SUSPECTS
Jake Gittes
Vivian Sternwood
Noah Cross
L. B. Jeffries
Ilsa Lund
Lars Thorwald
John Clay
Alicia Huberman
Axel Freed
Alexander Sabastian
Eileen Wade
Walker
David Staebler
Chris Rose
Judy Rogers
Ma Jarrett
Kit Carruthers
Cody Jarrett
Waldo Lydecker
Brigid O’Shaughnessy
Laura Hunt
Casper Gutman
Helen Ferguson
Victor Laszlo
Dickson Steele
Richard Blaine
Laurel Gray
Elsa Bannister
Roy Earle
Adeline Loggins
Marie Garson
Henry Oliver Peterson
Norman Bates
Gwen Chelm
Bruno Anthony
Alma McCain
Dolly Schiller
David John Locke
Bernstein
Maureen Cutter
Susan Alexander Kane
Al
Raymond
Joe Gillis
Mary Kane
Max von Mayerling
Sally Bailey
Guy Haines
Gilda Farrell
Pete Lunn
Hank Quinlan
Kitty Collins
Ramon Miguel Vargas
Amy Jolly
Jeff Bailey
Norma Desmond
Bree Daniels
Julian Kay
John Klute
Walter Neff
Mary Ann Simpson
Phyllis Diedrichson
John Ferguson
Wilson Keyes
Judy Barton
Debby Marsh
Smith Ohlrig
Harry Lime
Howard
Kay Corleone
Evelyn Cross Mulwray
Skip McCoy
Harry Moseby
Cora Papadakis
Paula Iverson
Frank Chambers
Travis Bickle
Jimmy Doyle
Frederick Manion
Francine Evans
Mark McPherson
John Converse
George Bailey
Jack Torrane
English-American writer David Thomson was educated at Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. After seven years at Penguin Books, he became a Director of Film Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire between 1977 and 1981. Perhaps best known for his magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson is a prolific writer on film including biographies of David O Selznick and Orson Welles, and two books on Hollywood: Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood.
‘Quite probably, Suspects is the most elaborate and witty piece of fan fiction ever’
- Laurence Phelan, The Independent
‘a dazzling work of narrative invention’
- Laura Miller, Village Voice
‘a work whose power is incremental, whose shadow-America is elaborated step by step’
- Graham Sleight, Strange Horizons read the full review
Wright Morris, Reflection in Oval Mirror, Home Place, Nebraska, 1947
For
Tom Luddy
Is this a novel,
My answer must be both. It is film criticism and movie history, but it is a fiction in which the material (the life) is the world created in a genre of movies. This is not just a way of warning readers of the rules of the game. It is a reminder that fiction has no hold unless we believe in it, and that movies use the exact poignant imprint of so many glances and faces to make a dream. So try to read without having to slap me, and ask how much your own “real” experience treasures imaginary beings and absurd possibilities.
David Thomson
November 1984
“Each man’s life touches so many other lives.”
—Clarence the angel, in It’s a Wonderful Life
“Round up the usual suspects.”
—Captain Louis Renault, in Casablanca
2006
INTRODUCTION
People ask how I wrote Suspects, or why? They find it hard to imagine how someone felt any need for such an odd book – no matter that they may have been entertained by it; no matter that I found its form obvious and even necessary from the start. Without that, I wouldn’t have done it. Not that I had understood what was happening. Rather, some force had pulled me along. And when it became clear at the end, I was as surprised as anyone. When the book first appeared, in 1985, no one thought to ask me about that process. But they wondered whether they were to regard the book as a novel, or as something else. Both, I said. But now, twenty-one years later, perhaps some discussion of that will be helpful.
A man named Jay Landesman approached me. He had read The Biographical Dictionary of Film (1975), and he wondered if there might be some future in the idea of a biographical dictionary of movie characters. I was intrigued by the suggestion for at least two reasons: I enjoyed the format of the Dictionary, where I might write an entry in a single sitting – so that you could feel the arc or the story of a career; and secondly, I always wanted to write more fiction.
So I thought about it and I came to the conclusion that covering all film characters would be impossible and unproductive – I don’t know if genres really mix. How could Henry Fonda as he is in The Lady Eve rub shoulders with Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath? On the other hand, the Fonda from The Wrong Man would certainly hope to meet the one from 12 Angry Men. So I proposed to take one genre, and I knew it had to be film noir, if only because at that moment (about seven years after I had started to live in America) it meant the most to me. Noir seemed the closest to life in America, and if I was ever going to try to write an American novel then chances are it would be noirish. You see, I had written a couple of novels in England, but I felt uneasy at first about writing American dialogue or American English. But starting from noir – and knowing it quite well – there was a way of talking that I could begin to imitate or make my own.
Fine, said Mr Landesman. Draw up a list of likely characters – round up the usual suspects, I thought. And I did that, without great difficulty, because the genre is crowded with lively people, especially if you’re willing to drop down (or rise) to the level of supporting characters. So I had a list and that’s when the imp of mischief, or creativity, or just making life difficult for oneself, spoke to me. I judged that I could supply this list with ‘lives’, but before I’d begun I felt a twinge of boredom – as if to say, well if that’s all there is to it…
I said to myself, suppose ‘he’ had known ‘her’? It doesn’t matter who the he and the she were. My plan was to draw a brief biography of these characters. So you’d have Jake Gittes, say – and I remember he was one of the samples in the first proposal – from birth to death. And since these characters often lived in the same years and in the same cities, I said, might they not meet? I still have the scrap of paper on which I wrote down, ‘Suppose George Bailey knew Laura Hunt’ (bringing together the families of It’s a Wonderful Life and Laura, only two years apart in fact, and looking as if they had the same light).
That I realised that this plan was insane, and (for me) essential, says a great deal about the book and about my lifelong wish to write about films and their atmosphere instead of just reviewing them. I saw that the book might have a larger story – like that of a novel – but I always hoped that what I said about the
different lives would be helpful to anyone seeing the film, and might even persuade them to look at it again. For instance, I had always felt that compelling films left me wondering about what happened next – what would happen to Jim and Judy after Rebel without a Cause ended? Because ending is a convention or a polite artificiality in stories if they have made you believe. So Suspects did something I had always done as a filmgoer: it daydreamed about the rest of the story. Identification, if intense enough, finds it very hard to stop and ‘return to reality’; for it has just discovered a reality that it finds heady and lovely. I think I realized in doing this book not only that I wanted to write fiction but that something in me needed to act, or to find a story to act out.
The book was very hard to construct. I remember that I was driven to make complex wall-charts, maps in time, on the feasibility of the meetings I was inventing. That involved re-viewing the movies, and sometimes it called for taking note of throwaway lines or minor details that refer to a person’s past and electing to flesh them out. It was a challenge to devise the order for the book, so that the larger story came into being. I did think at the time that maybe the whole thing was only going to work for a small gang of people who knew the films well enough. So I was heartened later to discover that some readers – ignorant of many of the films – had been caught up in the strange conspiracy. And really that pregnancy was the mood of the genre itself: it was what film noir was about, why it existed—the anxiety, the fear, the melancholy, the possibility that ‘they’ were watching ‘us’. I felt then, and I feel now, that it was touching on a rather youthful pessimism that sometimes accompanies the cult of film noir. It was in doing the book that I realized that life was much more than noir – and that noirism might be a studied escape. Today, I fear, I find the people who cultivate noir a little unreliable as companions precisely because of that. Yet technology, in just twenty years, has made it far easier for them to watch us (or even them).
It was as a kind of corrective therefore that I put so much stress on It’s a Wonderful Life in building the haunted house of these films. There were people who argued, well that’s not a film noir – that’s Frank Capra, that’s our Christmas movie, that’s a very happy picture. And coming to America from England, it was impressive to discover how widely It’s a Wonderful Life was (and is) played on American television in the Christmas season. In turn, this added to my suspicion of hard-core noiristas, for what sort of discipline is it if it can’t see that It’s a Wonderful Life contains an exceptional excursion into noir.
I didn’t see how noir could begin and end with films about anti-heroes, femmes fatales, moody, would-be suicides and that alienation that comes from urban life. Noir, it seemed to me, grew out of the image and the age, a deliberate study in shadows and light, of course, but a response to the concentration camps, to the discovery of torture, and to the brave new world of Hiroshima. For instance, I like noirs like The Lady from Shanghai where, at Acapulco on a blindingly bright day, the mad (but very bright) lawyer Grisby can laugh about the end of the world. Yes, there were famous, unarguable noirs that spoke to the harshness of existence – films like Detour, They Live By Night, In a Lonely Place, Double Indemnity. Films about doom. But then there were films dealing with a larger range of life, films full of hope, where doom could not be put aside or forgotten. Citizen Kane is a film noir. So is Letter from an Unknown Woman. So is It’s a Wonderful Life.
Yes, the Capra movie ends up with Christmas breaking out everywhere, with snow falling and bells ringing, with the world saved, and so on. (It had been inspired by A Christmas Carol.) But along the way we have seen the night-town nightmare, what the world would be like if in despair – and this is heartbreaking agony – George Bailey had killed himself because everything in life had gone wrong. Noir is not just a special, isolated nightmare for connoisseurs. It is the entire possibility that the American dream – like the American empire and imperium, even the American way of life – turns out badly. (And the decades since noir started – more or less in 1947 – are not encouraging.) So, my largest reason for disputing the professionalism of noir is that by 2006 we have done so much to make noir the pervasive climate of America. And this is especially striking for anyone interested by film studies, because film once was the show or the art that said, look at happiness – get it while you can! So the George Bailey of Suspects is a haunted figure, a man who can’t forget the chance that bad luck will come back, and that the perfect love story will turn sour.
When the book came out, there was some talk of it being ‘meta-fiction’, which I didn’t really understand, even though I think I had (and have) a highly developed literary (or snob) side that has carried me through decades in film. I had two thoughts as I finished Suspects. The first was that in the way of a comprehensive puzzle, should I have made sure that everyone in the book fitted into ‘my’ novel? As it was, I had felt a need for some rest periods, and I had wanted to let some characters just make up the background against which the central drama took place. But was that timid? Once the artifice was at work should it have been mathematically perfect? I resisted that and I still feel I was right to do so. I liked the feeling of some of these lives being unattached, going nowhere.
At the same time, I realized that this strategy could be employed with other genres. I had a dream once of a trilogy: Suspects; Prospects; Connects. The first volume you have. The second would apply the same method to the Western. I wrote that book but I called it Silver Light, and it was published in 1990, looking more like a conventional novel, but including some characters from Western films (like Mathew Garth from Red River), some authentic figures of the period (like Wyatt Earp), and some entirely fictional characters (like Susan Garth, a still photographer – and someone I came to believe in more than the other two). For myself, I prefer that book, because it is about a landscape I love and because it is much more coloured by optimism. The third volume – Connects – will be devoted to screwball comedy, and the plan is for all the characters to be residents in an open-plan and quite relaxed asylum that is gradually revealed as the state of Connecticut. Madness at last as subject and not just method.
Perhaps twenty-one years later, this will only seem like madness. But over the years, with the book out of print, a number of people have written to me seeking copies and wondering about its being made available again. The book has its fans – notably Greil Marcus and Laura Miller, who have both written about it kindly. On the other hand, I have friends in film who, I think, have always been distressed by the book, just because it invades the precious territory of the films and may confuse their memories. I understand that, and I apologize especially in that sometimes I have even altered things that happen in the films. I can claim that Suspects has made its contribution to the video rental of these films, and even to keeping them alive. But not everyone likes my assertion that they are somehow, out there, common property and open to our speculations.
But it seems to me that some movie characters have left the screen and moved out – in a ghostly or experimental way – to enter common folklore, or try ordinary existence. Just as these days, some real people have acquired the ungraspable patina of becoming fictional, so I wonder if fictional figures don’t sometimes deserve their place in reality. Of course, the whole thing may also be no more than a sign of that very bad or perilous habit, living in the movies. However you determine the matter if you read the book again, or for the first time, and however difficult you find the question of where to put it in your library, I hope you will concede that it says something valuable about the country of movies and our chance of getting there – or getting out of there.
As for the other matter – where to shelve it – you could always buy two copies, one for fiction, and another for film.
Over the years, some film-makers have liked the book. Before it was published, Phil Kaufman gave it a very wise blurb. As it was published Martin Scorsese wrote to me about liking it. That led to a bizarre but enjoyable exercise. Marty then had a com
mitment to Disney to do a few films, and the producers Harry and Mary Jane Ufland asked me if there might be a film in Suspects that could count as one of Marty’s commitments. I said I thought that there were far too many films in there for it to be just one film. Though they pointed to Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and they tempted me to write an original noir script. Doing that was huge fun because of the Uflands and because of the chance I had to get to know Las Vegas.
No, that film wasn’t made. But we were by then venturing into the period of American film history where, maybe, the most interesting films didn’t get made. That was another reason for talking about films that you couldn’t quite name, but which you feel you might have seen. Movies, after all, were getting more and more like old movies. And life was often implausible, a flop or a blockbuster – just like movies. Bertrand Tavernier was another director who loved the book because of that eerie feeling of our no longer being sure which was which.
So, here is Suspects again. When it was first published a lot of people said it was ahead of its time – which can mean too odd for its own good. Anyway, here is the thing that supposedly doesn’t come along in noir (though people there lie all the time), a second chance.
At this time, in the evening, with
fifteen hundred miles of moist heat