Word: noir
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...currently chic for fancy novelists to slum it in the lower genres, the way Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a peasant and milk cows. Sebastian Faulks just wrote a James Bond novel; Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union was a noir mystery set in an alternate universe. Some writers find the discipline invigorating: look at The Road, Cormac McCarthy's fling with apocalyptic science fiction. Some don't: Martin Amis' Night Train was an undercooked attempt at hard-boiled detective fiction. It turns out that trashy books are as hard to write as good ones...
Letts' writing inspirations have ranged from Tennessee Williams to Oklahoma noir novelist Jim Thompson--and, not least, his own stage roles. "Acting teaches me so much about theater," he says. "I played George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Atlanta. That's a play I have known intimately my whole life. But until you really crawl inside of it and see how it works, it's not part of you. I know I'm a better playwright as a result of acting." He has returned the favor; August provides 13 juicy roles for the members of Steppenwolf...
...might even call it touching--if the term didn't seem so out of place in Letts' oeuvre. An actor who began writing plays in the early '90s, he has turned out two slices of nasty trailer-park noir, Killer Joe and Bug; one spiritual-quest play with kinky twists, Man from Nebraska; and now, with August, a ferocious, giant-size family drama in which the gathering for Dad's funeral turns into a donnybrook of revelations, recriminations and extreme combat. It may be the best American play of the new century. It has snagged nearly every honor in sight...
...Dassin had a lucky bounce when producer Mark Hellinger hired him to direct Brute Force, and the director rose to the challenge with one of the boldest, tautest films of the postwar crime cycle. Finally, he was in the gnarled noir territory that suited him. The story of a vicious prison guard (Hume Cronyn) and the angry cons under his boot, Brute Force is a sharp evocation of unrest in a totalitarian state. It also set up motifs Dassin would keep returning to. Here, as in Rififi, the lead character (Burt Lancaster) is a criminal who has our sympathy...
...When called by Congress to testify about his early membership in the Communist Party, Dassin skipped to London, where Fox production chief Darryl Zanuck let him shoot the Brit-noir Night and the City. It stars Richard Widmark (who died, also in his 90s, a week before Dassin) as an American tout aiming for the big score, then fleeing from its consequences. In his goon period, with that weird smile (his upper lip raised as if by invisible fish hooks), and outfitted in a checkered jacket so loud it practically barks, Widmark is the perfect sucker in a nightscape made...