As noted in the case of Audrey Totter, the camera’s eye technique used in the film made it easier to be noticed. This factor proportionately increased in the case of someone
blonde and beautiful. This worked not only in Totter’s favor but for another blonde per-former hoping to use the film as a launching pad toward bigger parts.
Lila Leeds had come to Hollywood from her native Kansas and, with her flawless fea-tures and excellent figure, obtained a job as a hatcheck girl at the famous Sunset Strip night-club Ciro’s. Before long Leeds was married to Jack Little, a bandleader and racehorse owner.
A problem arose when Little failed to tell her the truth about a divorce that never occurred, providing her with grounds for an annulment.
Leeds took an acting course at the Bliss-Hayden School of the Theatre in Beverly Hills.
After appearing in a school production farce called Campus Honeymoon she received what she described as “three good offers” among the contingent of Hollywood talent scouts who viewed the production, signing with MGM.
Director Montgomery provided Leeds with a great opportunity to be seen as the camera followed her in and out of scenes. Before long she became known throughout America for a reason MGM did not appreciate. After meeting Robin Ford, who unsuccessfully pursued her for a date, he aroused her interest by introducing her to his movie star friend Robert Mitchum.
The evening of August 31, 1948, Mitchum and Ford visited the Laurel Canyon home she was renting and called upon Leeds and his girlfriend, dancer Vicki Evans. There were other visitors as well — detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department. They confiscated the marijuana being smoked and made arrests, taking the foursome to police headquar-ters.19
After finding both Mitchum and Leeds guilty at trial, Judge Clement D. Nye sentenced them to one year in county jail, but suspended both of them for a period of two days. He mandated that 60 days be served within the confines of county jail. Mitchum spent his jail time at the state honor farm in Castaic, 40 miles north of Los Angeles. He came out weighing less and proclaimed to be much more fit than when he arrived.
Many in Hollywood circles speculated that Mitchum’s career would be doomed by the scandal. Paramount studio boss Hal Wallis, fearing such a result, refused to allow his top leading lady Liz Scott to work opposite a performer convicted of a felony on the grounds that she may suffer from a ripple effect from the negative public reaction to Mitchum.
Mitchum’s leading lady from Out of the Past, Jane Greer, was brought in at the last moment to appear with him in The Big Steal.
The public reacted favorably to Mitchum for two reasons. For one thing there was great suspicion that he had been set up in a sting. Second, he bore up under the circumstances without complaining, doing his time and returning to civilian life without bitterness or rancor.
Mitchum headed for Mexico to report for work on The Big Steal for director Don Siegel. The caper film proved to be a major RKO success upon its release in 1949. Not only was Mitchum vindicated with the public, which flocked to theaters to see him, he ultimately received good news from the justice system. On January 31, 1951, just after Mitchum com-pleted his parole period, Judge Clement D. Nye, who had found Mitchum guilty and sent him to jail, issued a statement quashing the conviction: “After an exhaustive investigation of the evidence and testimony presented at the trial the court orders that the verdict of guilty be set aside and that a plea of not guilty be entered and that the information or com-plaint be dismissed.”20
Lila Leeds was not destined to experience the same career surge as Mitchum after doing her 60-day stretch. She starred in an anti-marijuana film that was an attempt at an updated
version of the 1936 cult classic Reefer Madness. Instead a flop resulted for Wild Weed, released in 1949, the same year that Mitchum enjoyed success with The Big Steal. Wild Weed’s only claim to fame (other than Leeds’s appearance) was that it marked the film debut of prominent character actor Jack Elam. Leeds’s career bowed out in 1949 with an unbilled role in another forgettable low-budget film, The House Across the Street.
The Outsider and Film Noir
At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem. He is the hole-in-corner man.— Colin Wilson, The Outsider
George Haight, producer of Lady in the Lake, employed Raymond Chandler to adapt his novel to the screen. When he began reading portions of Chandler’s screenplay in progress Haight expressed surprise. He liked the original product sufficiently to want to develop a film from it. The producer expressed surprise to Chandler that the screenplay pages written by the detective writer were veering considerably from an original work he admired.
It took little time for what interest Chandler might have originally possessed in adapting his novel to dissipate. Ultimately he withdrew from the project, upon which Fisher was summoned like a relief pitcher from the bullpen to provide George Haight and his direc-tor-star Robert Montgomery with a shooting script.
Once the film was released and Chandler saw it, his response was the same as that of some of his other filmed works. Chandler disliked Lady in the Lake, but, if anything, Haight and Montgomery could well have considered his reaction good news. After all, Chandler abhorred another screenplay on which he worked. In the case of Lady in the Lake Chandler sought to have his name removed altogether from the project, as a result of which Fisher received sole screen credit.
The other screenplay for which Chandler ultimately received credit occurred after his one and only collaborative effort with screen giant Alfred Hitchcock in the powerful 1951 release Strangers on a Train. Chandler seethed with disgust over what critics and viewers consider not only one of Hitchcock’s finest efforts, but one of the best movies ever made by anyone.
There is ample evidence that Chandler fit into the category of a definitive outsider.
He never appeared to enjoy any aspect of screenwriting except for conversations with fellow writers at Paramount, and that had less to do with working on a screenplay than enjoyable conversation with members of the craft in general. When it came to dealing with those in positions of creative authority, be they directors or producers, Chandler was ill at ease.
An exception was when he worked with fellow Dulwich College graduate John House-man when the latter was producing The Blue Dahlia. Since Alan Ladd, the most popular male star on the Paramount lot, was faced with service recall, the studio was highly desirous of getting one more film under his belt before he left. As it turned out, Ladd was never obliged to face any World War II combat action and was released shortly afterward, but the tension was on during that period to get the film made promptly.
Many Hollywood observers were convinced that Chandler saw an opportunity and 103
grabbed it. He told his friend Houseman that the only way he could deliver a script under such pressure was to work at home. In that respect Chandler resembled William Faulkner, who detested the obligation of working in the formal office-style atmosphere of a studio writer. Chandler and Faulkner both made their mark working at home as fiction authors writing books and gravitated later into the cinema field. Each professed a marked discomfort for that type of writing compared to the free-flowing atmosphere of working on your own typewriter in your private residence.
Chandler insisted on working at home while the studio supplied a driver to pick up pages of the work in progress. He explained that it was necessary for him to be fortified with alcohol to be able to deliver a completed script under such a tight deadline. The game plan was to ply himself with alcohol and work on the script, then take breaks as necessity dictated to sleep off the alcoholic effects, after which he would return to the script.
Although the conditions were met by Paramount and the script was done by Chandler without any conferring or any other type of interference, he was dissatisfied with the results of The Blue Dahlia. And, despite the fact that Alan Ladd clicked with leading lady Veronica Lake, Chandler had a profound dislike for her and referred to the Florida-born blonde star as “Moronica Lake.”
While the film, directed by George Marshall, was a commercial success, the script was not up to the Chandler standards exemplified by the two classics on which he labored, his collaborative effort with Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity, and Hitchcock’s masterpiece Strangers on a Train. Then again, with not one but two films ranking among the greatest of all time, it is also safe and reasonable to state that such lofty perches are visited only on rare occasions, even by the finest talents.
As for The Blue Dahlia, a major complaint was that Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd’s initial meeting (when she picked him up while she observed him walking in the rain) was seen as pat. To those critics the initial meeting of Paramount’s popular stars could have been invested with a more thematic foundation.
In terms of what the script and finished film product provided, it contained solid pacing with good characters. Along with Ladd and Lake, William Bendix, Howard da Silva, and Doris Dowling all contributed commendable efforts. (More will be written about The Blue Dahlia later in this chapter.)
The act of writing is a solitary pursuit. It is therefore understandable that so many writers were solitary listeners and stood outside anything embodying a social milieu main-stream. When they did mix in social gatherings, it was often with the purpose of listening and understanding, then writing about their observations. As Ken Annakin told me about the great Somerset Maugham, when he attended parties, “The other guests were terrified.
He would sit, watch, and listen. They knew that he would be writing about them and he did.”
It is axiomatic that, for a writer to have subject matter, it necessitates using powers of observation. A direct relationship exists between writing expertise and observation. Ask any diligent reader what sets an excellent writer apart from others in the field and the answer, in one form or other, will come back that the author of consummate skill possesses an eye and ear for detail, along with the requisite skill to set such acquired information on paper.
It was no surprise to anyone familiar with his fascinating and highly unconventional life that British author Colin Wilson in The Outsider, his penetrating work on individuals who combined genius with outsider status, that T.E. Lawrence, known to the world as
“Lawrence of Arabia,” fell into that category. Despite failing to meet the required minimum
height standards for the British Army, Lawrence not only found a way to get in, but even-tually gained an international reputation for the ingenious manner in which he took a group of Arab irregulars and turned them into a desert guerrilla style force that aided in overcoming Turkey’s Ottoman Empire in World War I.
Not only was Lawrence a natural outsider who did things in his own particular manner, like so many in that distinct category he had a strong penchant for recording his experiences on paper. While some would question the veracity of certain content in his masterpiece The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, none disputed his gift for linking event and detail in a colorful fashion. Lawrence’s life was seemingly made for film.
Fortunately when the time arrived it was a fellow Britisher, genius, cinema director, and noted outsider named David Lean, an international traveling vagabond, who formed a creative bond with the long-deceased desert warrior with the 1962 classic Lawrence of Arabia the brilliant result. Playing the lead was a performer known for blazing his own trails and marching to his own tune: Peter O’Toole.
Lawrence would ultimately retreat from the same society in which he had become an international figure. He became an enlisted man in the British Royal Air Force. Lawrence even took a new name, that of Shaw. The legendary playwright and social critic George Bernard Shaw and his wife became his adoptive parents.
Colin Wilson sums up his definition of the outsider in one far-reaching paragraph:
The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their
respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth.1
Wilson’s encounter with the outsider and what produces the species led him to the last published work of H.G. Wells, one of Britain’s most prodigious creative and intellectual talents. It was appropriately titled Mind at the End of its Tether.
Wells explains the obligation humanity feels to clarify the world and ideas to maximum capability: “His renascent intelligence finds itself confronted with strange, convincing real-ities so overwhelming that, were he indeed one of those logical, consistent people we incline to claim we are, he would think day and night in a passion of concentration, dismay and mental struggle upon the ultimate disaster that confronts our species. We are nothing of the sort. We live with reference to past experience, not to future events, however inevitable.”2 Wilson defines Albert Camus, that early champion of Raymond Chandler, as one whose
“tone of indifference” generates throughout his famous work The Stranger. To Wilson, Camus’s outsider “has hardly any feelings at all.”3
When Camus read Chandler he certainly observed a thematic synergy between char-acters of his own, such as Mersault, the Algerian first-person narrator of The Stranger. Chan-dler’s riveting first-person narrative of his alter ego, detective Philip Marlowe, sharply evaluated human nature in a comparable manner to Camus in the aforementioned work.
Chandler’s love-hate relationship with Los Angeles stemmed largely from the fact that a rootless city with a transient population coming largely from elsewhere made it an ideal target.
Apart from his mother, the only person who had any kind of a sharply defining influence on Chandler following his schoolboy days at Dulwich College in London was his wife, Cissy. Theirs was an enduring relationship severed only by her death.