Nightfall (Book) (1947)

Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s, by David Goodis

New York: The Library of America, 2012

Goodis’s novel Nightfall was originally published in 1947.

List of main characters:

Jim Vanning, Navy veteran

Mr. Fraser, police detective

Mrs. Fraser

Martha Gardner

Sam

Pete

John

The image of the front cover is from The Library of America anthology. The page references in this blog post refer to The Library of America publication listed above.

Jim Vanning is a freelance illustrator with serious problems. Right away, in Chapter 1, readers learn that he killed a man in Colorado. He’s thinking about it as does his freelance advertising work in his Manhattan apartment:

. . . [B]ut the one color about which there was no mistake was black. Because black was the color of a gun, a dull black, a complete black, and through a whirl of all the colors coming together in a pool gone wild, the black gun came into his hand and he held it there for a time impossible to measure, and then he pointed the black gun and pulled the trigger and he killed a man. (page 196)

Vanning forces himself to take a break from his work and take a walk outside. It is hot and muggy. A man, a stranger, asks him for a light, and they start a conversation.

The novel then picks up this man’s story, the stranger’s story. He takes a cab back home to his apartment, where his wife asks him about the case and whether he is still tailing Vanning (although she doesn’t mention Vanning’s name). They are Mr. Fraser and Mrs. Fraser. The reader learns later that Fraser is a police detective tailing Vanning because he doesn’t believe he committed the crimes that he is accused of in Colorado.

(This blog post about the novel Nightfall contains spoilers.)

The plot alternates between Vanning and Fraser until their paths cross again toward the end of the novel. Fraser cannot figure out how Vanning is connected to a bank robbery in Seattle, Washington; a homicide in Denver, Colorado; and his current job and residence in New York City. He discusses the case briefly with his wife:

. . . “Three men rob a bank in Seattle. They run away with three hundred thousand dollars. They get as far as Denver. In Denver they register at a hotel under assumed names. They have a contact man in Denver. A smooth manipulator named Harrison. This man Harrison has the job of taking the money, getting it in a safe place or putting it in various channels or something. You follow me?” (pages 222–223)

No one—in Seattle, in Denver, or at Fraser’s headquarters in Manhattan—can figure out what made Vanning rob a bank with these accomplices or what made him commit a murder.

Readers know that Vanning has Fraser on his side, but Vanning doesn’t throughout most of the story. Like many noir protagonists, he is caught in an existential crisis. At a bar near his apartment in Manhattan, he thinks of the meaninglessness of his own life and life in general:

                . . . He wanted to talk to someone. About anything. And again he saw himself in a mirror, this time the mirror behind the bar, and he saw in his own eyes the expression of a man without a friend. He felt just a bit sorry for himself. At thirty–three a man ought to have a wife and two or three children. A man ought to have a home. A man shouldn’t be standing here alone in a place without meaning, without purpose. There ought to be some really good reason for waking up in the morning. There ought to be some impetus, there ought to be something. (page, 206, emphasis added)

Vanning’s existential quandary is alleviated a bit when he meets Martha Gardner in the bar. She agrees to have dinner with Vanning, and they leave for a small restaurant off Fourth Street. But he is still plagued by thoughts of his past and whether he can really believe that his life can change for the better. And his doubts appear to be well founded: Three men, Sam, Pete, and John, stop Vanning and Martha on their way out of the restaurant. One of the men thanks Martha for her work. She was the bait, it seems. Or was she? The three men kidnap Vanning and take him for a ride over the Brooklyn Bridge. They blindfold him before letting him out of the car and taking him to a deserted location.

Vanning escapes from his captors, but he doesn’t know who to trust as a series of events forces him to decide what he must do to protect himself. Readers may know that Fraser is on Vanning’s side, but they don’t know why. And readers, like Vanning, don’t know if he can trust Martha while he tries to figure out what to do about a past that he can remember only imperfectly. Is he guilty of murder and bank robbery? The only person who seems to be sure of Vanning’s innocence to any degree is Fraser, but even he isn’t 100 percent sure. Martha decides to trust Vanning based on what she knows of him since first meeting him in the bar in New York City. But can Vanning trust her?

All of these questions and ambiguities make the novel a great read and very noir. Vanning is in serious trouble, and he isn’t sure how he can get out of it. Outside factors force Vanning to confront his past, and his decisions help push the plot forward when the novel’s time line is in the present. Readers learn to sympathize with his predicament as they follow his every move, and this perspective helps them to sympathize with Martha, too.

Nightfall ends on a rather optimistic note, much more so than The Burglar. I read The Burglar (1953) first, but it was published after Nightfall, which was published in 1947. These are the only two novels that I have read so far by David Goodis, and he seems to have taken a darker view of life as time went on. But Nightfall is still very noir, with its postwar existential crisis and Vanning’s amnesia, which is the result of civilian, not wartime, trauma. Vanning is a veteran, but it’s not his wartime experiences that are giving him a case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The full truth about Vanning isn’t revealed until the final chapter, a very satisfying ending.

I have seen the film noir based on Goodis’s novel Nightfall. Anne Bancroft plays the role of Martha Gardner; in the film, her first name is Marie. The more I see of Bancroft in film noir, the more I can appreciate what she brings to all of her film roles. The film also captures the novel’s existential quandary. It has some great dialogue that exemplifies the confusion and fear for Jim Vanning and Marie Gardner and the role that fate plays in their lives. After Marie reluctantly lets Jim into her apartment, when he still has questions about her role in his abduction by John and Red, he says to her one of my favorite lines in film noir: “Nice place. I’ll try not to bleed over everything.” It captures his cynicism and his fear about her role up to that point. Fate brings Jim Vanning and Marie Gardner together and embroils them in a dangerous situation that neither one of them wants. Fate seems especially cruel to Marie, who is an innocent bystander in Jim’s story. After Jim enters her apartment and they begin talking, she asks the question that many film noir protagonists could ask about their own situation:

• Marie: “Why me?”

• Jim: “I used to ask myself the same question, ‘Why me?’ Because you were unlucky enough to talk to me tonight.”

◊ Click here for my blog post about the film Nightfall.

◊ Click here for my blog post about Goodis’s novel The Burglar.

Nightfall is one of those rare instances for me where the film and the novel each stand on their own merits, which is a bit unusual because I usually like the novel more than the film. On film and in print, it’s a great story.

Murder by Contract (1958)

December 1958 release date

Directed by Irving Lerner

Screenplay by Ben Simcoe

Music by Perry Botkin

Edited by Carlo Lodato

Cinematography by Lucien Ballard

Vince Edwards as Claude

Phillip Pine as Marc

Herschel Bernardi as George

Caprice Toriel as Billie Williams

Michael Granger as Mr. Moon

Cathy Browne as Mary, the secretary

Joseph Mell as Harry, the hotel waiter

Frances Osborne as Miss Wiley, Williams’s former maid

Steven Ritch as the plainclothes officer with the tear gas

Janet Brandt as the woman in the movie theater

Davis Roberts as the clerk at Hall of Records

Don Garrett as James William Mayflower

Gloria Victor as Miss Wexley

Cisco Houston as the rifle salesperson

Distributed by Columbia Pictures

Produced by Orbit Productions

The use of music is very effective in Murder by Contract, much like the zither in The Third Man (1949). The Columbia logo is the first thing to appear on the screen with no sound, just silence. Then the film cuts to the opening credits, which appear over a man (Claude, the contract killer) shaving and getting dressed. Now comes a kicky, whimsical, foreign-sounding guitar score on the soundtrack. This guitar score is the theme music for the film and is repeated throughout. The man continues dressing, with a suit and a tie, and then he shines his shoes. He could be any businessman getting ready for an office job.

After the credits, the film cuts to Claude visiting Mr. Moon and asking him for a job. He says that Mr. Brink sent him. Mr. Moon is skeptical and not very encouraging. From their dialogue, viewers know that Claude isn’t looking for any ordinary business job, although he is dressed in his suit, tie, and shined shoes for this very different interview. He wants a high-paying job to buy a house, so Claude is definitely hard to pigeonhole. He aspires to be a contract killer because he wants the money to afford a middle-class life. As soon as Claude leaves, Mr. Moon calls Mr. Brink. They might be able to use him after all.

Claude completes his initial assignments successfully, and Mr. Brink sends Claude to Los Angeles to kill a witness in a federal trial. Two men, George and Marc, pick him up at the train station. The shot of George and Marc waiting for Claude at the train station is very strange because of the rear projection. It creates the sensation that they are parked on the tracks. And this odd use of rear projection is unfortunately consistent throughout the film. Maybe it worked in 1958, but I found it very distracting. It stood out, perhaps, because everything else about the film is so finely tuned.

And so is Claude. He wants to take his time and conduct some research before he kills his mark. Before he gets to the particulars of the contract hit, George and Marc take (or Claude takes George and Marc) swimming; deep-sea fishing; and to the zoo, the driving range, and the movies. At the movies, Claude slips out of the theater while Marc is preoccupied with the film and George is asleep in his seat. George and Marc return to the hotel room without Claude and discuss what to do next. They finally decide to go looking for him, and when they open the door to the hotel room, Claude is standing on the other side of the threshold. Claude tells them that he tailed them so that he could be sure that no one was tailing any of them.

Claude refuses to allow emotion to enter into his work. He is a professional, and he is good at what he does. He tells Marc and George: “The only type of killing that’s safe is when a stranger kills a stranger. No motive. Nothing to link the victim to the executioner. Now why would a stranger kill a stranger? Because somebody’s willing to pay. It’s business. Same as any other business. You murder the competition. Instead of price cutting, throat cutting. Same thing.” Claude doesn’t care about conscience, religion, family, punishment. He is frightening because he makes a lot of sense on some level. The difference between what he does and what businesspeople do is a very fine line. The risk in his work is high, but the profit is high. He has trained himself well, and he is very convincing. Before long, he is literally in the driver’s seat: George and Marc are letting him drive their car.

Four days before the trial, Claude agrees to see the hit. He learns then that it is a woman. He knew that her name was Billy Williams, but he assumed that it was a man’s name. For the first time in the film, viewers see that Claude is ruffled. He tells Marc and George: “I don’t like women. They don’t stand still. When they move, it’s hard to figure out why or wherefore. They’re not dependable. It’s tough to kill somebody who’s not dependable. I’ll do it, but I want more money.”

Once Claude agrees to the new contract, he is just as meticulous as he was from the start. He tries to learn about Billie’s habits. He learns from her former maid that Billie reads the newspaper in the morning, watches television all day, and plays the piano. She is too afraid to do anything else while she is being guarded by FBI agents. He uses this information to devise his murder plans.

(This blog post about Murder by Contract contains all the spoilers.)

Murder by Contract is a perfect example of why I always say that film noir shows viewers exactly what not to do. The two handlers, George and Marc, want Claude to do what he agreed to do and move on, but Claude is meticulous and wants to do the job right. Against their better instincts, George and Marc let Claude take his time. Before too long, George starts to appreciate Claude’s technique and his sense of humor. Marc grudgingly agrees, but he still raises objections here and there. He still worries that the murder won’t be done before the witness has a chance to testify, but he is the only one. Viewers come to appreciate the camaraderie between Claude, George, and Marc, too. Their banter provides some genuinely funny moments. And then there’s that guitar score that has been used from the opening scene and credits. It is pleasant, whimsical, but it also emphasizes some of Claude’s most gruesome work. It’s another detail that seems to lull viewers into thinking that everything will be okay after all, although nothing is okay for Claude’s victims.

And that’s how the spell, for lack of a better word, is created. No one else enters Claude, George, and Marc’s small circle. If supporting actors appear at all, they aren’t on-screen for very long. They rarely even speak. Instead, the kicky guitar music is heard on the soundtrack, or Claude, George, or Marc are heard speaking whether or not they are in the shot. All three main characters and the viewers are drawn into the small circle.

Everything is meticulously planned and carried out. Claude sees to it. But none of the characters account for fate, coincidence, the long arm of the law, and Claude’s own superstitions (he isn’t the perfect killing machine after all). As soon as the rest of the world intrudes on the criminals’ small circle, their plans blow up in their faces. None of the three main characters survives. I was pretty sure that Claude wouldn’t make it to the closing credits alive, but I have to admit I was surprised that George and Marc didn’t.

And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t enjoy Murder by Contract as much as I thought I would. From a technical perspective, everything worked to perfection. But all that precision and character bonding led only to justice being served in a very violent way. Claude, George, and Marc may have been enjoying themselves, but I grew tired of all that planning and energy expended with nothing more than murder and money as the endgame. Claude’s misogyny grated on me, too. He may have found it difficult to kill a woman, but he is the man for the job of terrorizing her until she wishes she were dead. Murder for Contract is only about eighty minutes long, but it’s a long time to spend with a man like Claude.