Words and Pictures

While on vacation this last week, I had time to do some reading of crime novels, a genre I love, and I’m convinced that the greatest living practitioner of the species is Elmore Leonard.  In my book he writes the best dialog and nearly the best prose of anybody going.  Many of his novels and short stories have been made into films, most notably perhaps 3:10 to Yuma (twice!), Hombre, Out of Sight, and Get Shorty. But there’s a whole passel more, a total of twenty two or so, and you can peruse the entire list at Leonard’s Wikipedia entry.

While he may be the crime writer with the most works adapted to film (possible exception: Agatha Christie), it’s still his writing that stands out for me.  Although critics tend to single out his dialog, his expository passages have a rhythm and velocity all their own.  Often playing fast and loose with the rules of grammar — prepositions being especially expendable — he’s been known to say to budding writers “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

Leonard has published upwards of forty novels, and I’ve read a fair number of them, so when I go to the bookstore to pick one up, I have to be careful not to get one I’ve already read.  It’s not that they’re all alike, but that I’m really bad at remembering titles (I have the same problem with Robert Parker and James Lee Burke).  This time, heading up into the mountains, I picked up “The Hot Kid” (HarperCollins, available in paperback here) from 2005.

It’s a departure from his usual locales of L.A. or Detroit mean streets: it takes place in the 1930s during prohibition, and the bank robbing craze of the great depression.  It’s not one of his best — it runs in fits and starts and tries to cover a little too much temporal ground.  But it set up a frisson in my head with regard to a movie I saw this summer: Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.

Carl Webster, the hero of “The Hot Kid,” is a U.S. Marshall who’s job is to hunt down bank robbers such as the likes of Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson.  When he hears that John Dillinger has been killed after a Chicago showing of W.S. Van Dyke’s Manhattan Melodrama, he goes to see the film with his father Virgil and Virgil’s live in maid.  Here’s Leonard’s description of the film, as seen through his characters’ eyes:

Manhattan Melodrama. Clark Gable is Blackie.  William Powell is Jim.  Myrna Loy is Eleanor.  They said Myrna Loy was one of Dillinger’s favorites.  Muriel Evans is Tootsie, the platinum blonde, and she ain’t bad.  Blackie loses Eleanor to Jim, because Jim’s such a swell guy.  But it’s okay with Blackie because he and Jim were boyhood pals and are still close friends, even though they’re on opposite sides of the law, Blackie’s a gangster and Jim a prosecuting attorney and finally the governor.  Blackie bumps off Jim’s assistant, a snake who has evidence that would keep Jim from winning the governor’s seat.  Blackie is tried and convicted, sentenced to die in the the electric chair.  Jim, now the governor, could commute his sentence to life, but won’t because he lives by the letter of the law.  Eleanor tells Jim if Blackie hadn’t plugged his assistant in the men’s room at Madison Square Garden, witnessed by a blind beggar, he wouldn’t of been elected governor.  Jim still won’t budge.  Eleanor can’t believe he won’t help his friend.  She leaves Jim, unable to continue being his wife.  At the last moment, Jim caves in, commutes Blackie’s sentence to life.  But Blackie won’t accept it.  If he doesn’t go to the chair, Jim will have to resign his office.  Blackie goes to the chair, Carl thinking during the scene, They’re going to muss his slick hair with the metal skullcap, that part that looks like it was cut into his scalp.  Carl only used a little water.  He’d lost interest knowing what was going to happen.  There was a good scene of Jim and Eleanor getting back together, out in the hall.  Carl felt his eyes dew up just a little.  That Myrna Loy was all right.

On the trip home Virgil said “You believe a guy sentenced to die would turn down getting off?”

“Uh-unh,” Carl said.  “Except Blackie said he’d rather fry than spend the rest of his life inside.  That could be.”

Virgil said “I wanted to see more of Tootsie.  I saw her in some Westerns, Muriel … something.”

“Evans,” Carl said.

They all thought the plot was okay, even if it wasn’t believable, since it was a movie.

“You notice,” Carl said, “how Blackie jabbed the gun as he fired it?  That jabbing doesn’t help any.”

“I’ll tell you something,” Narcissa said.  “That boat, the big excursion boat catching fire, the two boys become orphans and live together a while?  It was Irish families on the boat in the movie.  It was 1906 and it’s true.  But it was Germans it happened to, not Irish people.  I read about it.”

The thing is, in Mann’s film they show Dillinger (Johnny Depp) watching the movie, and the emotions flitting across his face are like a master class in subtle acting.  Mann’s scene is designed to show the complex, inner workings of the outlaw, the flashes of sardonic recognition as he sees something of himself on the screen, and to foreshadow what’s just about to happen.

The aim of Leornard’s scene is at once simpler and perhaps more difficult to accomplish: to accurately portray the response of ordinary folks to a B-grade Hollywood movie, and say something about the art of movie-making at the same time.  Which scene is more “realistic” or “true,” I have no idea.  What I do know is that even given Mann’s painstaking production design, all his minutely-detailed historical recreation, Leonard holds his own in evoking his characters’ response to  the flick in a particular time and place.  And he does it all in barely 400 words.