loved it. LeMay’s prose is simple, but powerful. His characters are genuine and multifaceted. His narrative is well paced (perhaps better paced than the film), suspenseful, and utterly haunting. What stands out most for me is the way the land itself becomes a character, a relentless force to be reckoned with, compelling the characters to go beyond the physical and emotional limits of human existence. A worse enemy than any band of savages, the cruel and uncaring land must be mastered. In such a context, simply enduring is an act of redemptive heroism.
LeMay is also unsparing in his criticism of well-intentioned but ineffectual federal government peace policies that do little more than fatten hostiles up during the winter so they can resume raiding white settlements in the spring, summer and fall. As Indian policy is transferred from the gentle incompetence of the Society of Friends to the iron fist of the U.S. Cavalry, the narrative races to its conclusion.
That conclusion is less patently restorative and naively hopeful than in the film; LeMay opts for an uneasy ambiguity, which more closely resembles his source material. The fate of the uncle is also different. In Ford’s final tableau, the rescued Debbie is ushered into the Jorgensen home, and Ethan stands alone outside. Having poured out his essence in the search, Ethan has no place in the reunion. As the iconic Western hero, he cannot live in a tamed land. The fate of Amos in the novel is more tangible and its irony is more immediately dramatic.
Finally, I’m happy to say the book is an enjoyable read; it’s 272 pages are less than you’d expect for an onscreen epic, and they go by very quickly. Altogether, The Searchers is an engrossing experience for any fan of the film.
I can also heartily recommend the extensive examination of the saga from historical event to classic film, written by Glenn Frankel. The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend is a well-researched, thoughtful and thorough account, starting with the tragedy of Cynthia Ann Parker, including the life of her Comanche Chief son Quanah, and a behind-the-scenes tour of the Ford production. If you’re a serious fan of the movie, Frankel’s book is a treasure trove of information you’ll greatly appreciate.
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Redford and Costner score with crowd-pleasing films, after novelists strike out. By Kevin Rush
The first year I followed baseball was a fantasy season worthy of the old Hollywood dream machine. The lowly New York Mets, my father’s team since returning east from grad school in 1964, pulled off the greatest miracle in professional sports history, winning 100 games en route to an upset of the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles. My dad, who’d grown up following the Brooklyn Dodgers, had suffered through two decades of disappointment before “Dem Bums” finally vanquished the “Damned Yankees” and won baseball’s ultimate prize. He looked at me celebrating and just shook his head. “Now he’ll expect this every year.” Unfortunately, no. What every Met fan my age learned at the knee of his Dodger fan father was how to say, “Wait ’til next year.”
And so, as this baseball season ends, Yankee fans are once again looking forward to the playoffs and Met fans have their sights set on Winter Meetings and Spring Training. Which is why, for us, baseball and fantasy are so intertwined. Winning, for us, is a rare, transformative, and even metaphysical experience. Our relationship to the game is a romance in the Shakespearean sense. It’s the kind of drama the two movies I’m discussing today delivered, making them hits at the box office. But how do the books they’re based on measure up?
The Natural, 1984
The Natural released in 1984 is a film imbued with wonder. I wondered if 49-year-old Robert Redford had ever played baseball before. I wondered how far he could actually hit a ball with that rusty gate swing, and why in the world director Barry Levinson would let us scrutinize its every hitch in super slow motion. But I also got caught up in a lush fable about love, destiny, and a determined soul overcoming evil. Nominated for four Academy Awards, The Natural was a pretty popcorn movie about a simpler time in sports, as uplifting as a cotton-candy sugar-high, and stayed with me about as long.
As for the book, Bernard Malamud’s 1952 debut novel is to Barry Levinson’s 1984 film what the Grimms’ fairytale Cinderellais to the 1950 Walt Disney cartoon. Walt excised a few details while sanitizing the story for a post-war American family audience. For example, in the Grimm version, the evil stepmother goes to great lengths to force her daughters’ oversized hooves into the glass slipper; she cuts the heel off of one, and lops toes off the other. The prince brings each back in turn, after the slipper fills with blood revealing the deception. A grim tale indeed. Just so, screenwriters Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry gloss over many of the unsavory aspects of Malamud’s book, including Roy’s sexual dalliances, which are generally opportunistic and cynical. Despite Malamud’s feverish attempt to elevate the scenes of coupling with magical realism that would strain the credulity of Isabelle Allende, Roy’s sexual encounters lack any romance to stir the soul. The hero’s journey Malamud traces out for Roy takes myriad rough turns through a cynical, exploitative and corrupt world.
Young Arthur draws the sword from the stone. Malamud claims to have borrowed from this myth for Roy Hobbs’ bat.
This seems to be Malamud’s intention. Critics have seen in Malamud’s novel parallels with Homer’s Odyssey and Arthurian legends, and have noted how his various characters reflect those in classical literature. I felt myself transported back to English Lit 101, where a deeply depressed professor stroked his graying beard as he dourly explicated Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, pointing out each of the seven deadly sins the knights of virtue encountered along their way. (Roy Hobbs plays for a team called the New York Knights.) And as with my Spenser class, I found myself crying to get out. Arcane references are fine fodder for eggheads and bookworms. The true measure of a work isn’t how deftly the author has embedded the threading of Scylla and Charybdis, but whether the book entertains on its own terms.
Levinson’s film succeeds because it serves up a gentler allegory. Using costumes, settings, and lighting—sometimes subtly and sometimes heavy-handedly—Levinson conveys a world that exists like memory on the fringes of mysticism. Redford’s Roy Hobbs is a callow youth, cruelly robbed of his life’s purpose, who returns late in life to reclaim what is rightfully his. His Roy loves the game he was blessed with supernatural ability to play, but aside from the exploding stadium lights when Roy hits his triumphant home run, the story tends more towards romance than fantasy. We, the audience, like this Roy Hobbs, despite the slightly jarring hubris that threatens to undo him, and we root for him in his struggles. It’s hard to say the same about the Hobbs of Malamud’s novel, who personifies each of the Seven Deadlies in turn, starting with pride and proceeding through greed, lust, wrath, etc. until gluttony nearly kills him. Roy is so selfish, egotistical, and grasping that he exhausts our sympathy before the seventh inning stretch.
A reader who approaches Malamud’s The Natural after seeing Levinson’s film might at least hope that the purity of baseball (the game if not the business) and a boy’s love for it would redeem the cold world in which it must be played. Sadly, that’s not the case. The beauty of the game is lost in a too long litany of wins and losses, slumps and hot streaks, where the hero ultimately falls short and walks away unfilled. Closing the book, I felt the same way.
Field of Dreams, 1989
https://youtu.be/sHTsQ9qePrQ
The Natural opened the floodgates for baseball movies, so in quick succession there were Eight Men Out (1988), Bull Durham (1988) and Major League (1989). The first, I loved for the in-depth history. The second turned me off for various reasons, including its failed attempt to reconcile cinematic romantic comedy with the mores of the sexual revolution. RomComs are about the frustrated pursuit of love and the myriad obstacles overcome. When the obstacle to being with the object of your desire is the guy ahead of you banging her, who is just the latest in a long line of bangers, the bloom is off the rose. When Crash finally gets with Annie, his career is done, she’s tired of bed-hopping, and they just seem ready to settle, because their routines have worn them out. That’s not much of a payoff for the audience who’s hung with them for ninety minutes, because there’s no special trick to “getting the girl,” when the rest of the town has already had her. The film also suffered from Costner’s low-key performance, which I felt lacked charm, and a lot of way-too-obvious humor that fell flat. I know a lot of people love Bull Durham (Rotten Tomatoes has it ranked as the second greatest baseball movie of all time behind Moneyball), but upon its release, I dubbed it Dull Bore ‘em, and I stand by that assessment.
As for Major League, the trailer was so packed, I assumed it had shown all the best jokes. So since I had already seen Slap Shot, I figured I didn’t need to spend seven dollars.
But from my first glimpse of the theatrical trailer for Field of Dreams, I was hooked. Yeah, I was chagrined slightly that it starred Costner, because everything he’d done to that point including Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, had left me slightly disappointed. I did not see the onscreen magnetism of an A List movie star; I saw a tall, not so bad looking guy getting paid millions to learn how to act on the job. But the Hollywood machine seemed determined to make Costner a star, so what could I do about it? I decided to keep an open mind about Costner; I put down my seven or eight dollars and entered into the fantasy of an Iowa farmer who heard a voice telling him that “If you build it, he will come.” Costner turned out to be fine, though I still had my quibbles, but the film really spoke to me about where I was in my life: unsure what my path should be, stuck somewhere between prolonged adolescence and adulthood, and most importantly, uneasy in my relationship with my father, with whom I could not talk openly about anything except baseball. So, yes, I went along for the ride, I shared Farmer Ray’s urgency to get to the heart of the mystery, and, yes, I cried when he asked his dad to play catch.
At the time, Costner had called the film “It’s a Wonderful Life for our generation,” which seemed plausible, since I’m pretty sure many baby boomers secretly regret their youthful radicalism and yearn for reconciliation with their parents. But I don’t think Field of Dreams has held up. Whereas each viewing of Capra’s classic, tied into my celebration of Christmas, endears me further to the Bedford Falls milieu with its many well-drawn characters and the all-too-human struggles of George Baily, Field is not anchored to any recurring observance and subsequent viewings, for me at least, have simply exposed its flaws. I get impatient watching Field, annoyed that I ever let it get to me that first time, and so I don’t think I’ve ever sat all the way through a second showing. Once again, I’m sure I’m in the minority. So much so, that readers of this column might choose to disregard what I have to say about the book, but here goes anyway.
Shoeless Joe by Canadian writer W.P. Kinsella was the inspiration for Field of Dreams. Published in 1982, the novel, which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, tells the story of Ray Kinsella, an Iowa insurance salesman turned farmer, who hears the voice of a baseball announcer instructing him to turn his cornfield into a baseball stadium, because, “If you build it, he will come.”
The book is far more expansive, and dare I say meandering, than the film, featuring characters the screenwriters dropped to get a cleaner, more focused narrative. One such character is Eddie Scissons, the former owner of Ray’s farm, who bills himself as the Oldest Living Chicago Cub. Another is Ray’s identical twin Richard, whom he hasn’t seen for 15 years, since at the age of 16, he had a fistfight with their father and left home.
The writer whom Ray Kinsella kidnaps in Shoeless Joe is a fictional version of J.D. Salinger
But the most consequential character change from the book is that Ray does not “kidnap” the fictional writer Terrence Mann, author of the radical novel, The Boat Rocker, but a fictionalized version of the real-life writer, J.D. Salinger, who wrote A Cather in the Rye. In fact, Kinsella once told The Des Moines Register that the working title of the book was The Kidnapping of J.D. Salinger. This choice creates problems for Kinsella’s narrative which he never completely overcomes. That is, the portrayal of Salinger must be human enough for the reader to believe, but benign enough so Salinger would not sue for infringement. Thus, J.D. Salinger, whose name suggests edgy and subversive, is rendered bland enough to fade into the kitchen wallpaper.
If you admire Field of Dreams, as I do, for the clarity of Ray’s internal conflict, i.e., the regret he harbors over the distance he put between himself and his father, and how they never understood each other, and how Ray has a burning desire to bridge eternity to close that gap, be aware that such clarity does not exist in Kinsella’s book. The novel’s Ray had a warm relationship with Dad. The antagonism was entirely between his twin brother Richard and the dad. Unfortunately, his pugnacious twin comes very late to the narrative, and what he might be thinking is not explored or resolved. As far as the dramatic thru-line is concerned, that character might as well not have existed. Obviously, the film’s developers felt likewise, and made the wise choice of incorporating Richard’s daddy issues into Ray’s character. However, the book, because of the lack of tension between Ray and his dad, fails to deliver the movie’s emotional pay off when the two finally meet.
Now, if you’re a fan of dramatic thru-lines generally, good luck with Shoeless Joe. The novel, at 265 pages is roughly 90 pages of fluff I could have done without. That fluff includes effusive, treacly, yet vague paeans to the love he and his wife, Annie, share. Often. Like constantly. The characters are also a bit frustrating to deal with. If you thought Amy Madigan’s portrayal of the ever-so-chipper-never-complaining-always-supportive wife lacked depth, she’s James Dean in East of Eden compared to Annie in the book. Our narrator, Ray, is a wordy son of a gun with a touch of ADHD. He’s also a far cry from Kevin Costner, who was always a hunk and has matured into a first-rate leading man with intense gravitas, as shown in some fine performances in Open Range, Yellowstone, et al. Ray in the book is very much a beta male, and we get the impression that no matter how much his hair recedes or his frame fills out, he’ll always be a beta. Here’s how Ray Kinsella describes himself:
…it’s just that I’m uncomfortable with most men, especially “men’s men,” who know all about gears, rifles, and how to splice rope. They always make me feel like the new kid on the block, tolerated but not accepted, and they always act as though they have a common secret that I will never be party to.”
It’s hard to imagine Kevin Costner ever harboring such insecurities.
But, you might ask, is Shoeless Joe at least a fun read? Well, it’s not going to hurt you. The book, as you would expect from the film, is imaginative, and at times humorous and heartfelt. But it suffers from Kinsella’s too earnest desire to construct mythology out of snippets of baseball lore laced with random Americana and bound up in weak sentiment. His narrator often (and gratuitously) expresses his disdain for religion, and it’s clear Kinsella (either Ray or W.P. or both) would like to replace church rituals with ritual attendance of baseball games. At one point “Kid” Scissons goes on a rant about baseball as “word” which more than implies a desire for baseball fanaticism to usurp the vaunted station held by sacred scripture in the public consciousness. How a diversionary pastime might form the basis for a moral society while providing a salvific vision giving hope to the hopeless is not explained in the character’s flimsy tirade. And yes, I know, this is light fantasy, so we don’t want to crush dandelion fluff under the weight of eschatological ponderings, but the writer who deliberately raises questions cannot retreat behind pleas to his readers “not to think too hard.”
Which brings us to another grating point of style, which is the weird self-referential tone that Kinsella the writer has in relation to Ray Kinsella the narrator, as though the novel is in some measure a fantasy biography that only close relations and insiders can truly appreciate. It also gives the book an aura of an all-too-precious vanity project. And precious, unfortunately, aptly describes much of the prose. So, if you are a fan of masculine writing, and approach Shoeless Joe as a baseball book, you’re going to have a tough time sifting through a seemingly endless procession of saccharine similes, as Ray tells you how something he preciously feels or observes is preciously like something else.
Still, some of the writing is quite good. There’s a wonderful passage towards the very end, a speech given by Salinger about how visitors will come from all over drawn by their dreams, that rivals the prose of Jack Kerouac, whose influence is felt throughout.
My bottom line for Shoeless Joe is that the inspiration for the story deserves a better book, and W.P. Kinsella is lucky to have gotten so good a film made from it. Today, perhaps the only use for Kinsella’s novel is to instruct would-be screenwriters on how to take a cluttered, meandering story with potential and help it find its heart for the big screen.
Disclaimer: Links in this column may be affiliate links. If you click on an affiliate link, the author receives a small commission on purchasesfor a limited time at no additional cost to you. These commissions help ensure future posts. Thank you.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, I invited you to read the other posts on books made into film, including two by Hitchcock and two noir-ish Bogeys.
Humphrey Bogart struggles In a Lonely Place; terrorizes in The Desperate Hours
From The Petrified Forest to The Harder They Fall, Humphrey Bogart was the undisputed King of Film Noir. As Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Bogey set the tone for hard-boiled gumshoes navigating “the great wrong place” and surviving the intrigues of the deadly femme fatale. In Key Largo, he embodied the soul-dead weariness of a disillusioned crusader, who’d concluded the world was just too rotten to save. Bogart was so noir, he could shed the shadows and fog, defying the disinfecting powers of sunlight, to play betrayal, corruption and revenge on the picturesque streets of San Francisco. In Dark Passage, with the help of a fortuitous self-defenestration, and after the necessary extermination of underworld vermin no one would miss, Bogart extricates himself from peril and achieves one of the rare happy endings in a film that is nevertheless truly noir.
That said, despite Humphrey Bogart’s curriculum vitae—or perhaps because of it—I have trouble accepting the following films as full-blooded noir. They’re missing too many elements I consider essential: the femme fatale, the underworld lurking beneath the respectable world, and the false step the hero takes to plunge himself into danger we know will ultimately be fatal. I know, I know, Dark Passage broke some rules, but it cleaved to others. In my admittedly subjective opinion, these films are not scrupulously noir; although noir—ish, they are more mainstream suspense thrillers. I welcome contrary opinions in the comment section below.
So, without further ado, let’s get started.
Theatrical trailer for In a Lonely Place, 1950
In a Lonely Place — Directed by Nicholas Ray, and loosely based on the 1947 novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place (1950) features the best performance of Gloria Grahame’s career and what many have called the most complex performance of Humphrey Bogart’s career. Ray first. A reliable and often interesting director, Ray is generally not recognized as a great director. His most famous film is Rebel Without a Cause, which for me grows more tedious with each viewing. Essentially The Breakfast Club with blood, Rebel tells a cloying tale of misunderstood/ mistreated teens who bond as outcasts, and is only elevated from obscurity by its talented cast, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, who went on to better things before dying tragically (one a definite homicide, the other…eeeehhhhh), and James Dean, who achieved legendary status with fine acting, prematurely truncated by reckless driving.
Ray also directed a string of notable films, including They Live by Night (not They Drive by Night with Bogart), Knock on Any Door (with Bogart), The Flying Leathernecks (a serviceable John Wayne vehicle), The Lusty Men (not a porno, but an insightful look at rodeo performers with a great cast), The True Story of Jesse James (which no one really believes is true, but at least veers off the beaten Hollywood path of Robin Hood redux to depict James, played by Robert Wagner, as a murderous psychopath), 55 Days at Peking (in which 54 days are spent waiting for something to happen) and King of Kings (unfairly maligned as I Was a Teenage Jesus—Jeffrey Hunter was 36, older than Jesus himself). A solid career that deserves props if not effusive accolades. There may be underappreciated gems in Ray’s career that I haven’t yet discovered, but of the films I’ve seen, In a Lonely Place is the best.
US postage stamp dedicated to Bogart
Reclusive Dickson (Dix) Steele is a Hollywood, crime-film screenwriter, so absorbed in his work that he’s teetering on the brink between passionate romantic and psychotic strangler. When he’s linked to the victim of a late night murder, his new paramour, Grahame, is rightly unnerved. Complicating matters is Dix’s relationship with a homicide detective and his wife, who wonder if he might have slipped the rail.
Bogart, who practically owned the patent on cynical detachment, plumbs depths unimaginable from his prior roles. Scratch Rick Blaine, you’ll find a wounded narcissist; but you’d have to rent a backhoe to unearth Dix Steele (which, yes, I know is porno name to rival Dirk Diggler, but I’m trying not to go there). My point is that tough guy Bogey was more vulnerable as Dix than in any other role I’ve seen. And that’s not to say Bogart was an actor who relied on machismo or braggadocio. He often conceded the false facades of his characters to enrich the role. Remarkably enough, Louise Brooks, an actress who claimed to be an intimate of Bogart, said that Dix Steele came closest to the real Bogart she knew.
For her part, Gloria Grahame had a wide ranging and mostly underappreciated career playing supporting roles. Most moviegoers will recognize her as Violet Bix in It’s a Wonderful Life or Ado Annie in Oklahoma! An imperfect beauty, Grahame was relegated to secondary roles, but her skills shined in such noteworthy films as The Bad and the Beautiful (my favorite Kirk Douglas film) and Crossfire, an intense psychological drama centered around antisemitism. Grahame met Ray when she played in his second film, A Woman’s Secret. The two later married after an adulterous affair resulted in pregnancy. Thanks to Ray’s insistence that Grahame play the part of Laurel Grey, In a Lonely Place gave her the rare chance at a lead female. Judging by her superb handling of the nuances of her character, she should have had more. Grahame died young at age 57, a death sensitively portrayed by the lovely Annette Benning in a film worth viewing.
Yet the script from which Ray worked and the roles Bogart and Graham play are departures from the novel. In a Lonely Place was Hughes’ third book adapted to the screen. Her 1942 novel, The Fallen Sparrow was filmed in 1943, and her 1946 novel Ride the Pink Horse, also filmed with alacrity in 1947, produced a minor noir gem. Published in 1947, In aLonely Place had too may sharp edges for classic Hollywood, thus, changes to the plot and characterizations were necessary.
Cover of the Penguin Classics edition
In Hughes’ novel, Dix is not a waning screenwriter in need of a hit. He’s a poseur, much like Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s popular series of novels, but without being light in the loafers. It’s also clear from the very first pages that Dix is hiding a deep secret related to a series of stranglings in the West Hollywood area. Laurel, the Grahame role, is less important to this narrative, which consists mostly of Dix’s internal monologue as he concedes, denies, admits, retracts, and rationalizes thoughts related to the homicides his best friend Brub is investigating. Dix is the classic unreliable narrator, and the dramatic irony between what he admits and what we readers come to realize creates an unnerving air of suspense.
While the movie is certainly worth viewing, Hughes’ novel is a masterpiece in crime fiction. Hughes invites the reader into the disturbed psyche of her protagonist and proceeds to tease, titillate, disappoint, cajole, offend, frighten and evoke pity. I must admit that, early in, I wondered if I could keep reading, because the lonely place that Dix inhabited was bringing me to a dark place that I didn’t want to be in. My fertile imagination was filling in the gaps that Hughes had tastefully left empty. I’m glad I stuck with this book, although I now need to take a break from noir-ish reading for mental health reasons. My recommendation: dive in. A short stay In A Lonely Place is well worth the visit.
The Desperate Hours, 1955 theatrical trailer
The Desperate Hours — Twenty-five-year-old writer Joseph Hayes won the Trifecta with this 1954 thriller. His first novel, it was a bestseller. The next year, he adapted it as a stage play which starred Paul Newman and Karl Malden, ran for 212 performances on Broadway, and won the 1955 Tony Award for Best Play. That same year, producer/director William Wyler had Hayes adapt that stage play as a film starring Humphrey Bogart and Frederick March. That’s a lot of mileage from a single idea, reportedly based on a real-life incident. But if that wasn’t enough, the movie was remade for TV in 1967 and got a theatrical reboot as Desperate Hours in 1990, this time starring Mickey Rourke and Anthony Hopkins.
The original film is a taut thriller about a suburban household invaded by three escaped convicts who hold a family hostage for a couple of days. The tension in the story relies heavily on the unlikely decision by the ringleader to keep up appearances by letting the head of the household and his 19-year-old daughter go about their business outside the home, while he keeps a gun poised over the wife and 10-year-old son. Wyler also goes a bit far out of his way to make the Liberal orthodox point that good people don’t settle their differences with guns. But for the most part, given the fine performances by the cast, led by Bogart and Frederick March, the film works as a suburban nightmare.
Cover of The Desperate Hours featuring film cast
As for the book, I found it engrossing, with much more depth of character and many more moving parts than the film. The characterizations in the book are very different from the actors chosen for the film. Glenn Griffin, the ringleader, is described as young and tall, which is hardly the impression a viewer gets from the 54-year-old Bogart. (And though Paul Newman was young when he originated the role on Broadway, he’s also on the short side.) Jesse Webb, the Sheriff’s Deputy hunting the fugitives is described as young, tall and lean. One gets the impression of a young James Stewart, not the middle-aged Arthur Kennedy we get in the movie. But perhaps the greatest difference is the depth of character and consequential action taken by the daughter’s young boyfriend. Played in the film by Gig Young, he basically exists to be annoyed by the girl’s odd behavior. In the book, he’s a combat veteran who’s spurred to action.
The book suffers a bit by relying on characters making silly decisions to elevate the tension, but overall, it’s a fun escapist read that will surprise you here and there and draw you into the conflict, even if you’ve seen the film.
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