A.I. Bezzerides

The death of novelist and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, reported last week, has just begun to provoke highly deserved waves of mournful admiration (and it was followed so closely by the death of Yvonne De Carlo, whose allure is forever immortalized in Criss Cross).

Here was a man whose influence on American noir can hardly be underestimated. Consider, by way of example, the famous opening sequence of the Bezzerides-penned Kiss Me, Deadly (1955), one of the greatest scenes in all of noir. Opening on a darkened highway, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), in his tiny, flashy sports car, nearly runs over a hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman), wearing only a raincoat and a desperate gleam in her eye. He grudgingly offers her a ride and she proceeds, as they drive, to deconstruct Hammer’s remote, narcissistic brand of masculinity, saying, “You’re one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. But you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard.” Hammer, far from disagreeing, asks, “You against good health or something?” and she returns, “I can tolerate flabby muscles in a man if it’d make him more friendly. You’re the kind of a person who never gives in a relationship. Who only takes.” She then philosophizes, voice steeped in irony, “Woman. The incomplete sex. What does she need to complete her? Why a man, of course. Wonderful man.” This scene, dense with all the sexual politics of noir, of the Cold War period, sets into motion a narrative that twists Mickey Spillane’s hot and delicious 1952 novel inside out with such flash and vigor, it leaves you breathless.

If Bezzerides were to have written only this scene, it’d likely have been enough. But he wrote so much more, including the unforgettable On Dangerous Ground (1952), with Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, and the novels The Long Haul, Thieves Market, and There is a Happy Land. See the peerless Woody Haut’s chapter on Bezzerides in his book Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood, which includes interviews with the man himself.