Pulp Review: The Bronze Door

Oil-executive-turned-mystery-writer Raymond Chandler was a master of characterization and prose, and his cynical gumshoe Philip Marlowe stands in the rarefied air of outstanding fictional detective characters alongside Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. He is easily one of my favorite authors.

Coming onto the Detective pulp scene in 1933 with a string of stories for Black Mask and similar publications, he would switch gears to novels in 1939 with his breakout The Big Sleep, but right before that he published a short story in the ninth issue of John W. Campbell's nascent fantasy magazine Unknown. Published in November of the very same year as The Big Sleep, The Bronze Door is a marked departure from Chandler's murky California streets in that its a piece of fantasy (close in tone to a Weird Tales story) set in foggy ol' London.

I became aware of this story about a year ago thanks to Nathan over at The Pulp Archivist who digs up all kinds of interesting pulp-era information and analysis.

We open with the unhappy marriage of James and Louella Sutton-Cornish. James is something of a run-down aristocrat who likes to drink while his wife is an unpleasant battleaxe with a spiteful Pomeranian named Teddy, who torments Mr. Sutton-Cornish whenever he can.

After an argument that causes Mrs. Sutton-Cornish to storm out of the house, James goes out into the night and takes an outdated style of horse-drawn cab to Soho, where he finds an auction house and a mysterious bronze door that he supposes belonged to a harem thanks to the Arabic writing on it.

By chance he discovers that things that pass through the doorway simply disappear without any fuss or muss. Discussing the door with the auctioneer, the little man hops through and vanishes like everything else.

Now the proud owner of a magical bronze door that can apparently disintegrate anything that passes through it, he has it delivered to his home, and then the wife returns, demanding a divorce...

From there the crime story elements rise to the surface since several people have simply disappeared and the police are beginning to take notice. The prose is of Chandler's usual top quality, with the mood and setting well-established. The little dog Teddy is wonderfully realized as a hateful little bastard, but then he becomes sympathetic when Mr. Sutton-Cornish chases him around the room trying to goad him into the door. That's a hard switch to pull, and Chandler does it excellently.

The Sutton-Cornishes are both terrible people, and a there's really nobody in the story to root for aside from Detective-sergeant Thomas Lloyd, who's really only in two scenes and isn't given a whole lot of spotlight, so that's a flaw.

The horse-drawn cab that is seemingly from another time/place? That's never developed. Its just a weird moment for its own sake. Its a shame too, since its a neat little scene.

The centerpiece of the story is the door itself, which manages to be sinister and corrupting while still being an inanimate object. The manner in which it disappears things is great, too. No fancy special effects, no messy piles of ash, no noisy sounds. Just...nothing, which is even more unsettling.

The Bronze Door is a curio of a story. Something to read once for the novelty of Raymond Chandler stretching his wings into unfamiliar territory. You read it, go “huh, that was interesting,” and then largely forget about it, except you steal the idea of the bronze door itself for your D&D campaign because you want to troll the hell out of your players.

It would be interesting to see more Chandler fantasy stories, but with the success of his Marlowe books, I can't blame him for following the money. 

“We were talking about automobile insurance, only you were thinking about murder. And I was thinking about that anklet.”

Okay, last film noir for a little while, and it’s a humdinger. Murder, My Sweet and The Maltese Falcon are great movies, fine examples of the genre and I love them, but they’re relatively... upbeat compared to 1944’s Double Indemnity, which is about as noir as film can get. Directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by Raymond Chandler himself, this film gets dark.

Plot
So there’s a cocky insurance salesman who pays a house call to a wealthy L.A. businessman about his auto insurance. He’s not there, but his bombshell wife is, and the sexual tension between them leads first to flirty innuendo, then to an affair where they plot the intricate murder of her husband where they would make a fortune on a life insurance plan they tricked him into signing. And then it all goes to hell.

Characters
Walter Neff: Fred Mac Murray (another Hollywood nice guy acting against type here) is outstanding as our protagonist. A decent enough fella at the beginning, if a bit cocky, he gets seduced pretty hard by femme fatale and ends up doing some pretty bad stuff. Despite becoming a villain protagonist, he’s still pretty damn badass throughout, consistently lighting a match with his fingernails before putting it to a cigarette.

Phyllis Dietrichson: Barbara Stanwyck (yet another actress playing against type) is just so damn evil in this movie. Sexy evil. When Neff meets her, she gives off the vibe of a bored housewife looking for some excitement in her life, but as the movie goes on, you get a peek at the layers underneath the character, and my God is Phyllis a disturbing character. Stanwyck acts the hell out of her too, putting in probably the best performance in the film. Some of the looks she gets in her eyes are the stuff of nightmare.

Barton Keyes: Edward G. Robinson (who was a veteran of tough guy crime movies) is the Hero, Neff’s supervisor and mentor at work, and one of the best claim investigators at the company. Keyes is the kind of guy who puts up a gruff exterior, but deep down he’s a softie who tries to look out for his friends. Too bad one of them is a murderer.

Mr. Dietrichson: Tom Powers is the unfortunate businessman who gets bumped off in the name of lust. Not much to say about him other than while he’s kind of a codger, he doesn’t deserve what’s coming to him.

Lola Dietrichson: Jean Heather is the good and innocent daughter of Dietrichson from a previous marriage. She looks up to Neff after they meet, and he tries to look out for her as the movie goes on.

Nino Zachetti: Byron Barr is Lola’s boyfriend, a kid studying medicine who’s also a wannabe tough guy that’s important to some of the subplots that develop.

Visuals/Effects
Prolific writer-director Billy Wilder handles this film with steady hand. Shots are great, the pacing is great and the whole visual mood of the movie just brings the tension to the fore. Probably the real standout stuff is how he works with close ups of the actors to get maximum non-verbal cues to imply what they’re thinking.

Writing
James M. Cain wrote the novel about a 1920’s murderess (Double Indemnity in Three of a Kind) and Billy Wilder & Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay. Apparently Wilder & Chandler hated each other, but that doesn’t matter, since the end result is probably one of the most riveting of the noir screenplays looked at here. I’ve got a bias toward Chandler’s quality, and Wilder is another solid writer, and here, they’re not working with established characters that have “franchise potential.” What that means is anything can happen to the characters in the film.

Sound
Miklós Rózsa’s score fits the dark and oppressive mood of the movie. Its good.

Conclusion
Double Indemnity is another one of those awesome classics where all the ingredients work. Its definite required material for viewing film noir, and its outstanding. However, I’m not kidding about how grimdark and bleak this movie is. There is exactly one bright spot by the end of the film.

"He died in 1940, in the middle of a glass of beer. His wife Jessie finished it for him."

Wave a gun in my face and ask me what my favorite genre is, and I’ll tell you its film noir, but only after I’ve managed to pick a few choice expletives expressing alarm and surprise. Its true though. More than Comedy, more than Science Fiction, even more than my beloved category of “Movies With Swords,” Film Noir scratches that storytelling itch like no other; where plot, characters and dialog get together and scheme some dirty business in a smoke filled room. Its also a genre so visually stylish that its always italicized. Now that’s classy. While the trench coat and fedora set is the accepted milieu, its not essential, just helps. What’s really important is the darker side of human nature, situations that get ugly and never wrap up neatly, and the gloomy grayscale presentation that’s devoid of all color.

One of the biggest names in the genre is Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s hard boiled private eye who’s more or less the guy who gets emulated the most in parodies and inferior rip-offs. Marlowe’s been put on the screen a bunch of times, and 1944’s Murder, My Sweet is a good place as any to start.

Plot
L.A. detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a petty crook just out of jail to find his old girlfriend. While that investigation begins, he also gets hired by a rich man to accompany him as protection on a midnight handoff of a good chunk of change in exchange for the return of some valuable jade. Marlowe gets socked with a blackjack and finds Mr. Fancy Pants dead in the car. The next day, he gets hired by the real owner of the jade to get it back discreetly, somehow. Then things get messy.

Characters
Philip Marlowe: Dick Powell, who was previously typecast as a nice guy crooner, plays against type here as the narrator and hard-boiled guy who’s trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. Marlowe’s a complex character; a tough talking, cynical guy who’d cuff you one for calling him an intellectual without denying it. He’s also famous for having an unbreakable code of honor that gets the tar kicked out of him more often than not, and Marlowe takes quite a beating in this picture. They don’t get much more badass than him.

Mr. Grayle: Miles Mander is an old rich man with a trophy wife. The missing jade was a gift from him to his wife, and he’s the one who calls in Marlowe to find the piece.

Mrs. Helen Grayle: Claire Trevor is a beautiful, wealthy woman who’s the owner of the missing jade. The dead guy was one of her lovers on the side, and she…encourages Marlowe to recover the jewelry. You could cut the tension between her and the detective with a fork.

Ann Grayle: Anne Shirley is Mr. Grayle’s daughter from a previous marriage, and she hates Helen. She’s got quite a bit of tension with Marlowe as well.

Jules Amthor: Otto Kruger (from Dracula’s Daughter) plays some kind of psychologist who’s got a mystique of some mystical woogie-woogie to help his clients, but he admits to Marlowe that he’s a quack running a pretty lucrative racket. He’s crooked and connected to Mrs. Grayle.

Moose Malloy: Mike Mazurki is the heavy that hires Marlowe in the first place to find his girl. Moose is a big brute of a guy who’s slow on the uptake and has something of a temper, but he’s more a figure of pity than a villain. That may be so, but he’s not the kind of guy that takes well to being hit.

Dr. Sonderborg: Ralf Harolde is an associate of Amthor’s, a crooked doctor who’s involved in some pretty bad stuff. Marlowe gets drugged and put into his “care” for a stretch of time. Guess how please our hero is about THAT situation.

Visuals/Effects
Edward Dmytryk makes really good use of the standard film noir elements, but the film also goes for some more experimental shots. For instance, we cut to a nightclub, but the establishing shot is a spotlight cutting horizontally through a dark room and the camera pans down until it stops on a singer. There’s also a section where Marlowe gets drugged by some bad dudes and the movie goes into a really well done dream/hallucination sequence that uses a lot of camera and editing tricks. Then there’s my favorite scene where Marlowe’s waiting outside for someone and he’s standing next to a cherub statue, looks at it for a second, then lights a match on its ass.

Writing
Raymond Chandler wrote the novel “Farewell, My Lovely” and John Paxton wrote the screenplay, the story is chock full of that Raymond Chandler goodness. Double crosses, intrigue, femme fatales, whip-smart dialogue and at the center of it a good man in a dirty world trying to make something right.

Sound
Roy Webb did the score for it and the music works great for the mood and situation.

Conclusion
Raymond Chandler apparently called Dick Powell his favorite actor to play Marlowe, and I can see why. He’s outstanding in it, but so is the rest of the cast. Murder, My Sweet may not be the most famous film noir out there (we’ll get to some of those in a bit), but it gets major points for effort and experimentation. Totally recommended.