Book Into Film: “High Sierra”

(Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series comparing noteworthy crime, mystery, and thriller novels against their Hollywood feature adaptations—for better or worse.)

By Randal S. Brandt

Book: High Sierra, by W.R. Burnett, 1940
Movie: High Sierra—John Huston, W.R. Burnett (screenplay),
Raoul Walsh (director), 1941
Movie: Colorado Territory—John Twist, Edmund H. North (screenplay), Raoul Walsh (director), 1949

“I’ve been trying to crash out ever since I can remember.”
—Marie Garson (High Sierra)
“This time, Wes, we can really bust out.”
—Colorado Carson (Colorado Territory)

William Riley “W.R.” Burnett had an incredible track record of getting his books adapted for the silver screen. His first novel, Little Caesar (1929), was an overnight success and led to a wildly popular 1931 gangster film of the same name starring then little-known actor Edward G. Robinson. In 1949, he published The Asphalt Jungle, which was filmed the next year under the direction of John Huston and is widely considered to be a quintessential heist film. These are just two examples of Burnett’s output, but he clearly had a knack for turning out filmable fiction. It probably didn’t hurt that he was a skilled screenwriter, as well as a novelist, and often adapted his own work.

Much of Burnett’s storytelling in the crime genre revolved around gangsters and robbery capers. In 1940, he penned a tale that incorporated both and added a twist by moving the action out of the asphalt jungle of the city and into the wilds of the American West. High Sierra, published by Alfred A. Knopf, is the story of Roy Earle, a small-time gangster who ran with John Dillinger and wound up being sentenced to a lifetime’s confinement in prison. As the novel opens, however, Roy is driving across the country, headed for California, after just six years behind bars in Illinois. At 37, he’s been granted a full pardon, secured for him by “Big Mac” M’Gann, who bribed the governor in order to get Roy out of stir. Mac, suffering from ill health, has engineered the heist of a popular mountain resort in Southern California, where all the big shots from Hollywood go to gamble and flaunt their wealth and jewelry, and he wants Roy to pull off one last score for him. Two inexperienced thugs, Red Hattery and Babe Kozak, have been enlisted to do the dirty work, and an inside man, Louis, is providing key information about the layout of the resort. Roy is needed to organize the crew and lead this seemingly easy job.

(Right) High Sierra, Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.

During the drive west, Roy meets “Pa” and “Ma” Goodhue. They have lost their farm in Ohio and are taking their granddaughter, Velma (who is afflicted with a club foot), to Los Angeles to live with Velma’s mother. Roy, who was also reared on a Midwestern farm and longs to return to that idyllic life, hits it off immediately with the Goodhues and is attracted to Velma.

When he arrives at the motor camp near the resort, where the gang is meeting to plan and wait for their go-ahead, Roy finds out there is another person there, Marie Garson, a girl who Babe picked up at a “dime-a-dance joint” in L.A. Roy is not pleased with this turn of events, but he ends up letting Marie stay. He is also introduced to a mangy stray dog called Pard by the camp’s Black handyman, Algernon, who explains to Roy that Pard brings bad luck to anyone who adopts him. Not being the superstitious type, Roy takes in the dog, too.

Can anyone guess where this is going? Right. Pear-shaped.

Marie falls in love with Roy. Roy falls in love with Velma, pays to have her foot operated on, and has his marriage proposal rejected (Velma’s already got a fiancé back home). Predictably, the heist goes sideways—a security guard is shot and Red and Babe are killed in a car crash during the getaway—and Roy, Marie, and Pard end up on the run. Things get even worse when Roy reaches L.A. and finds that Big Mac has died and he has no way to collect his cut of the money for their stolen jewels. In the meantime, Roy is wounded, Louis squeals to the cops, and a manhunt for Roy (now dubbed “Mad Dog” Earle in the press) ensues. Roy convinces Marie to take Pard and head east to San Bernardino to wait for him. Short on gas and cash, Roy holds up a drugstore and is recognized, leading to a chase over a mountain pass in the shadow of mammoth Mount Whitney. When Roy is stopped by a boulder blocking the road, he takes off up the mountain on foot. The police draw near and a marksman shoots him. Fade to black.

High Sierra in paperback (left to right): From Bantam, 1950, with art by Harry Schaare; Corgi, 1958; and Carroll & Graf, 1986.

The novel has two major flaws. The first is the abruptness of its ending. For a book called High Sierra, the chase up that 14,505-foot mountain and subsequent standoff occupy fewer than four pages at the end. Both film versions discussed below vastly improve on the drama and tension of Burnett’s original climax. The second flaw is much more serious. The racism the author heaps on Algernon is unforgivable. Not only is the character treated as a stereotype and a caricature, but he is repeatedly referred to with vile racial epithets, both in the white characters’ dialogue and in Burnett’s exposition. Even for 1940, this seems extreme, cruel, and wholly unnecessary.

The initial big-screen version of High Sierra, which premiered on January 25, 1941, is an important bridge between the popular gangster films of the 1930s and film noir (a term that had not been coined yet). It is not really a gangster film, or a heist film, or a film noir, and yet it contains elements of all three. The screenplay was written collaboratively by John Huston and Burnett, and the plot is extremely faithful to the novel. For the role of Roy Earle, director Raoul Walsh reluctantly cast Humphrey Bogart, who up until that time had only served in supporting roles in B-pictures.

(Left) Humphrey Bogart with his younger screen “moll,” Ida Lupino.

According to Marilyn Ann Moss, in her 2011 biography of Raoul Walsh, Bogart lobbied Warner Bros. hard for this role. He won it after top Warner star Paul Muni, who’d played the lead in Scarface—a 1932 Howard Hawks-directed feature that Burnett had also had a hand in scripting—and George Raft, who was adamant that his fans did not want to see him die onscreen, turned it down. Bogart didn’t get top billing, though; that honor went to Ida Lupino for her role as Marie. Lupino’s star had risen significantly after her appearance the previous year in They Drive By Night, also directed by Walsh and starring both Raft and Bogart. A big part of the reason Warner wanted Raft for High Sierra was due to the success of Drive; studio execs saw the Walsh-Raft-Lupino combo as a winner.

Shot on location outside Lone Pine, California, High Sierra was a box office hit and made Humphrey Bogart a star. It also boosted John Huston’s career and, based on the success of this film, Warner Bros. decided to let him try his hand as a director. His debut in said capacity came with The Maltese Falcon, which was released later that same year, starred Bogart as San Francisco private eye Sam Spade—another role that Raft refused to play—and, well, you know the rest of the story. Bogart never again received second billing to anyone.

But Ida Lupino, then only 23 years old, deserved her headliner status in this film. Her performance is terrific as Marie, the taxi dancer who wants to crash out of her dead-end life and sees Roy as the means to that end. It also helped pave the way for Lupino to begin writing, directing, and producing her own motion pictures by the end of the decade. (And in 1953, she became the first woman to direct a film noir when she helmed RKO’s The Hitch-Hiker.)

The official, 1941 trailer for High Sierra.

As mentioned previously, the ending of this flick vastly improves on what the novel offers. Maybe Burnett realized his original was jarringly abrupt and was happy to get a do-over, or perhaps the credit belongs to Huston. In any event, this time the standoff with Roy on Mount Whitney lasts long enough for a large crowd to gather below, including newspaper and radio reporters. (In a bit of coincidental casting, Jerome Cowan appears as a journo with just about as many lines as he would be given later that year playing Sam Spade’s doomed partner, Miles Archer.) The standoff also provides time enough for Marie and Pard to arrive on the scene. When Marie refuses to call up the mountain to Roy and lure him out into the open, Pard’s barking does the job, giving a police sharpshooter the opportunity to take him out. After Roy’s lifeless body tumbles down the slope, one of the closing shots is of Pard, licking his hand. That dog was bad luck, after all.

The movie also treats handyman Algernon (played by Willie Best) marginally better than the book. There are no racial slurs in the dialogue, but a cringe-worthy portrayal of Algernon as a lazy, superstitious “Stepin Fetchit” stereotype is hard to watch.

In many respects, High Sierra reminds the viewer of a western, especially with it climactic shootout amid dramatic mountain scenery. Director Raoul Walsh certainly saw those qualities in the first film adaptation and, in 1948, when Warner Bros. found itself short on good scripts, he pitched the idea of actually turning High Sierra into a western. Studio mogul Jack Warner approved the project, shooting took place in New Mexico from September to November, 1948, and the finished Colorado Territory premiered in June 1949.

This time around, the protagonist is mid-19th-century bank robber Wes McQueen (played by Joel McCrea), who is busted out of jail by his old friend Dave Rickard (Basil Ruysdael) and told to head off to Colorado Territory. In the stagecoach along the way, McQueen meets Fred Winslow (Henry Hull, who played the doctor in High Sierra) and his daughter, Julie Ann (Dorothy Malone—not disabled like Velma Goodhue, just in a very bad mood); they are bound west to take up ranching. Julie Ann is the spitting image of Wes’ old girlfriend, Martha, who died while he was in prison. McQueen travels to the ghost town of Todos Santos, where he meets the rest of his gang: Reno (John Archer), Duke (James Mitchell), and Colorado Carson (Virginia Mayo), who Reno picked up in an El Paso dance hall. In this version of the story, the gang has been assembled to execute a train robbery. Wes is tired of the outlaw life and hopes to use his share of the loot from this one last job to buy his own ranch and settle down, preferably with Julie Ann as his wife.

Following the general outline of High Sierra, McQueen is betrayed at every turn, first by the “inside man” railroad station agent, then by his partners, and finally—and most cruelly of all—by Julie Ann, who is barely stopped by Colorado Carson from turning him in for the reward money, a selfish impulse that earns her a slap from her father. Only Colorado can be trusted, and Wes eventually recognizes her as his true love. They go on the lam together and try to get married at the derelict Todos Santos mission, but the padre there explains he is “not a priest, only a brother,” and cannot perform wedding ceremonies. When Wes realizes the posse is closing in on them, he unsaddles Colorado’s horse to prevent her from following him. He rides into the “Canyon of Death,” hoping to elude his pursuers and escape south into Mexico, where he and Colorado can be reunited. Not so easily deterred, Colorado follows on foot and eventually catches up to the posse, which has McQueen holed up in the abandoned “City of the Moon,” an ancient Pueblo settlement carved out of the canyon wall. When Colorado arrives, the sheriff tricks her into luring Wes out into the open, where a sniper can shoot him. This time, though, Wes is only wounded. Colorado races up to meet him, carrying two pistols. As Colorado starts blasting lead at posse members, the doomed couple is cut down in a hail of gunfire, dying hand in hand.

Again, a much more dramatic climax than Burnett’s novel offered.

Not surprisingly, given its source material and director, Colorado Territory is a very good production, one which American film historian David Meuel thinks, “in several ways, improves on the original.” Although not quite an “A” picture, it definitely rises above “B” status. It is also a prime example of the “noir western” subgenre that combined elements of film noir (including cinematography techniques) with the traditional western—Walsh was a pioneer of the noir western, with his 1947 film, Pursued, featuring noir stalwart Robert Mitchum, often considered to be one of the earliest examples.

The original, 1949 theatrical trailer for Colorado Territory.

The acting in Colorado Territory is strong, even if the Wes McQueen role is somewhat miscast. A veteran of countless westerns, Joel McCrea was resistant to playing “bad guy” parts during his career. So, he is not quite believable as an outlaw, even one who wants to leave behind his life of crime and settle down with the woman he adores. But he has strong chemistry with Virginia Mayo and he is not someone to be messed with in a gunfight. There are no dogs or racial stereotypes in this version, although we are told that Colorado is a “half-breed” (“Unusual for a blonde, wasn’t it?” Virginia Mayo is reported as saying years later). Otherwise, the Native Americans in the film, although in small roles, appear to be treated in non-stereotypical ways and with basic respect and dignity—on both sides of the law.

High Sierra was remade again in 1955 as I Died a Thousand Times. It is described as a scene-by-scene remake of the 1941 version, albeit in color, and this time Burnett is the sole credited screenwriter. In an interview (quoted in Marilyn Ann Moss’ Walsh biography), Burnett stated that the script for the original was weakened by the interference of associate producer Mark Hellinger and indicated his clear preference for this version. “The main point wasn’t as strong as it should have been. I corrected that in the remake … The remake is a better picture. Except we had two repulsive people in it—Jack Palance and Shelley Winters … I think the script is much better. I cleaned up the script …” This writer has not yet seen it.

SOURCES
Meuel, David. The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range, 1943-1962. McFarland & Company, 2015.
Moss, Marilyn Ann. Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director. The University of Kentucky Press, 2011.
Nott, Robert. Last of the Cowboy Heroes: The Westerns of Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Audie Murphy. McFarland & Company, 2000.

READ MORE: W.R. Burnett’s 1982 Obituary.

Book Into Film: “Phantom Lady”

(Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a series comparing noteworthy crime, mystery, and thriller novels against their Hollywood feature adaptations—for better or worse.)

By Randal S. Brandt

Book: Phantom Lady, by Cornell Woolrich (as “William Irish”), 1942
Movie: Phantom Lady—Robert Siodmak (director), Bernard C. Schoenfeld (screenplay), 1944

“Robert Siodmak is the greatest director of
film noir. Ever.”—Eddie Muller
“La bonne fée de Siodmak … s’appelle Joan Harrison.”—Hervé Dumont

Film director Robert Siodmak, a German expatriate whose Hollywood career coincided perfectly with the rise of the style of American filmmaking that would eventually be called film noir, has earned his fair share of accolades from movie historians. But, when “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller declares you the “greatest … ever,” that’s saying something. After a promising early start in his profession, Siodmak left his native Germany in 1933 as Adolf Hitler rose to power. He emigrated first to Paris, where he made several French films between 1933 and 1939, and then to United States, arriving in Los Angeles in 1940. Working within the Hollywood studio system, his initial American efforts were a series of forgettable B-pictures made first for Paramount and then for Universal. But it was at Universal that Siodmak’s fortunes finally took a positive turn. In her landmark, 1998 biography of this director’s life and career, Deborah Lazaroff Alpi wrote:

[Siodmak] was beginning to feel somewhat downcast at the thought that his career would develop no further, that he would be doomed to bread-and-butter pictures for the rest of his life. But it was at this point that he met someone who would change forever the course of his life and his work. Her name was Joan Harrison.

Siodmak’s previous biographer (in 1981), film historian Hervé Dumont, went so far as to call Joan Harrison the director’s fairy godmother.

And the picture that set the course for both Siodmak’s and Harrison’s groundbreaking careers was Phantom Lady.

If Robert Siodmak was a master of film noir, Cornell Woolrich was equally a master of noir novels and stories. He knew how to toss a character into an impossible situation, light the fuse, and then take him or her to hell and back. In Phantom Lady, published under Woolrich’s nom de plume William Irish, the reader knows from the chapter titles alone that the fuse has already been lit and that it’s going to burn fast—Chapter 1 is called “The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution” and Chapter 22 is “The Hour of the Execution,” for goodness sake!

(Right) Phantom Lady, J.G. Lippincott Company, 1942.

The novel starts, 150 days before the execution, when Scott Henderson—who had quarreled with his wife just before they were due to head out for the evening—goes into a saloon with a sour look on his face, orders a Scotch, and sits down next to a woman at the bar. The first and, as it turns out, only thing he notices about her is her chapeau.

The unusual thing about her was the hat. It resembled a pumpkin, not only in shape and size but in color. It was a flaming orange, so vivid it almost hurt the eyes. It seemed to light up the whole bar, like a low-hanging garden-party lantern. Stemming from the exact center of it was a long thin cockerel feather, sticking straight up like the antenna of an insect.
Not one woman in a thousand would have braved that color. She not only did, but got away with it. She looked startling, but good, not funny.

Impulsively, Henderson invites this woman to have dinner with him and then attend a show. She agrees, but before they leave the bar they make a pact: no names, no addresses, no personal details about each other. They are just “two people seeing a show together, companions for an evening.” They take a cab to a restaurant, have dinner, then go to a nightclub to see Estela Mendoza, “the South American sensation.” It’s there that Henderson’s companion catches the attention of the orchestra drummer. She also catches the attention, and not in a good way, of Mendoza, who appears on stage wearing the exact same hat as hers! After the show ends, Henderson and the woman return to the bar where they met, have a nightcap, and go their separate ways.

But when Henderson returns to his apartment, the cops are there, waiting for him. His wife, Marcella, has been found murdered, strangled with one of Henderson’s neckties. Naturally, Henderson is the prime suspect in his wife’s slaying. Yet he has an alibi! The police know the time of Marcella’s death, and it was the precise time he was at the bar meeting that woman in the odd hat. She can prove he didn’t do it … if only he knew what her name was, where she lived, what she looked like … Alas, all he can remember is that hat.

Scott Henderson makes a perfect murder suspect. He had asked Marcella for a divorce; she refused. He actually was having an affair, and in order for him to be with the woman he really loved, he needed to be free from the one he was married to. Unfortunately for him, the mysterious lady who could alibi him has vanished, and everyone who Henderson can remember interacting with that fateful night remembers him, alone; no one claims to recall his companion at all.

Following his trial, he is convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair. No surprise, really. Remember the countdown chapter titles?

Phantom Lady in paperback (left to right): From Pocket Books, 1944, with cover art by Leo Manso (later famous for his collages); Graphic Mystery, 1955, with an uncredited illustration; and Ace Books, 1968, featuring a cover painting by Stan Hunter.

Afterward, though, Henderson is visited by Inspector Burgess, the lead homicide detective in his case, who only found evidence to convict him, but none to exonerate him. Regardless, Burgess has become convinced that Henderson is innocent—a guilty man, he reasons, would have done a much better job of alibi-ing himself. Unable to do anything more for Henderson, at least officially, Burgess convinces him that he should appeal to his best friend, John Lombard, to continue searching for the phantom lady. Burgess also enlists Henderson’s girlfriend, Carol Richman, to conduct a parallel investigation.

Yet every time John or Carol get close to someone who—finally—admits to seeing Henderson and the mystery woman together on the night in question, that witness ends up dead. Clearly the murderer is somewhere nearby, making sure that Henderson stays in the frame. Slowly—at times excruciatingly slowly—they get nearer and nearer to tracing the unidentified woman, and when the real murderer is finally revealed, it is shocking. But has that killer been found too late?

(Above) Thomas Gomez, Ella Raines, and Franchot Tone.

The novel was such a commercial success that Universal Pictures acquired it and lined it up to be the studio’s first noir film (although the term “film noir” hadn’t been coined yet). It was also the first noir to be directed by German émigré Robert Siodmak and the first film produced by Joan Harrison. Harrison had started her motion-picture career in 1933 as Alfred Hitchcock’s secretary, but she quickly advanced up the ranks to become a screenwriter (at the 1941 Academy Awards she was double-nominated for Oscars for her work on Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent) and Hitchcock’s most trusted advisor outside of his wife, Alma Reville. In 1943, after she had left Hitchcock and struck out on her own, Harrison adapted Woolrich’s novel Phantom Lady and pitched it to Universal. Although it initially rejected her treatment, Universal later changed course and offered her the opportunity to produce it herself—making her the first female producer at a major Hollywood studio.

(Left) Joan Harrison at Universal, 1943.

According to Christina Lane, in her 2020 biography of Harrison (also titled, not-so-coincidentally, Phantom Lady), it was she who changed the narrative focus of the film by placing Carol Richman at the center of the story. In the film version, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) is an engineer and Carol (now nicknamed “Kansas,” and played by Ella Raines) is his secretary. Kansas is in love with Henderson—a fact of which he is utterly oblivious here—and determined to do everything she can to exonerate him. The majority of this black-and-white film follows Kansas’ investigations, as she relentlessly tries to extract the truth from people Henderson saw on the night of his wife’s demise: the bartender, the drummer, the nightclub singer, the hat-maker, and, finally, the elusive phantom lady herself. Another major shift from the novel is the revelation of the killer’s identity. It’s no spoiler to tell you that it is Franchot Tone, the film’s top-billed star, who plays Henderson’s friend Jack Marlow (renamed from John Lombard in the novel). However, the audience does not yet know who he is when he arrives in his introductory scene and basically announces “It’s me. I did it.” This revelation turns the narrative from a whodunit (which the novel carries out to the very end) to a howcatchem. Kansas and Burgess (Thomas Gomez), of course, still have no clue, so the audience knows more than they do, and Siodmak keeps the tension building until the nerve-wracking climax.

The official, 1944 trailer for Phantom Lady.

Although the screenplay is credited solely to Bernard C. Schoenfeld, Joan Harrison really deserved at least a share of recognition for its writing. (Universal offered her either screenwriting or producing credit, but not both. She wisely chose producer.) Schoenfeld’s scripting experience up to that point was in radio and he had never tried his hand at a motion-picture screenplay before. Author Lane surmises that hiring Schoenfeld actually worked to Harrison’s benefit, as she could guide and shape the screenplay in the way she wanted it, without much pushback from her novice scribe. As a radio writer, Schoenfeld’s contributions played to his strength—dialogue. As the film’s producer, it was also Harrison who hired Robert Siodmak to direct Phantom Lady, setting him on his course to becoming one of film noir’s greatest directors—and Eddie Muller’s favorite.

Cornell Woolrich’s strength as a crime writer was in devising setups that placed characters in seemingly impossible situations. He was also very good at tying everything up at the end, pulling all the plot threads together and leaving the reader satisfied, if not exhausted. However, he frequently had trouble in the middle. The book version of Phantom Lady is no exception. There are long sections of exposition and monologue that sometimes seem like they are going on forever without moving anything forward. The film does not have that problem. At a brisk 87-minute running time, there is no room for lengthy diversions. The casting is also spot-on, with Ella Raines (in her first featured role) stunning as Kansas, Franchot Tone suitably creepy as Marlow, and Alan Curtis sympathetic as Henderson. Elisha Cook Jr. also turns in a terrific cameo as the frenetic trap drummer. And, doing her best Carmen Miranda impression as the nightclub singer, Estela Monteiro (renamed from Mendoza), is Aurora Miranda—Carmen’s sister!

Two set pieces in the movie are taken directly from the novel. The first shows us Carol/Kansas, during her independent investigation, staking out the bartender who served Henderson and the mystery woman, and who now claims to only remember Henderson alone. After several nights of her sitting quietly in the saloon, constantly staring at him and then following him home after closing time, the stakeout finally ends tragically, inadvertently turning Carol into another of Woolrich’s avenging “black angels.” In the film version of this sequence, the direction and camera work (by ace cinematographer Woody Bredell) are top-notch; in particular, the scene of Kansas trailing the barkeep onto a deserted subway platform absolutely drips “noir.”

Here’s the jazz-club cellar scene from Phantom Lady, showcasing Elisha Cook Jr. (remember him from The Maltese Falcon?) as a sexually-charged drummer.

The second is one of the most famous (infamous?) scenes in all of film noir. In the novel, Henderson had testified that while attending the nightclub act, his companion had drawn the persistent, unwanted notice of the drummer in the orchestra. Set on getting that drummer, whose name is Cliff Milburn, to admit he’d seen the lady in the orange hat, Carol dresses provocatively, sits in his direct line of sight, and flirts with him while he plays. After the performance, she lets him take her out. When he proposes accompanying her to a late-night jam session, she initially hesitates. “Come on, you don’t want to miss this, snooks,” Milburn urges. When they reach the basement where the band is playing, Woolrich makes it clear that the musicians are all stoned, with marijuana smoke “filling the air with haze and flux.” This time Carol’s plan actually works. Milburn finally breaks down and admits that he had watched the lady in the hat and had later been paid $500 by somebody to forget that fact if the cops asked about it.

When Siodmak shot this scene, he subverted the Motion Picture Production Code censors by playing down the drug angle. In the movie, Kansas and Cliff rendezvous after the show and Cliff asks, “You dig jive?” “You bet,” she replies, “I’m a hep kitten.” Arriving at the jam session, they find the drummer-less band already in full swing. There are open bottles all around, and smoke in the air, yet there is no hint that it is anything illicit. But were the censors so focused on the reefers that they completely missed the orgasmic frenzy that Elisha Cook Jr., as Cliff, works himself into behind his drum kit, with Ella Raines seductively egging him on?

(Right) Author Cornell Woolrich.

Phantom Lady is a great example of a novel and the film based upon it that both stand the test of time. Although key changes were made to Woolrich’s yarn, most of them work very well on the big screen. And many of the essential elements from Woolrich’s book remain intact. The only creative change in the cinematic version that is hard to understand is the decision to ignore Woolrich’s description of the hat—especially as it was featured prominently in the cover design of the original novel. To be sure, the headwear in the movie is large, gaudy, and hard-to-miss. But it is no orange pumpkin. Surely, some Hollywood milliner could have made something that resembled the novel’s version, even if the color would have been lost in a black-and-white film.

The Hollywood adaptation of Phantom Lady was a breakthrough in numerous ways. As an early example of dark and suspenseful storytelling and chiaroscuro cinematography, it provided a blueprint for the further development of film noir. It showed Hollywood that Cornell Woolrich was a reliable source of original material (reaching a high-water mark in 1954 when Hitchcock adapted one of his short stories as Rear Window). And it gave Ella Raines, according to film noir scholar Imogen Sara Smith, “her defining, and perhaps her greatest role, allowing her to try on several personae while playing a distaff version of the white knight detective pounding the mean streets.”

Perhaps most significant of all, though, was the impact this motion picture had on the future careers of Robert Siodmak and Joan Harrison, he as a director (The Killers, Criss Cross) and she as a producer (Ride the Pink Horse, Alfred Hitchcock Presents). In 2015, Eddie Muller echoed Dumont’s assessment of the mutual benefits they gained from this collaboration: “With [the] 1944 release [of Phantom Lady], Joan Harrison not only helped foster the film noir movement, she set the course of Siodmak’s career. From then on he was synonymous with moody, psychologically complex thrillers—competing with Hitchcock throughout the 1940s for the mantle ‘Master of Suspense.’”

Phantom Lady can be streamed for free from the Internet Archive.

SOURCES
Alpi, Deborah Lazaroff. Robert Siodmak: A Biography, with Critical Analyses of His Films Noirs and a Filmography of All His Works. McFarland & Company, 1998.
Dumont, Hervé. Robert Siodmak: Le maître du film noir. Editions
L’Age d’Homme, 1981.
“Eddie Muller on Robert Siodmak.” Phantom Lady, DVD. Turner
Classic Movies, 2012.
Lane, Christina. Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. Chicago Review Press, 2020.
Muller, Eddie. “Murder, She Made: The Exceptional Career of Joan Harrison.” Noir City Annual 8 (2015): 88-101.
Smith, Imogen Sara. “A Light in the Dark: Ella Raines and Film Noir’s Working Girls.” Noir City Annual 8 (2015): 103-111.
Terrall, Ben. “Book vs. Film: Phantom Lady,” Noir City Annual 8
(2015): 226-229.

Book Into Film: “Plunder of the Sun”

(Editor’s note: Today would have brought the 115th birthday of American mystery/thriller novelist David Dodge, had he not gone to his grave way back in 1974. It’s the perfect occasion to introduce The Rap Sheet’s new “Book Into Film” series, which in this first installment measures Dodge’s novel Plunder of the Sun against its subsequent Hollywood adaptation. The columnist here is Randal S. Brandt, a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, where he curates the Bancroft Library’s California Detective Fiction Collection. Brandt also manages the Web site A David Dodge Companion.)



By Randal S. Brandt

Book: Plunder of the Sun, by David Dodge (1949)
Film: Plunder of the Sun—John Farrow (director), Jonathan Latimer (screenplay), 1953

In 1955, Paramount Pictures premiered Alfred Hitchcock’s glittering To Catch a Thief starring Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, shot in glorious Technicolor VistaVision on location in the South of France. The film was based on David Dodge’s 1952 same-titled novel and added his name to the relatively small club of well-respected authors (including John Buchan, Ethel Lina White, Daphne du Maurier, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith, and Robert Bloch) whose work was adapted to the screen by the Master of Suspense and thereby assured his place in the annals of movie history.

But that was not David Dodge’s first Hollywood rodeo. Two years earlier, his novel Plunder of the Sun had been the source for a black-and-white film noir directed by John Farrow, starring Glenn Ford, and with a screenplay by hard-boiled novelist/veteran screenwriter Jonathan Latimer.

(Right) Plunder of the Sun, Random House, 1949. Art by H. Lawrence Hoffman.

The novel, Dodge’s second to feature expatriate American private investigator Al Colby, was published in 1949 and its story begins in a park in Santiago, Chile, where Colby reluctantly accepts a job from the mysterious invalid Señor Alfredo Berrien, who has a Peruvian “antique” that he wants smuggled back into Peru. Berrien, a well-known dealer in antiquities, expects to be thoroughly searched on both ends of the journey; as a supposed American tourist, Colby will have no such trouble. The job pays $1,000 and gives Colby an excuse to get to know Berrien’s attractive nurse, Ana Luz. Colby’s assignment is to carry the object aboard a ship sailing from Valparaíso, Chile, and return it to Berrien when they reach Callao, Peru.

After Berrien is found dead in his shipboard cabin, Colby discovers that the antique he’s been carrying is a quipu, an Inca message-cord, wrapped in three sheets of parchment covered with writing in Quechua. He goes on to consult a museum in Lima, as well as William H. Prescott’s The Conquest of Peru (1847) and an unscrupulous collector and translator in Arequipa, thereby learning that what he really has is a manuscript describing the location, near Cuzco, Peru, of 84 pieces of lost Inca treasure.

In his quest for the gold, Colby tangles with a couple of fellow Americans: Julie, a lonely young party girl who drinks too much and “paint[s] her mouth square at the corners, like a comic-strip glamour girl”; and Jefferson (Jeff), a rough, ruthless “sharp-shooter” who first tries to steal the manuscript, then proposes a partnership, and finally double-crosses Colby and hijacks the loot. The action climaxes with a chase across Lake Titicaca, in the Andes Mountains, as Jeff tries to make it to Bolivian waters in a small reed boat.

With the major exception of where its action takes place, a substantial amount of Dodge’s novel survives its cinematic adaptation. The character names and plot are basically the same, but for the screen Al Colby (Ford) becomes an insurance adjuster who takes the job of smuggling a small package into Mexico from Cuba. The opening scene finds Colby being held by Mexican authorities who are asking him to explain why a tourist has left “a trail of bodies throughout the country.” In a flashback, Colby then tells his story, starting out with him being broke and stranded in Havana (a situation Dodge’s Colby would have never allowed himself to be found in). One night he is picked up in a bar by the beautiful, sultry Anna Luz (Patricia Medina; with a slightly different spelling of “Ana” than Dodge chose). She takes him home, where he is persuaded by the wheelchair-bound Thomas Berrien (Francis L. Sullivan; renamed from “Alfredo” in the book) to accept $1,000 in exchange for carrying an unknown object on board a ship to Mexico and returning it to Berrien in Oaxaca. During the journey, he meets Jefferson (Sean McClory) and Julie Barnes (Diana Lynn), whose characters resemble—more or less—their counterparts in the novel. However, the artifact is now a carved jade disk wrapped in three pieces of parchment, and the treasure it leads to is a collection of priceless Zapotecan relics.

(Above) The original trailer for 1953’s Plunder of the Sun.

Some scenes and lines of dialogue make it almost straight from the book into the movie. One of the best is a scene in which a very drunk, heavily made-up Julie tries to get Colby to spend the night with her. “You think I’m a tramp, don’t you?” she says in the book. “Everybody thinks I’m a tramp, just because I like to have fun.” Colby is not interested. He’s much more concerned with deciphering the treasure map. In order to get rid of Julie and stop her from causing a ruckus, he agrees to go with her to her room. But, instead of succumbing to her charms, Colby forces her to look at herself in a mirror. She says:

“Kiss me, mys’ry man.”

“Open your eyes.”

They opened. I took her by the shoulders and turned her around so that she was facing the mirror of the peinador.

It was a big mirror, nearly full length, and it gave her a good view—smeared lipstick, smeared mascara, cockeyed hat, loose mouth, glassy eyes, rumpled clothes, everything. She rocked there for seconds, looking stupidly at herself.

“Who wants to kiss that?” I said.

The big-screen version is markedly similar. “Kiss me, mystery man,” Diana Lynn purrs and starts taking off her jewelry, clearly implying that her dress will be next. “Come here,” replies Glenn Ford, then grabs her arm and jerks her around to face herself in the mirror. “Take a good look at yourself. Who’d want to kiss that?” In both the book and the film, the fallout from this scene is the same. First, Julie gets her revenge by betraying Colby to a local antiquities expert (Naharro in the novel; Navarro in the film), but then later regrets her actions and comes over to his side. She also stops drinking. “I haven’t had a drink since [the mirror incident],” she says. “Not one.”

One of the most striking things about the 1953 picture is its location filming in Mexico. It would have been more exotic to keep the novel’s Peruvian setting, but the moviemakers made the most of their Mexican locale with dramatic scenes shot amidst the archaeological ruins of Oaxaca’s Mitla and Monte Albán, as Colby explores the ancient pyramids and temples, and some of the history of Mexico’s ancient civilizations described in the film might actually be true. Other scenes were also shot in Oaxaca, as well as in Veracruz, Mexico, and at the Churubusco-Azteca Studios in Mexico City. Throughout the film, the cinematography is top-notch.

(Left) Plunder of the Sun, Dell Books edition, 1951, with a cover illustration by Robert Stanley. (Right) The 2005 Hard Case Crime edition, featuring art by Robert McGinnis.

David Dodge considered Plunder of the Sun one of his best novels. It is also one of his most reprinted works (most recently in 2005 as part of Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime line), so it seems that many publishers and readers agree with him. Although the filmmakers followed the blueprint laid out in the book, the rich and complex characters that Dodge created get watered down in Jonathan Latimer’s script, sometimes to the point that the viewer is not even sure why they’re included in the finished product. While Glenn Ford is well-cast, and plays Colby with the same toughness that Dodge imbued in him, the screenplay makes him much more of a brute towards women than anything Dodge wrote over the course of three novels.

At times, the film also seems to be trying a little too hard to channel The Maltese Falcon—during his first meeting with Colby, one almost expects to hear Señor Berrien tell him how much he likes talking to a man who likes to talk. The trailer’s intertitles even make explicit connections between the two: “Not since ‘The Maltese Falcon’ … has a novel probed so deeply into the realm of intrigue … has the screen swept you past such mystic barriers!” Mystic barriers?

When Hollywood took notice of his book, Dodge was understandably excited. There had been interest earlier in adapting It Ain’t Hay (1946), his last of four novels starring San Francisco tax accountant Whit Whitney, but with that tale’s plot focused so heavily on narcotics trafficking, Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (PCA) refused to approve it for a screen treatment. Then an aspiring independent producer named Paul Fix (a veteran character actor with a lengthy career in films and television, who had a long-running association with John Wayne, appearing with him in 27 motion pictures) came along with an offer of $4,000 for the film rights to Plunder of the Sun, and Dodge accepted, even though he and his agents considered that amount low. At the time, David Dodge, his wife Elva, and their daughter Kendal were running out of cash in South America, and the promise of this windfall, even if modest (“I’ll hold out for more next time,” the author wrote to his agent), gave them the boost they needed to make plans for their next stop, France. At this same time, Paramount offered Dodge a seven-year contract to work as a screenwriter himself—but he turned it down. “About Hollywood, definitely no,” he remarked. “Seven years is too long. I wouldn’t live that long, in Hollywood.”

In his humorous travel book, 20,000 Leagues Behind the 8 Ball (1951), David Dodge tells part of the story:

Best of all, I got a short, businesslike note from my agent which, without flattering me more than usual, told me that some piker had offered four thousand dollars for the television and related rights to something I had written and forgotten about, an amount which the agent thought such small potatoes in view of the tremendous potentialities of the television field that he hardly considered it worthwhile mentioning the offer before declining it in my best interests, and if he did not hear from me promptly to the contrary, he would reject the offer with the scorn it deserved.

The submarine cable between Valparaíso and New York was sending up bubbles before the operator finished transmitting the wire I got off. Four thousand dollars, when you need it, looks like four million. I knew the money would not be forthcoming immediately, because contracts have to be drawn up, scribbled over, revised, reworded, rehashed, and finally signed before you get your hands on any cash, but the news blew away a number of dark clouds on the distant horizon.

The Dodges had just arrived in France when they received word that the film deal for Plunder was dead (and it was a film deal, not a television deal, despite Dodge’s later recollection in print). His agents had signed the contract in good faith and they considered taking legal action against Fix. But, since Fix never signed his side of the contract, they had little legal recourse, and ultimately dropped the matter. (According to the Internet Movie Database [IMDb], Fix has no producing credits to his name; this may have been his one and only attempt to break into that side of the business.)

When another offer for film rights came in later that same month, they took it, even though it was for a firm $2,500. This time the buyer was crime writer Jonathan Latimer (Headed for a Hearse, Solomon’s Vineyard), and after negotiations were completed—much as Dodge later described them—the contracts were signed in July 1950.

Unlike It Ain’t Hay, the screen treatment of Plunder of the Sun had a relatively easy time meeting the demands of the Production Code. After the screenplay’s first version was submitted in June 1952, Breen expressed several objections to small bits of dialogue and some of the action. His main directives, though, were to urge the producers to exercise “the greatest possible care in the selection and photographing of the costumes and dresses for your women. The Production Code makes it mandatory that the intimate parts of the body—specifically, the breasts of women—be fully covered at all times.” (Perhaps Colby got even rougher with young Julie in the initial treatment than was depicted in the final film?) Breen also insisted that revisions be made “to properly portray law and order in Mexico,” as the screenplay offered “an unfair portrayal of Mexican law-enforcement officials.” A revised screenplay was submitted a few months later, together with a note from the producers saying, “this version of the script has the approval of the Mexican government.” Breen gave it the go-ahead with a request for only two additional minor changes, and final PCA approval was granted on April 17, 1953.

David, Kendal, and Elva Dodge, circa 1950.

When all was said and done, Plunder of the Sun premiered on August 19, 1953. It was the second feature produced by John Wayne and Robert Fellows under their recent partnership as Wayne-Fellows Productions. Glenn Ford was ably cast in the lead role as Al Colby. Rhonda Fleming had originally been considered to play Anna Luz (which would have reunited the stars of 1951’s The Redhead and the Cowboy, also scripted by Latimer), but a horse-riding accident that Ford suffered on the set of his previous movie, The Man from the Alamo, delayed work on Plunder of the Sun. By the time everyone was finally ready for the cameras to start rolling, Fleming was no longer available and Patricia Medina was cast instead.

Dodge was disappointed with Hollywood’s rendering of his story, considering it a “low-budget, very poor picture,” and in a letter to his agent, he quoted a Variety review that said the film “did not do justice to the book.” The author was particularly peeved by Medina’s performance as Anna, referring to her (his daughter later recalled) as the “female Alan Ladd”—apparently, Dodge was no fan of Ladd, either.

Luckily for David Dodge, Grace and Cary and Hitch were waiting in the wings, ready to make a bolder, even if less faithful to the source material, rendition of his first novel set in Europe.

(Author’s note: The research necessary to compose this article was supported, in part, by a Research Grant from the Librarians Association of the University of California).

SOURCES
“Dodge, David,” Curtis Brown Ltd. Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.
Dodge, David. Plunder of the Sun. Random House, 1949.
Dodge, David. 20,000 Leagues Behind the 8 Ball. Random House, 1951.
Ford, Peter. Glenn Ford: A Life. University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
“Plunder of the Sun,” Internet Movie Database (IMDb), accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046196/
“Plunder of the Sun,” Motion Picture Association of America Production Code Administration Records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.