JAMES M CAIN'S COCKTAIL WAITRESS

The reasons why James M. Cain was more successful than Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett during their lifetimes, and the reasons why he is the least read of the three today are connected, and they have to do with morality. This was a point reinforced for me by The Cocktail Waitress, Cain's lost last novel, written in 1975 when he was 83, and tracked down and then edited together from various versions by Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime.

Cain's writing sold more to his contemporary audience partly because it escaped the confines of the genre ghetto of 'mystery' –his stories usually have crime within them (though the killing of Monte Beragon in Mildred Pierce, for example, is something added by the movies), but not detective heroes, so they could play to the somewhat higher-brow audience who looked down on the pulp magazines that spawned Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. More important, though, was the world of steamy, obsessive, noirish sex which Cain's characters inhabited. He wrote material that the highbrow critics hated, but which the middle brow audiences ate up, a form of sexual slumming which inspired a slew of followers, of whom Erskine Caldwell may be the most notable. And though today he's remembered for the films his novels inspired, it's worth noting that it took Hollywood 12 years to work up the gumption to produce a diluted version of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Of course, what was hot stuff to my parents' generation, and when I was a kid in the Fifties, is pretty tame nowadays. Which is one of the reasons Cain fell somewhat to the wayside. Another was that, as his late-blooming career went on, his work dealt more and more with his obsessions, and his stories became less and less compulsive.

But what made his stories compulsive is also what made them acceptable in the Thirties and Forties, and what makes them less compelling today. They are underpinned by a powerful sense of morality, a morality which insists that sin, inevitably, be punished, while simultaneously portraying the intoxicating delights it offers before the punishment comes due. Cain's stories are about people caught up by forces they cannot control, forces which will inevitably destroy them. It is a world created by an Old Testament God, and if that makes the original Cain, or Job, or David, the first noir protagonist, so be it. It's not like this is a secret, among Cain's later novels are titles like Sinful Woman and The Root Of His Evil. His God may well have departed the scene; not for nothing did Albert Camus call Cain 'America's greatest writer', but that sense of retribution is never far away, and often his characters see it coming.

Hammett's protagonists resonate with modern audiences because they are almost anti-heroes; they know the world has its sins, that people are corrupted, and they function within that world, partaking of it but never succumbing to it, never letting it take control of them, living by their own code of what demands punishment. Chandler's Marlowe also knows the world is corrupt, but he copes with it like an idealist who's become, as idealists do, a cynic. He constructs a facade of not caring, defined by cracking wise, to protect him from the corruption. What makes Elliott Gould's Marlowe so accurate in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, the reason by it's generally either loved or hated by Chander fans, is the understanding of this character, which Leigh Brackett and Altman nail perfectly. Their Marlowe is the most accurate depiction of what's REALLY going on underneath the facade, as opposed to the what the readers (and perhaps author) really thinks is going on, since Robert Aldrich and Buzz Bezzerides' deconstruction of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly.

In this sense, The Cocktail Waitress is a veritable cocktail of Cain's Old Testament themes, a small masterpiece of self-deconstruction. Joan Medford, the eponymous waitress, narrates the tale, and when it opens her abusive husband has just died in a drunken car crash, which at least one cop still suspects her of somehow having caused. Her son is in the care of her in-laws, and her sister-in-law Ethel, who can't have children of her own, desperately wants to keep him. Joan is simply trying to make ends meet, but needs to prove she can support herself and her son, so she takes a job as a cocktail waitress at the Garden of Roses. She catches the eye of an older millionaire, Earl K. White III, and of a younger man with big plans, Tom Barclay, who says he drove her home from her husband's funeral, and claims she blew him a kiss when he left.

The set-up is brilliant, and you can see where it's going. Joan is obsessive about making a success, and enough money to get back her son. Her need becomes overwhelming. Earl quickly becomes obsessed with Joan, and offers to marry her, but with a catch—he has a heart condition, and has been told by his doctors that he could never stand the strain of sex. His passion could literally kill him. Joan quickly becomes obsessed with Tom—even though on their first 'date' he takes her to a topless bar cum whorehouse. But her passion is just as dangerous to her need as Earl's is to him. It's like a condensed version of Cain's classic characters and themes rolled into one: Postman crossed with Mildred Pierce crossed with Double Indemnity (you wonder if the character is called Joan in reference to Crawford) with a bit of Cain himself thrown in: he was suffering from angina as he wrote the book, and was 83, (I wondered reading the strip club scene if he'd seen The Graduate and been inspired). Tom is Walter Neff crossed with Beragon, Earl is partly Nick, partly Mr Dietrichson. But the real question is who Joan is, and that's where the beauty of this novel lies.

As you might expect, things get complicated, and then go wrong, and eventually one accident is followed by another death, and coincidence begins to mount. There's a trial scene, and then a vicious twist at the end which clever readers will have seen coming, but which, in terms of Old Testament justice, is cruel and unusual, and which makes clear what Cain has been doing all along: setting us, the readers, up for a fall, just as he did so brilliantly in Postman. But here, he's done it with the female first-person narration (remember, Mildred Pierce is told in third person; Postman in the first by Frank Chambers). Cain's sense of Joan's voice, which seems believable at first, now is revealed to be downright compelling: we have watched the story through her eyes, and we are forced to re-evaluate the entire story, and our own preconceptions and sympathies, as a result. Although we have the sense of impending doom, Joan never shares it, and this creates a wonderful tension, because we, as readers, accept her voice. 

The Cocktail Waitress is not a 'great' novel, and  it will carry less impact to a modern audience unfamiliar with Cain; in fact, judging by some of the reviews it appears that is the case. But its publication at this time makes it a perfect coda to Cain's career; he is remembered now mostly for the movies he inspired. I'd love to see it turned into a film; after all even Mildred Pierce with Kate Winslett was a success (Guy Pearce's Beragon stole that show--though the HBO adaptation did return Lucy Gessler, as Mildred's friend, to a larger role, giving Melissa Leo a chance to shine; there is an equivalent character in The Cocktail Waitress too). The question would be whether you use the late Fifties/early Sixties period (the end of the era of morality: pre-Beatles and the rest) or go contemporary, because we are currently mired in an age that combines both licentiousness and prudery in ways that make the Roaring Twenties/Depression Thirties seem balanced. With the popularity of Mad Men, and copies of it like The Hour, and the success of Mildred Pierce, period might work better; this I think could be the breakthrough role for Jessica Chastain.

There has been huge re-evaluation of Cain in recent years. Postman was picked for the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list; Double Indemnity is one of the AFI's 100 best American films. This novel is a moving reminder of what made Cain so compelling in his time, and what makes him so today. It may not be the place to begin reading him, but once you've started to move beyond the classics, to the more obsessive works (The Butterfly, Galatea, Serenade and Past All Dishonor, for example), it's a good place to see clearly what he's up to, and what he's capable of doing with his writing.

The Cocktail Waitress by James M Cain

Hard Case Crime/Titan Books £16.99 ISBN 9781781160329

This essay will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetrime.co.uk)

THE GOLDEN GLOBES, IN GLOBS

The important thing to remember about the Golden Globe awards is that they serve their purpose, but that purpose (or purposes) have nothing much to do with predicting Oscars or judging quality. The awards are voted on by about 90 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and their biggest purpose is to do what that organisation set them up to do: ingratiate themselves with the Hollywood studios, get better access to them, and to their stars. Their members, of whom I've known a couple, are not usually film critics but primarily writers chasing celebrity interviews and entertainment previews, indeed some are general reporters. Their jobs depend largely on studio public relations access, and if you look closely at the banquet, you'll see the members are scattered among the tables, giving each a built in chance for a couple of exclusives on the night. Something the movie-makers like, because being of small number, and desperate, the Globes voters are eminently, shall we say, vulnerable to inducement. And the awards serve a useful purpose to Hollywood: both as a way to hype up films pre-Oscar, and also to generate some ticket sales for films that won't triumph at Oscar time. This is made easier because the Globes give separate awards for 'drama' and 'musical or comedy,' twice the winners mean fewer losers! Given given the extra shot at the odds, the Globes more often than not fail to predict the Academy Awards' best picture. And television loves the Globes too, for the rub they get with the movie people—you could argue that the worldwide market for television programmes and their stars makes this even more essential than the film awards. Then there's that European obsession with golden-this and golden-that awards; I once served on a jury for a Sports TV award called the 'Golden Shot'. If Oscar had lived in Cannes, rather than its twinned city Beverly Hills, he'd be called The Golden Oscars.

Keeping all this in mind, it was funny to read some of the British critics opining that Argo's award for best drama came because the picture shows 'Tinseltown coming to the rescue of the real world', as if the Globe voters were actually part of Tinseltown. I suppose you could argue that, in a Stockholm Syndrome sense, they are. As a piece of historical drama, Argo may well be more accurate than Zero Dark Thirty, or indeed Lincoln (neither of which I have seen as I write this) and it is both suspenseful and entertaining, as well as catching its period very well. But you can pretty much write it off for an Oscar. Director Ben Affleck wasn't even nominated for an Oscar, and neither was Tom Hooper, who directed Les Miserables, which won the best musical award.

Besides Argo, it was a good night for the CIA, who also took the best actress awards in both drama and TV, though they weren't nominated for the Zero Dark Thirty script. Jessica Chastain's role, which is supposedly a composite character, seems oddly similar to Clare Danes' Carrie, serving primarily to nag her organisation into following up on her work. I've written about Homeland elsewhere on this blog, but it does occur to me that in its insistence on Carrie's neurotic behaviour, the show has it both ways, presenting a strong female character who's driven crazy trying to succeed. It may be that the point is it's a man's world, and its corruptions would drive anyone insane, but that interpretation is also tempered by her love for Brody, which renders her all marshmallowy in the end. It is also reflected in other women characters: Aileen Morgan, (Marin Ireland) the American woman working for Al-Queda, who kills herself rather than spend her life as a tortured prisoner in a mainland Guantanemo, or the Vice President's wife, who knows how the game is played, as an adjunct of the males. The most telling character, however, is the British journalism student cum Al Queda operative Roya Hammad (played by Zuleikha Robinson) who, after she is captured, has to listen to Carrie telling her all the great things she has to look forward to in life without Al Queda—and then spits out her defiance and her disgust at Carrie's lack of understanding what her 'enemy' is all about. It was as powerful as Morgan's suicide—and presumably wouldn't be needed in Zero Dark Thirty.

Among the actors it was a good day for the British Lewis brothers. Daniel Day-Lewis won for Lincoln, and Damien Lewis for playing Brody in Homeland. I can't comment yet on ' Lincoln, but I wonder if comparing Day-Lewis' career to Spencer Tracy's might be apt (for example, Northwest Passage vs Last Of The Mohicans). Damien Lewis seems to specialise in playing American characters who are trying to draw on inner reserves in the face of being asked to do things they might have found impossible not long before. In Homeland, particularly in the second series, his visible breakdown was almost a parallel to Danes' in the first series; theirs may be the relationship most ripe for psychoanalysis since McMurtry met the Chief.

In the wake of this non-consequence it probably wasn't surprising that the scene get stolen by a couple of sidebars, which made the biggest and the funniest splashes in the chativerse. The biggest, of course, was Jodie Foster's acceptance speech on being given the Cecil B DeMille award. CB, were he alive today, would be rolling over in his grave. Foster's rambling 'j'accuse' appeared to be blaming the press in general for making her not come out when she was out, or maybe the opposite, and perhaps using the stage to complain about the attention she's received. Not for nothing did her dress appear to be made of chain mail. It's hard to escape the idea that Jodie might have been saying she'd like back the lifetime for which she was being given her award. In fifteen years, I fully expect Claire Danes to be making the same speech.

The more amusing moment for the Globes actually came the next day, in a New York Times blog written by Alessandra Stanley, whose take on the awards was headlined 'A Salute To Girl Power' and boasted the following lede:

At a time when President Obama is under attack for appointing so many white men — and so few women — to senior positions in the White House, Hollywood seemed intent Sunday on correcting the imbalance at the Golden Globes. 

Apart from the wave of nausea, if I understand this correctly, 'Hollywood', in the person of 90 foreign journalists who work there, tried to correct an 'imbalance' in the American government by hiring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to host their show. Leave aside the idea that the President was somehow obligated to replace Hilary Clinton was another woman, or that he actually tried to and had the idea shot down from all sides; this vacuity is remarkable on a couple of lesser levels. First off, the idea that hiring Tina Fey, who after all was the best Republican candidate in the 2008 elections and is one of the funnist people out there, needs to be explained as some sort of market correction is insane. It should be taken for granted and pass without notice that Tina Fey should be hosting. But even more stunning is the assumption that her hosting the inanity of a second-tier self-congratulatory award show somehow would rebalance the perceived faults of the United States government. 'Oh, no woman is secretary of state, but that's OK because TWO women hosted the Golden Globes!'. The logical next step would be to demand that Obama nominate either Jessica Chastain or Claire Danes to become head of the CIA!