Keeping your head down may be the best strategy...
Written: Jul 03 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: prose, plot, characterization
Cons: a fatalism abhorrent to many
The Bottom Line: with a family and a milieu like the piano player's.
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: David Goodis - Shoot the Piano Player |
One of my favorite American book titles is Wright Morris's Real Losses, Imaginary Gains. It seems that it would serve well for the collected works of David Goodis (1917-1967). With the partial exception of Dark Passage (in the movie version of which Lauren Bacall managed to redeem the escaped convict played by Humphrey Bogart), Goodis's fiction portrayed people with grim-to-grisly pasts, no future, and dubious if sensation-filled presents: the world of doom and gloom of cinéma noir.
Like that of Chester Himes (a noir noir writer), Goodis's fiction was much more highly regarded in France than in the United States. After leaving Hollywood in 1950, Goodis published thirteen novels, all paperback originals (that is "pulp fiction").
His writing was lyrical and cinematic. Goodis worked for Warner Brother's during the late 1940s (he did not receive screen credit for adapting "Dark Passage," but did receive screen credit for adapting a W. Somerset Maugham story as "Unfaithful" (also in 1947) and for adapting his novel The Burglar (1957, with Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea—now there's a pairing made in hell!).
The most famous adaptation of fiction by Goodis was François Truffaut's (1960) second film, "Tirez sur le pianiste," Although the movie was not a commercial success in either France or the United States, subsequent editions in English of the novel that was published in 1956 as Down There, have used the (literal) English translation of Truffaut's title: "Shoot the Piano Player."
Having just reconsidered the movie (a third of a century after having first considering it), I was curious about the book. I was surprised to see how much of the movie drew directly on the book (including my favorite two lines: "Even when he walks with someone at his side, he walks alone" and "They aren't bulletproof"—the latter an explanation of why parents were sent away from the remote family farm in which two of their sons hole up to make a stand they expect will involve bullets flying).
Although called "Eddie" instead of "Charlie," the emotionally numb saloon pianist is the same. In both cases, the reader/viewer learns that the pianist had a rising career as a concert pianist that his wife put out to launch, and then withdrew into self-loathing. Having failed her, the pianist crawled out of the gutter into a gin joint.
As Plyne, the bouncer/manager reflects: "Three years, and aside from the music he made, his presence at the Hut meant nothing. It was almost as though he wasn't there and the piano was playing all by itself. Regardless of the action at the tables or the bar, the piano man was out of it, not even an observer. He had his back turned and his eyes on the keyboard, content to draw his pauper's wages and wear pauper's rags.... Even the smile was something neutral. It was never aimed at a woman. It was aimed very far out there beyond all tangible targets."
Plyne is astounded when Eddie gets up to try to keep Plyne from hurting a man who has staggered into the Hut. As in the movie, the novel opens with a man being chased and knocking himself out for a moment by colliding with a lightpost while looking back. I didn't think that it was Eddie's brother in the movie (I need to look again!), but it is in the novel. Eddie tells himself not to get involved, that his brothers have always been trouble, yet he bestirs himself out of his shell to help Turley escape an altercation with Plyne and then to escape the two men who have been chasing him. In both the movie and the novel, it is puzzling that the pursuers who do not catch the man after he knocks himself out...
In both book and movie, a waitress named Lena has feeling for the piano player, though he never before noticed them. The novel provides more of the piano player's back story. Both make clear that he failed the wife who made his concert career advance by bedding an impresario. In the book, the reader learns that Eddie learned to play the piano from his usually drunken father, and was the "white sheep" of the family.
"The mother called them [her first two sons, Clifton and Turley] bad boys, then shrugged and let it go at that. The mother was a habitual shrugger who'd run out of gas in her early twenties, surrendered to farmhouse drudgery, to the weeds and beetles and fungus that lessened the melon crop [on their South Jersey melon farm] each year. The father never worried about anything. The father was a slothful, languid, easy-smiling drinker."
Eddie's "early childhood was mostly on the passive side. As the youngest of three brothers, he was more or less a small, puzzled spectator, unable to understand Clifton's knavery or Turley's rowdyism." They did not pick on him and seemed to like having him around. When he won a scholarship to the Curtis Music Institute, they pelted the car that drove him away with stones.
Just as Eddie's career was beginning he was drafted into the Army and became one of "Merill's Marauders" in Burma. Thus, he had killed men before—sometimes with bullets, more often with his bayonet. Even with this background, it is surprising when Eddie takes on Plyne. Even more than the movie, the book has an extended knock-down, drag-out, inadvertently fatal fight starting in the Hut and flowing out back.
Besides not having any songs and less back story (the back story of why the two men are chasing Turley as well as Eddie's youth), the major difference is the absence of Fido (a boy, not a dog) and that the two men pursuing Turley are considerably more seriously dangerous than in the movie (when Fido easily dominates them). One is a particularly crack shot. Also, they are more heavily armed.
Eddie's relationships with Lena and with an acrobatic prostitute who lives in the same rooming house as he does and hangs out at the Hut are pretty much the same, and the doom is the same. The glimpses into what the piano player is thinking are very similar (voice-overs in the movie). The climax of the novel is briefer than that of the movie, and the coda of the movie comes right out of the novel.
The movie mixes (often jarringly) existentialist anguish, gangster menace, comedy, with quite a bit of saloon music. The novel stays in the doom-laden noir world (of the Point Richmond section of Philadelphia rather than in whatever seedy section of Paris Truffaut shot in), with an escape doomed to disaster to snowy woods and the pianist's childhood home that has never been a safe refuge (in South Jersey in the movie, somewhere outside Grenoble in the movie).
Early on, Lena tells Eddie, "You never seem to know or care what's really happening. Always tuned in on some weird kinda wave lengthy that only you can hear." Giving love another go(-round!) shows Eddie that being numb is better, that he is a menace to anyone who attempts to love him or to help him. (What happens to the brothers and their pursuers whom they had double-crossed, Goodis does not bother to report.)
As what the French call a roman dur, Don't Shoot the Piano Player is perfect. It shows a seamy amoral world, has some sex, a lot of violence, seeming hope, implacable fate. The characters are individuated, their ' motivations seem plausible (including Eddie's faint but residual family loyalty trumping his knowledge that any involvement of any sort with his brothers is a terrible idea) and the plot moves right along. I think that I have quoted enough to give an idea of Goodis's hard-boiled but not flat prose style.
Under its original tile, Down There is also available in the Library of the Americas, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, along with novels by Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Willeford, and Chester Himes.
©2006, Stephen O. Murray
Recommended:
Yes
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