Included as a supplement on Disc 2 of the two-disc Reservoir Dogs reissue, The Film Noir Web was a tangle of cross-references — for example, in the first entry, clicking on any of the movie titles or people mentioned would whisk you to the relevant paragraph in another section, hence "web" and not "list." (To illustrate this, the clickables in the first few entries are underscored, so you'll get the idea. They don't work as links, here.) This was great fun and hard work to write, because it required actual thought about the essential differences among a bunch of writers and directors who could all be generalized as "hardboiled." As with most DVD supplement work, a lot of the information is public record or old news, but the intent is that anybody who reads any section stands a decent chance of discovering at least one thing they didn't know before. If you want to see all the pictures, you'll just have to imagine them … or get the damned DVD, already.

The Film Noir Web was a "start anywhere" kind of function, so we'll start here with the first entry DJS wrote:

LEE MARVIN (1924-1987)

After Bogart, the archetypal movie tough guy who personified Richard Stark's Parker (as "Walker") in the watershed noir film of the American New Wave, John Boorman's Point Blank. Jut-jawed and super-tough, he claimed he "learned to act in the Marines" and worked his way up through supporting roles. playing cops and thugs with equal aplomb (see: Violent Saturday, Shack Out on 101), breaking out in villainous full flower in The Big Heat and The Wild One. On the flip side, he played a no-nonsense detective for the full run of TV's M SQUAD (1957-60), and after scoring an Oscar for playing a dual role in CAT BALLOU (1965), elevated to A-list leading man status in such actioners as THE PROFESSIONALS (1966, for Richard Brooks) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967, for Robert Aldrich). He also worked for John Ford as the whip-wielding villain of THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962) and DONOVAN'S REEF (1963), and starred in Sam Fuller's final film, THE BIG RED ONE (1980). Portraying an ice-cold assassin in Don Siegel's infamous 1964 remake of The Killers, he blows away bad guy Ronald Reagan (in his final screen role prior to politics) and refuses to suffer Angie Dickinson begging for her life: "Lady, I don't have the time."

RICHARD STARK (Donald Westlake)

Psuedonym of best-selling crime/thriller writer and satirist Donald Westlake, confected for a groundbreaking series of novels about master thief Parker, best personified by Lee Marvin in John Boorman's Point Blank, an adaptation of the first Parker novel, The Hunter (remade in 1999 by Brian Helgelund as Payback). Film adaptations of Parker novels include The Outfit (1963) as The Outfit (1973), The Score (1964) as Mise à Sac (aka Pillaged, 1967), The Jugger (1965) as Made in U.S.A. (1967), The Seventh (1966) as The Split (1969), The Handle (1966) as Run Lethal, and Slayground (1971) as Slayground (1983). After a 24-year break, Westlake, as "Stark," commenced a new cycle of Parker novels in 1998 with Comeback.

PARKER

A virtual blueprint for the icy professional thief who appears totally amoral but hews to his own rigid inner code of ethics (this archetype's distaff side further defining modern noir via the femme fatales popularized by James M. Cain) , Parker was created by Donald Westlake in the 1962 novel The Hunter — twice filmed (as Point Bank and Payback), and much-plundered, in spirit, for spinoffs such as Mike Hodges' Get Carter (1971), Lo Lieh's Devil and Angel (1973), Walter Hill's The Driver, (1978), Michael Mann's Thief (1981), Ringo Lam's Full Contact (1993) John Irvin's City of Industry (1997), and Steven Soderbergh's The Limey (1999). See The Violent World of Parker website at: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Nook/5171/

JAMES M. CAIN (1892-1977)

One of the Holy Trinity of classic hardboiled fiction (with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett), Cain helped the modern detective story, first imagined by Edgar Allan Poe, transcend its roots — British locked-room mysteries and Sherlock Holmesian dramas of deduction — by concentrating on the lurid and prurient. Sex and violence were the principal concerns of his crime thrillers, which evolved the form into today's take-no-prisoners, no-holds-barred toughness of character, and paved the way for everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Mickey Spillane.

Cain's first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) was a runaway best-seller on first publication, and established his quintessential femme fatale in a fairly often-repeated plot: A man falls for a woman he cannot have or does not rate, he becomes involved in criminal activity in cahoots with the woman, and is eventually betrayed by the object of his desire. Hence, Cain is the progenitor of such modern spins as Body Heat (1981), Blood Simple (1984) or Basic Instinct (1992), with the crown jewel of his pantheon of corrupt schemers being the immortal Phyllis Dietrickson of Double Indemnity (1943; originally a novelette in the collection Three of a Kind).

Cain began his career as a screenwriter, doing storylines or additional dialogue for such films as She Made Her Bed (1934), Blockade (1938) and Algiers (1938) before concentrating on novels. His books, while much-adapted and fundamental to film noir, were mostly screenwritten by others, (most notably Chandler, on the 1944 Double Indemnity). Prior to the first English adaptation of Postman were two other versions, French (Le dernier tournant [1939]) and Italian (Ossessione [1943], directed by Luchino Visconti).

MICKEY SPILLANE (1918 - )

Frank Morrison "Mickey" Spillane not only created Mike Hammer, but in an earlier occupation helped to originate the Captain Marvel and Captain America characters for the comic book medium. Hammer is his immortal creation (over 140 million copies of the novels have sold worldwide), permutated through cinema, TV, radio, short fiction and a host of imitators whose reverberations are experienced today. Of writing, Spillane always maintained that he was a writer, not an "author," pointing out that "those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar."

MIKE HAMMER

Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe were pussycats compared to Mickey Spillane's ultraviolent P.I., Mike Hammer — a hard-drinking, Lucky-smoking, two-fisted, sadistic loner as likely to use a gun to pistol-whip as shoot, and thereby a model for latter-day anti-heroes in the mold of Dirty Harry. His .45 automatic is nicknamed "Betsy," but the only significant woman in his life is Velda, a spiritual bright side to usual dark, venomous, betraying females found in most noir. Velda is sidekick, secretary, nursemaid, and, by inference, Mike's sole romantic interest (Velda also packed a .32 and was licensed as a P.I. — a distinction not afforded many women in noir fiction, who were usually relegated to victim or femme fatale status).

Hammer is the centerpiece of Spillane's I, the Jury (1947), filmed in 1953 and 1982, but he explodes across the screen like a supernova in Robert Aldrich's groundbreaking adaptation of Kiss Me Deadly (1955), as indelibly portrayed by Ralph Meeker. It gets even better: Darren McGavin memorably portrayed Hammer in the best of many television adaptations, for 78 episodes of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (1958-59). Another great "lost" Hammer was Brian Keith, directed by Blake Edwards (in 1954, prior to Peter Gunn) in a TV pilot deemed "too violent" for broadcast (and, not surprisingly, Keith's performance as Hammer was one of Spillane's favorites). But Hammer has the ultra-rare distinction of being one of the few lions of noir and modern hardboiled fiction to actually be portrayed onscreen by his own creator — Spillane himself! — in The Girl Hunters (1963, directed by Roy Rowland), in which Hammer detains a suspect (after beating him up) by nailing his hand to the floor!

Spillane's canon of Hammer novels includes I, the Jury (1947), My Gun is Quick (1950), Vengeance is Mine! (1950), One Lonely Night (1951), The Big Kill (1951), Kiss Me, Deadly (1952), The Girl Hunters (1962), The Snake (1964), The Twisted Thing (1966), The Body Lovers (1967), Survival … Zero! (1970), The Killing Man (1989) and Black Alley (1996).

See The Unofficial Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer site at: http://www.interlog.com/~roco/hammer.html

Holding Your Gun

Like cigarettes, rainswept tarmac and dialogue clipped from between clenched teeth, gun affectations have remained with film noir since the term was coined. Before squibs, blood bags and "zerk" hits became common coign in cinema, about the only way for an actor to perform the absorption of a bullet was to grimace, as though from a gas pain, clutch the entry point, and sag slowly to the floor. That all changed with mass audience acceptance of the tommygun slaughter at the climax of Bonnie and Clyde (though earlier, more isolated examples exist) in 1967, just a Sam Peckinpah was gearing up to show us The Wild Bunch. Similarly, heroes, anti-heroes, gunsels and just plain joes in noir all used to wield their weaponry a certain way. Watch Bogie in The Big Sleep — the pistol is always held tight to the ribcage. Once public awareness of firearms handling grew, movie folk began to hold their guns differently — note the hyperextended, two-hand combat grip on show throughout Thief (1981), wherein James Caan demonstrated what the Los Angeles Times called "the method for covering unknown space." Gun handling was also conditioned by growing cognizance of the moves employed by SWAT teams (did you know that SWAT squads were first conceived by former L.A. police chief Daryl Gates, pre-1978, while still a uniformed officer? The acronym originally stood for Special Weapons Attack Team, but Gates' superior at the time, Chief Ed Davis, was concerned about public relations and uneasy about the word "attack." Today Gates is known as "the Father of SWAT.").

In the late 80s / early 90s, all of a sudden, people started holding their guns sideways, especially badass rappers and gangbangers, and movies copied them in the name of street credibility. But these cutting-edge copycats picked it up from the movies in the first place, where it began not as a cool new way of pointing a firearm, but as a safety precaution once the revolver was put out to pasture and the semi-auto handgun became the weapon of choice, the way the Beretta .92 was popularized in the first Lethal Weapon in 1987. Most semi-automatic handguns eject spent brass up and to the right; when that brass comes out, it is still sizzling hot from discharge, and movie stunt coordinators began to request — especially in big firefight scenes involving more than a single shooter — that actors tilt the gun so cartridges fly out laterally, or, even better, toward the floor. This has spared many a make-believe bad guy from taking hot brass in the eye. Somebody noticed it while watching a movie, and voila — a whole new weird way to hold your gun.

DONALD (Edwin Edmund) WESTLAKE (b. 1933)

Creator of the indomitable Parker, mainstay of The Hunter and its many followups (under the psuedonym Richard Stark) and the irascible John Dortmunder, mainstay of The Hot Rock (with his own set of novels), Westlake persistently dabbles in the hardboiled and noirish, but never without a sense of humor and deep irony. Westlake's more than 80 books form the backbone of what is commonly called "comic crime." Additionally, he was nominated for an Academy Award in 1990 for his work adapting the Jim Thompson novel The Grifters to the screen. In 1993, Westlake adapted Dashiell Hammett, for a TV anthology episode titled Fly Paper. He also created the Father Doweling character for television, and has seen his most immortal creation, Parker, flirt with assorted film adaptations for fully half his own bibliography – from John Boorman's classic take on The Hunter, Point Blank, to Jean-Luc Godard's disastrous version of The Jugger, titled Made in U.S.A.

JOHN WOO (Yusen Wu; [born Ng Yu-Sum, 1946])

Inventor of the "bullet ballet" and the man responsible for re-energizing Chinese cinema in 1986 with A Better Tomorrow, John Woo began his movie career directing comedies and musicals, after working his way up through assistant positions at Golden Harvest and the Shaw Brothers Studios (then famed for martial arts action films usually summed up as "chop-socky"). Heavily influenced by the films of Jean-Pierre Melville – particularly Le Samourai – and citing his favorite directors as Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese, Woo redefined the limits of gangster movies and action cinema with A Better Tomorrow 1 and 2, The Killer (his classic), Bullet in the Head (his epic), and Hard-Boiled, more often than not teaming with his preferred star, Chow Yun-Fat. Woo "imported himself" to America to debut with a Jean-Claude Van Damme film, Hard Target, followed by a big-budget action hit, Broken Arrow, and later by Face/Off, the first film that can be said to be a pure, or genuine, "John Woo film" made under American auspices.

RAYMOND (Thornton) Chandler (1888-1959)

One of the architects of modern film noir through both his literary influences and frustrating experiences with screenplay writing, Chandler made a living out of chronicling the other side of the tracks, grifters and losers at barrel-bottom and rope's end, and the betrayals that mark the greatest hardboiled fiction, yet he felt little more than contempt for his audience, and was the subject of a roman-a clef parody in the Coen Brothers film, Barton Fink.

Chandler began publishing in the pulp mines, in markets like Black Mask, Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly. A slow writer, he produced only a handful of short stories, but his fourth, "Killer in the Rain," served as the basis for his first novel-length venture, The Big Sleep, which introduced the world to his crown jewel, Philip Marlowe, P.I. – a modern knight and tarnished hero soon immortalized by Humphrey Bogart in the screen adaption of the novel.

Bogart was not the first screen Marlowe, however – that distinction goes to Dick Powell, who played the gumshoe in Murder My Sweet, a 1944 adaption of Chandler's second Marlowe book, Farewell My Lovely (the plot of which was also used as the basis for The Falcon Takes Over [1942]).

The six central novels of the Marlowe canon are The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953), and Playback (1958). An unfinished seventh novel, Poodle Springs, was completed by Robert B. Parker in 1989. Parker later wrote a sequel to The Big Sleep, called Perchance to Dream (1991).

After debuting as a screenwriter (with Frank Partos) with And Now Tomorrow (1944), Chandler adapted James M. Cain's Double Indemnity for director Billy Wilder. It was the beginning of a tempestuous and frustrating ride through Hollywood for Chandler, and most of his subsequent screen credits were collaborative: The Unseen (with Hagar Wilde and Ken Englund [1945]), and Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (with Czenzi Ormonde and Whitfield Cook [1951]). By the time John Houseman asked Chandler to write the screenplay for The Blue Dahlia (1946, based on the unsolved Black Dahlia murder case), Chandler's demands included an on-call secretary, chauffeur, and never-ending supply of scotch. It was Chandler's final solo screen credit.

Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner called Chandler "a star of the first magnitude." While Truman Capote noted Chandler's plotting was "a mess," Ross MacDonald founded the more famous and enduring quote to sum up Chandler: "He wrote like a slumming angel."

More importantly, Chandler capsulized the essence of the film noir anti-hero in his classic essay, "The Simple Art of Murder."

(NB: See pieces of this essay referenced in the introduction written by DJS for the Sonambulo comic, here.)

JIM THOMPSON (James Myers Thompson, 1906-1977)

Son of a failed politician turned failed oil magnate, Thompson hit the mother lode of inspiration while working as a bellhop in Fort Worth's Hotel Texas. His observations and experiences led to the distinctive flavor of his novels, from The Getaway, Wild Town and Bad Boy to Now and on Earth and Swell-Looking Babe. When Stanley Kubrick needed a writer to adapt Lionel White's Clean Break to the screen, he chose Thompson, and the result was The Killing. Kubrick called Thompson's The Killer Inside Me " … the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally-warped mind I have ever encountered." Thompson was to work twice more for Kubrick: on revisions for Paths of Glory, and on a never-realized project titled I Stole$16,000,000.

Thompson's The Getaway was adapted by Walter Hill for the 1972 Sam Peckinpah film of the same name, later remade by Roger Spottiswoode. Donald Westlake later adapted The Grifters in 1990.

Most of Thompson's 29 novels were classic pulp writing, originally published as paperback originals during the 1940s and 50s by such houses as Lion, Pyramid, and Regency – books with a very short half-life. Despite the success of the movie version of The Getaway, Thompson enjoyed no boosted notoriety and at the time of his death (from starvation and depression, in 1977), not one of his books was in print in America. His canon was later repopularized in the mid-1980s, starting with a series of classic reprints from Black Lizard Books of such Thompson linchpins as Recoil, Pop. 1280, The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me, and Nothing More than Murder.

TIMOTHY (William) CAREY (1929-1994)

A lanky, saturnine character actor most famous for his work with Stanley Kubrick in Paths of Glory … and most infamous for being the only man director Elia Kazan ever physically attacked on-set. Marlon Brando stabbed Carey with a pen on the set of One-Eyed Jacks. John Cassavettes, who cast Carey in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, declared that the actor had "the brilliance of Eisenstein" – after Carey put Cassavettes in a padded suit and turned an attack dog loose on him, during the actor/director's first visit to his home.

Carey's six-foot-five stature and laconic demeanor served him well in a number of tough-guy and character bits, and he later became a television regular on such shows as Mannix, Baretta, Ellery Queen and CHiPS. He was apprehended scaling the fence at 20th Century-Fox in full armor, just to audition for Prince Valiant, and later faked his own kidnapping while in Germany, during the shooting of Paths of Glory.

His magnum opus was The World's Greatest Sinner (1962) – made nearly single-handedly over three years and released in 1962. Carey wrote the story of an insurance salesman who goes into politics and develops a God complex, then directed and starred. It featured a score by iconoclastic genius Frank Zappa. A second feature, Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena, remained in production from 1972 onward (Carey turned down a role in The Godfather to work on it), but was never completed.

Carey also appeared in Kubrick's The Killing, East of Eden, Crime Wave, and The Outfit.

He died of a stroke on his own birthday, May 11th, 1994.

CHARLES WILLEFORD (1919-1988)

Another writer of the modern hardboiled school who might have been condemned to the obscurity of many of his contemporaries – like David Goodis – were it not for the resurrectional benefits of the film medium, and his creation, comparatively late in his bibliography, of a washed-up detective named Hoke Moseley, star of four novels – Miami Blues (1984), New Hope for the Dead(1985), Sideswipe (1987), and The Way We Die Now (1988) – and memorably incarnated by Fred Ward in the 1990 film version of the debut book.

His first published book was a collection of poetry, Proletarian Laughter (1948). After writing a soap opera serial, The Safa of Mary Miller, Willeford found himself hooked on the narrative form and began High Priest of California the next year. This short novel fell into the purvue of Beacon Books and was published in a back-to-back format with Talbot Mundy's Full Moon in 1953. It offered a non-moralizing observation of its main character, psychopathic used-car dealer Russell Haxby, in much the same style inaugurated by Robert Bloch in his own debut novel, The Scarf (1947) – thus paving the way for a whole generation of brutal and amoral anti-heroes to follow.

Willeford's next novel was Pickup (1955 – still a classic) and Until I am Dead (1956); Beacon changed the title of this latter to Wild Wives. In 1962 he penned Cockfighter, adapted into a memorable 1974 film by Monte Hellman; Willeford wrote the screenplay (titled Born to Kill) and if you look fast, you'll spot him in the movie. The film of Cockfighter accorded Willeford more visibility just as he had completed the novel The Burnt Orange Heresy (1971) and Cockfighter, a paperback original, was reprinted in a hardcover edition. Willeford's "masterpiece" – at least he thought so – was also his longest novel, The Shark-Infested Custard (published as Kiss Your Ass Goodbye in 1987); by that point, he had entered the world of Hoke Moseley … and his greatest fame.

Willeford's protagonists were accurately summarized by Lou Stathis as "dickhead heroes," which pegs Hoke Moseley right on the … nose. "I'm not breaking the genre," Willeford said. "I'm just bending it a bit."

EDDIE BUNKER (b. 1934)

Called "the reigning king of prison writers," Edward Bunker spent over half his life in prison or as a fugitive for forgery, dope dealing, extortion and robbery. At 17 years of age he was the youngest inmate ever admitted to San Quentin, and today he is known to most people are Reservoir Dogs' all-business Mr. Blue.

Bunker taught himself to write while an inmate (on a typewriter provided by Mack Sennett silent star Louise Wallace) and it took 17 years for his first novel to be published. No Beast So Fierce (1973) is still hailed today by Quentin Tarantino as the greatest crime novel ever written.

In 1978 Bunker collaborated with Alvin Sargeant on the screenplay to his book, retitled Straight Time -- a film which Dustin Hoffman directed initially, then turned over to director Ulu Grosbard. Bunker also served as an advisor on the film, and appears in the cast as "Mickey."

By this time, "Eddie" Bunker was jailhouse-free and making his living as a writer, actor, and technical advisor. He co-wrote the script to Andrei Konchalovski’s "existential action movie," Runaway Train (1985, based on a script by Akira Kurosawa), and acted in ten other films before coming to Reservoir Dogs.

His other books include The Animal Factory (1977), Dog Eat Dog (1996), Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (1999), and Education of a Felon: A Memoir (2000). A film version of Animal Factory was produced in 2000, directed by Steve Buscemi ("Mr. Pink"), with Bunker onboard as screenwriter, as well as a convict named "Buzzard."

JAMES ELLROY (b. 1948)

One of the modern generation of hardboiled writers, Ellroy's first novel, Brown's Requiem, was published in 1981. The murder of his mother, Jean Ellroy, when James was only ten subsequently fueled his obsession with the dark side of the street, and he later put his feelings in writing in the semi-autobiographical My Dark Places (1995).

His first brush with adaptation was Cop (1987), co-written with Jack Harris and based on Ellroy's third novel, Blood on the Moon (1984). Following some TV work, his novel L.A. Confidential was adapted by Brian Helgeland (later himself to write and direct Payback -- a remake of Point Blank, itself an adaptation of The Hunter) and directed by Curtis Hanson in 1997, and Ellroy found himself, by virtue of that film's many Oscar nominations, as the newest kid on the noir block.

Ellroy's seventh novel, The Black Dahlia(1987) was derived from the infamous (and much-mined) Elizabeth Short murder gone unsolved since 1947. (This same story also spurred the creation of John Gregory Dunne's novel True Confessions (1977), later a 1981 film directed by Ulu Grosbard (of Straight Time), and also done as a TV movie titled Who is the Black Dahlia?

The latest of 16 books so far (including two story collections) from the self-professed "demon dog of American crime fiction" is The Cold Six Thousand (2001).

RIFIFI (1955)

The working model for heist films nearly half a century later, Rififi exists in what critic Richard Harland Smith correctly pinpoints as "a harsh world of harsh rules." Its centerpiece is the now-legendary, dialogue-free, 33-minute jewelhouse robbery, quoted today, in one particular or another, in every heist film from The Pink Panther to Thief to Mission: Impossible; Dassin himself even quoted the sequence in Topkapi (1964).

After polishing off Brute Force (1947), Naked City (1948), Thieves' Highway (1949) and Night and the City (1950, with Richard Widmark in an Americanization of role written as British by the original novelist, Gerald Kersh), director Jules Dassin found himself ostracized from the US film industry due to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee blacklist, and retreated to France to pick up an offer to feed the new taste for hardboiled thrillers. Given the source novel (Du rififi chez les hommes, by Auguste Le Breton), Dassin jettisoned all of it save for a 10-page description of the actual robbery which became Rififi's focusing element.

ELMORE (JOHN) LEONARD (B. 1935)

On being called a "mystery writer," Leonard notes: "There is never a mystery in my books or my plots. There are not whodunits … I'm not interested in mystery. I do write crime novels. There is always a crime in my novels."

Beginning his career as a Western writer, Leonard met the movies with two adaptations of his short stories to film, 3:10 to Yuma and The Tall T (both 1957). Soon after his novel Hombre sold to film in 1963, Leonard wrote his first crime novel, The Big Bounce (1969), but it wasn't until the early 1970s that his film writing would subsidize his fiction writing and he began to manufacture his particular brand of crime story, usually set in Detroit, and exemplified by Fifty-Two Pickup (1974), Swag (1976) and Unknown Man No. 89 (1977). After following the breakout book La Brava (1983) with Glitz (1985), Leonard landed on the cover of Newsweek the same week Time Magazine called him "the Dickens of Detroit." Other Leonard-derived movies of note include Joe Kidd (1972), Mr. Majestyk (1974), Get Shorty (1995), Jackie Brown (1997) and Out of Sight (1998). Based on the 1992 novel Rum Punch, Jackie Brown was directed by Quentin Tarantino.

(Samuel) DASHIELL HAMMETT (1894-1961)

Creator of the Sam Spade and Maltese Falcon, the Continental Op and the Thin Man, Dashiell Hammet was a former Pinkerton Detective and Ambulance Corps enlistee who entered the field of crime writing with stories published in Black Mask

Hammett specialized in "puzzle plots" and the breakdown of authority (the universe in which much of Hammett's work takes place seems to be a place of ararchic chaos, covered by a thin mask of normalcy that easily breaks down). For their day, the plots of The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1931) are experimental and ambiguous, staffed with unsympathetic characters and frequently oblique plotting … and it is these things that paradoxically elevate Hammett into the pantheon of hardboiled writers alongside James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, though Hammett is often judged the best writer of the three (with Chandler the most accessible). Falcon was filmed twice before the more popular 1941 Humphrey Bogart version (in 1931, and 1936 as Satan Met a Lady), and The Glass Key was also filmed twice (in 1935, with George Raft, and 1942, with Alan Ladd). Akira Kurosawa later claimed The Glass Key was his inspiration for Yojimbo (itself the inspiration for A Fistful of Dollars, in turn remade as Last Man Standing by Walter Hill).

Sleuths Nick and Nora Charles were invented by Hammett in The Thin Man (1934), and immediately became the darlings of sophisticated comedy intermixed with whodunit in a highly successful series of films starring Dick Powell and Myrna Loy: The Thin Man (1934), After the Thin Man (1936), Another Thin Man (1939), Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), and Song of the Thin Man (1947).

Hammett's Continental Op was a sort of proto-Mike Hammer – a stout, balding, middle-aged detective inured to physical pain and almost monstrously stubborn. He first appeared in a 1923 Black Mask story titled "Arson Plus" and continued through two novels – Red Harvest (1927) and The Dain Curse (1928) – and 28 short stories. The Dain Curse was produced as a TV miniseries in 1978.

Hammett also created the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9 in 1934 (note the similarity to Mickey Spillane). It was illustrated by Alex Raymond, who was later responsible for the classic series Flash Gordon and Rip Kirby.

Hammett met playwright Lillian Hellman in 1930; both subsequently divorced their respective spouse and spent the rest of their lives together, but never married. Hammett often acknowledged Hellman as his inspiration for Nora Charles. Hammett's support of the Civil Rights Congress of New York in 1951 ultimately led to his blacklisting during the McCarthy era. His already-poor health failing, he died in 1961 with his final novel, the autobiographical Tulip, unfinished; Hellman later published the excerpt as a novella in The Big Knockover, a collection of Hammett tales she edited in 1966.

Called one of the most influential American writers of the 20th Century, Hammett was there first, and best. Raymond Chandler said, "Hammett was spare, hard-boiled, but he did over and over what only the best writers can ever do: He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before."

LIONEL WHITE (b. 1905)

Known principally for writing the novel Clean Break,(1955) adapted by Stanley Kubrick into The Killing (1956), Lionel White spent 20 years as a police reporter and staff writer, editor and publisher of various true-crime magazines through 1951. He was one of the most important, and best, of the writers for the Gold Medal paperback imprint, providing fast-moving, non-humorous caper novels including The Snatchers (1953), To Find a Killer (1954), Love Trap (1955), The Big Caper (1955), Flight Into Terror (1955), Operation Murder (1956), The House Next Door (1956), Right for Murder (1956), Hostage for a Hood (1957), Death Takes the Bus (1957), Too Young to Die (1958), Coffin for a Hood (1958), Invitation to Violence (1958), The Merriweather File (1959), Rafferty (1959), Run Killer Run (1959) and Steal Big (1960).

None of White's books was filmed with as much success as The Killing, but there are several other notable titles: The Big Caper (1957), Pierrot le fou ([1965] from the novel Obsession; uncredited), The Money Trap (1965), Night of the Following Day (1968), Karvat (1974) and a TV-movie adaption of Rafferty (1980).

MONTE HELLMAN (b. 1932)

With barely ten films to his credit, Monte Hellman has been an almost invisible, yet heavily influential presence in modern hardboiled film principally by virtue of Ride the Whirlwind (1965), essentially one of the first domestic "anti-westerns" to play consciously against Western stereotype inside the framework of an independent film of the Roger Corman school. Jack Nicholson wrote the script. Hellman utilized the same locations and much of the same cast for The Shooting (1967). In 1971, Hellman concoted a mini-masterpiece in Two-Lane Blacktop, an existentialist road movie featuring characters denoted solely by what they do – The Driver (James Taylor), G.T.O. (Warren Oates), The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson), and so on. Nihilistic and almost a companion to EASY RIDER (1969) in scope, Two-Lane Blacktop's style helped pave the way for anti-hero cop movies in the vein of Dirty Harry.

Hellman is a product of the revolutionary 1960s indie film movement, which included Dennis Hopper, Milos Foreman and Frank Perry. Sam Peckinpah played a supporting role in China 9, Liberty 7 (1978) as a favor to Hellman, who had edited The Killer Elite (1975). He was Second Unit Director on Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (1980) and Paul Verhoeven's Robocop (1987). The George Hickenlooper documentary Monte Hellman: American Auteur (1997) presents Hellman – noted by Cahiers du Cinema as "one of the finest American filmmakers of his generation" -- as emblematic of the brand of cult heroes who successfully walk the tightrope between art and commerce.

CORNELL (George Hopley) WOOLRICH (1903-1968)

"First we dream, then we die"

Cornell Woolrich

The man called "the father of noir" also authored many of his more significant works under the psuedonym "William Irish," concocted for the Black Mask group of pulps. His theory was that the "line of suspense" should subordinate all other plotting concerns, and admirably demonstrated this in the book that broke him into the mystery field, The Bride Wore Black (1940), as well as his justly famous "black" followup novels.

A tragically miserable and unhappy man, Woolrich had a knack for translating that pain into a syllabary of despair, using the most "common" crime elements and plots imaginable, and thereby exceeding their usual boundaries and audience expectations. His people were not private eyes or foreign spies; they were ordinary citizens locked into the stress box and pushed to their limits, where the violence and intrigue logically evolved from the traps people weave for themselves and others – the language of mistaken identities, frame-ups and human paranoia taken to toxic extremes.

While still a student at Columbia University, Woolrich wrote his second novel, Children of the Ritz (1927), which won a $10,000 prize and sold immediately to Hollywood. His first, Cover Charge (1926), was heavily influenced by the work of his idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he wrote four more books before embarking upon the mystery career during which he used "William Irish" and his middle names, "George Hopley," almost interchangeably as pen-names.

Woolrich's "black period," after The Bride Wore Black, included The Black Curtain(1941), The Black Alibi (1942), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944), and Rendezvous in Black (1948).

His first genre film was Convicted, starring Rita Hayworth, based on the 1938 short story "Face Work." After Street of Chance (1942, based on The Black Curtain), Black Alibi became the basis for Val Lewton's classic The Leopard Man (1943). Robert Siodmak directed Phantom Lady (1944, based on the 1942 novel of the same name), and William Castle directed The Mark of the Whistler (1944, based on the short story "Dormant Account"), part of the eight-film series derived from the popular mystery radio show.

Deadline at Dawn (1946), scripted by Clifford Odets from Woolrich's 1944 novel, was a murder-frameup story starring noir stalwart Susan Hayward. 1946 also brought a film version of Black Angel, co-starring Peter Lorre and Broderick Crawford, and The Chase (from The Black Path of Fear), also starring Lorre.

Of the over 30 adaptations of Woolrich books to film (not even counting the over 300 short stories), the most famous is undoubtably Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), based on the story "It Has to be Murder."

Posthumous adaptations include Sirène du Mississippi (1969, from Waltz into Darkness, La Pupa del Gangster (1975, from the story "Collared," also known as Get Rita or Gun Moll), Mrs. Winterbourne (1996, from the 1948 novel I Married a Dead Man), and even the 2001 Antonio Banderas / Angelina Jolie movie, Original Sin (also from the 1947 novel Waltz into Darkness).

Woolrich's final novel, Into the Night, was based on an unfinished manuscript completed by Lawrence Block in 1987.

Woolrich also dabbled in short horror and ghost fiction, and many of the stories are gathered in The Dark Side of Love (1964), Violence (1958), Beyond the Night (1959), The Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich (1965, with an introduction by Ellery Queen), Nightwebs (1971), and Angles of Darkness (1979) … also earning Woolrich the sobriquet "our poet of the shadows."

ROSS MacDONALD (Kenneth Millar) (1915-1983)

Creator of private eye Lew Archer and a mainstay of mystery pulps such as Black Mask, Mystery Magazine, and Manhunt, Ross MacDonald (real name: Kenneth Millar) elevated the mystery thriller from "whodunit" to "whydunit" with his best-selling Archer novels from The Moving Target (1949), to The Galton Case (1959), to The Goodbye Look (1969). A perennial favorite for nearly 50 years with over 24 novels, MacDonald was quickly ranked by modern critics as the latter-day equivalent of Chandler or Hammett. His first novel was The Dark Tunnel (1944), written in one month (in 1943) while he was completing his doctorate at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His third novel, Blue City (1947), was his first attempt to write in the hardboiled style, and was fittingly published by Knopf, which in the past had published Hammett, Chandler and Cain. Lew Archer debuted in The Moving Target, MacDonald concocting the character name from a combination of Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and the author of Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace. Several collections of Archer short fiction exist (such as The Name is Archer, 1955), though MacDonald found the form "confining." He did not break away from the Archer character until The Ferguson Affair (1960), which introduced defense lawyer Bill Gunnarson, a character MacDonald intended to follow-through in subsequent novels … but never did. he stuck with Archer thereafter until the end of his career. Black Money (1966) is his redress of The Great Gatsby (a book MacDonald claimed to have read once a year, citing F. Scott Fitzgerald as a great influence (as did Cornell Woolrich).

In 1966, The Moving Target was adapted by William Goldman into the script for Harper; Goldman was also the author of the most widespread quote about MacDonald, from a front-page article in the New York Times Book Review on The Goodbye Look: "The finest detective novels ever written by an American." Hollywood legend has always held that Paul Newman engineered the change from "Archer" to "Harper" based on his good luck with other "H" films such as Hud, The Hustler, and Hombre. Well, that sounds great, but it's not true. Newman reprised the Harper role in a sequel, The Drowning Pool (adapted from MacDonald's 1951 novel), co-screenwritten by Walter Hill. In 1968, MacDonald declined a bid to script a remake of The Maltese Falcon. Blue City became a 1986 movie starring Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy.

Brian Keith's portrayal of Archer for the quickly-cancelled (after 6 episodes) TV series Archer (1975) has been called one of the best matches of actor to character in the annals of the detective genre. Lew Archer would take nearly any case so long as it was "not illegal and makes sense," and his creed was "We are all guilty. We have to learn to live with it."

George (Vincent) Higgins (1939-1999)

A former lawyer and journalist, Higgins wrote three hardboiled masterpieces: The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), Digger's Game (1973) and Cogan's Trade (1974). His work as both a prosecuting and defense attorney invested his writing with a trademark mastery of criminal patois and the workings of the underworld, particularly of the Boston Irish element.

The classic setup of a smalltime hoodlum fighting to avoid giving evidence against his friends is the centerpiece of Eddie Coyle, made into a gritty, rough-house film in 1973 by Peter Yates, with Robert Mitchum as Coyle and Peter Boyle as Dillon, who accepts the commission to murder his best friend. Critics cited the dialogue of the novel as having the same ring of authenticity as the tough-guy talk in Hemingway's The Killers

Though The Friends of Eddie Coyle was Higgins' first-published novel, he had written more than 15 other books before breaking into print. Over 23 novels later, he completed his last, At End of Day, just prior to his death in 1999.

Higgins also created defense attorney Jerry Kennedy, featured in Kennedy for the Defense (1980), Penance for Jerry Kennedy (1985), Defending Billy Ryan (1992) and Sandra Nichols Found Dead (1996). Kennedy is also featured in The Rat on Fire (1981).

JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE (Grumbach) (1917-1973)

"One must choose – die or lie." (from Le Doulos)

An instigator of the French New Wave in cinema during the 1960s, shooting on actual locations on shoestring budgets, in defiance of unions, with skeleton crews (he frequently acted as his own art director, cameraman or extra), director Jean-Pierre Grumbach assumed the name "Melville" from his favorite writer, the author of Moby Dick. He also appeared, as actor, in Cocteau's Orpheus(1949), Godard's Breathless (1961), and Chabrol's Landru (Bluebeard, 1962).

Joining forces with actor Alain Delon, Melville created a hardboiled trilogy that influenced all similar films to follow: Le Samourai (1967, acknowledged by John Woo as the "inspiration" for The Killer), Le Circle Rouge (1970), and his final film, Un Flic (1972). His potent themeology of loyalty to one's comrades and unbending respect for a self-imposed code of honor earmarked him as "the Father of the French Gangster Film." A former fighter for the French Resistance, Melville cleaved to the concepts of duty and honor above all plus a willingness to die for a cause, and interpolated these qualities into the stoic, existentialist loners that populate his films … which is why he is revered by several generations of filmmakers, including Truffaut, Godard, Scorsese, Woo and Tarantino. His fascination with edge culture extended to his love of trenchcoats, impenetrable aviator sunglasses, a trademark wide-brimmed Stetson, and huge American automobiles (he drove a yacht-like Ford Galaxy). Unabashedly admiring of the American cinema image of the criminal underworld, he built his own reinterpretation of that world steeped in romantic notions of love and loyalty, betrayal and deceit, living above his own filmworks, the Rue Jenner Studios, inside what David Thomsen termed "a Hustonian dream of tough, self-sufficient men in trench coats, fickle girls, and a maelstrom of treachery and heroic gestures."

Bob le Flambeur (1955) is considered by some to be Melville's best film, a crime thriller representing his debut incursion into all things that make the darker side of the street so tempting. The gradually souring scheme to rob a casino during Grand Prix weekend is contrasted with the likeability of the old, well-dressed gambler who plans the crime – Bob (Roger Duchesne), successful, respected even by the police … but now broke and desperate to maintain his well-heeled social persona. The wet Parisian back streets and cigarette-smoke laced, Pernod-imbued café world of the Paris Beats is beautifully invoked.

Le Doulos (1961, from the novel by Pierre Lesou) translates literally as "the finger man" – the stool pigeon, the rat, the informer. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien, the one remaining friend of Maurice (Serge Reggiani), recently released from prison. Maurice has killed his best friend and benefactor, Gilbert (Rene Lefevre), for killing his girlfriend as a possible betrayer and is plunged into in a spiraling skein of treachery and murder, all based on constantly changing self-doubt. Fraught with symbolism, underlit -- almost Expressionist tableaux of inadequate light attempting to penetrate vast darkness – and positing a world in which all betrayals are possible, even likely, Le Doulos manipulates the viewer at every turn, presenting convincing cases for the guilt or innocence of each of its benighted characters. Volker Schlondörff worked for Melville as assistant director on this project.

Le Samourai (1967) was released the same year as Boorman's Point Blank and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde – plunging the so-called Summer of Love into the apocalyptic abyss of the post-modern gangster film. A solitary assassin whose only companion is a caged bird kept in his flat – a "partner" who chirps to warn him of danger (and a presagement of the hit man's tenderness for his potted plant in Luc besson's Leon -- Jef (Alain Delon) cares for nothing and nobody until he accepts one last contract that plummets him into a harrowing chain of police lineups (anticipating The Usual Suspects in his cocky impenetrability), constant surveillance, and double-crosses that must be repaid, in the end, in a climactic bloodbath.

For Le Circle Rouge (1970), in which a thief is freed from prison on the same day a murderer evades the police, and joins forces with him to pull off a caper, Melville united three French acting legends -- Alain Delon, Yves Montand and Bourvil – for a film popularly regarded as the apotheosis of French crime cinema. (A contemporary American remake, directed by Brett Ratner, is planned for 2002.)

Un Flic (1972, aka Dirty Money) was Melville's final film, on reflection even more inspirational to John Woo's The Killer, in its setup of a criminal nightclub owner, the cop who is his opposite number and close friend, and the woman whom they both love.

RINGO LAM (b. 1954) (Ling-Tun Lam; Lingdong Lin)

Latter-day member of the Hong Kong New Wave which included directors John Woo and Tsui Hark, Lam was an early acting classmate of Chow-Yun Fat at the Shaw Brothers Studio's Actor's Training Program, at Hong Kong television station TVB. Like Tsui Hark, he trained in the West before returning to Hong Kong to become a director, producer, writer and sometime-actor.

Since his early efforts – Esprit D'Amoure (1983) and Ace Go Places 4 (1986) – turned a modest profit, Lam was green-lit for his first original project, City on Fire (1987). Coming in the aftermath of Woo's blockbuster success with A Better Tomorrow, and featuring the same star (Chow Yun-Fat), City is often cited as a major influence on Reservoir Dogs – detailing how an undercover cop infiltrates a crew of jewel thieves so deeply that he becomes friends with one of them.

Prison on Fire (1987) followed immediately, again with Chow Yun-Fat. Shot in a scant three weeks, inside an actual prison that was still in official use at the time, Prison's grueling shoot earned Lam the nickname "dark-faced god." By the time of School on Fire (1988), Lam began to feel the backlash for "glamorizing" violence and life inside China's criminal underworld, the Triads.

Lam's career seemed to spiral downward with his next four projects: Undeclared War (1990), his first international production; Touch and Go (1991) starred frequent Jackie Chan partner Sammo Hung, but underperformed at the box office. Chow Yun-Fat came to the rescue by starring in Wild Search (1990) and City on Fire 2 (1991), but Lam's editorializing on the Tiananmen Square massacre got him in hot water with Hong Kong Studios.

(On June 4th, 1989, tanks of the People's Liberation Army moved to disperse students and demonstrators staging peaceful protest to demand political reform through fuller participation of Chinese citizens in their government. On some days the gathering in the Square amounted to more than a million people; on this day, two to three thousand were staging a hunger strike. Chinese Communist Party soldiers opened fire, wounding thousands and killing over 200 people. The event is memorably recreated by John Woo in Bullet in the Head [1990].)

By this time, Chow Yun-Fat had become one of the biggest stars in China, and insisted that Lam direct his next project, Full Contact (1992). This revitalized his career somewhat but did not stop him from emigrating to the United States, at the invitation of Columbia Studios, to direct Maximum Risk (1996) with Jean-Claude Van Damme. The film was ultimately recut by the studio, and Lam returned to Hong Kong to do Full Alert (1997), which was very well received.

The infamous "urine drinking" anecdote seen in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1987) and again in Bullet in the Head (1990) is based on an actual gang incident that occurred during Lam and Chow Yun-Fat's days as students.

MIKE (Michael) HODGES (b. 1932)

As cinema in Hong Kong and the USA evolved to tougher heroes and starker methods of violence, so did England experience its own New Wave in British gangster films, and prime among these is Mike Hodges' Get Carter (1971). A boxoffice failure when released, today the film an indelible classic and cultural icon deeply embedded in the national consciousness, reflecting a uniquely British fixation on the underworld genre and often-quoted in popular song lyrics – a fascination that had now percolated through to the next generation of filmmakers to follow in the wake of Reservoir Dogs: Guy Ritchie with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Jonathan Glazer with Sexy Beast, and Paul McGuigan with Gangster Number One.

Hodges began as a writer, producer, director and editor for Thames Television, where he worked his way up to directing a pair of thrillers, Suspect (1969) and Rumour (1970), and first met actor Michael Caine, who he tapped as the star in his first feature film venture, Get Carter, which Hodges calls "a Jacobian tragedy." A movie with a huge body count, swift yet nongraphic violence, and an overall pervasive air of corruption.

Pulp (1972) was a direct invocation of all things noirish, as over-the-hill movie actor Mickey King (Mickey Rooney) hires a pulp writer Preston Gilbert (Michael Caine) to ghostwrite his autobiography … the details of which pull no punches and incur the ire of gangsters who murder King, forcing Gilbert to turn sleuth according to every cliché and movie P.I. he knows in order to save his own skin and uncover the killer. (Al Lettieri, later seen in The Getaway, has a bizarre role as a transvestite hit man who a compulsive Ross MacDonald fan; similarly, Michael Caine is seen reading Raymond Chandler in Get Carter.)

Hodges feature career became a hodge-podge of odd projects including The Terminal Man (1974, from the Michael Crichton novel), a chilly, cerebral exercise in sharp contrast to the carnival-colored eye candy that was Flash Gordon (1980), which was miraculous cinema compared to the lamentable Morons from Outer Space (1985).

He returned to form with A Prayer for the Dying (1987), with Mickey Rourke as Martin Fallon, an IRA bomber pressed into service as an assassin by a mobster. Studio interference led to Hodges' request that his name be removed from the film. In Black Rainbow (1990), a bogus psychic (Rosanna Arquette) begins to accurately predict forthcoming homicides, which makes her a target for a hit man.

Croupier (1998) was an unexpected art-house hit in America, and has refocused the public eye on Hodges. A down-in-the-pits depiction of the gambling world, Hodges called it "an elaborate joke by conjurers," (recalling the raison d'être of Cornell Woolrich). It led to several retrospectives of Hodges' crime films and an offer from MGM to restore his original version of A Prayer for the Dying for DVD.

A remake of Get Carter (2000) starring Sylvester Stallone and featuring Michael Caine (this time as criminal Cliff Brumby) was directed by Stephen Kay.

Hodges' future plans include a "noirish" project with Clive Owen, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead.

JOHN BOORMAN (b. 1933)

"I would define a myth as a story that has survived."

An ex-documentary maker and editor who joined the BBC in 1955, and transitioned through television to his first feature, Having a Wild Weekend, with the Dave Clark Five (1965), John Boorman gave the tough-guy thriller a hard left to the jaw in his sophomore film, Point Blank (1967) – knocking the form headlong into its post-modern period.

Based on the cement-nail toughness of the novel The Hunter (written by Donald Westlake as "Richard Stark"), Point Blank was one of the first films to interpret the stylistic conceits of the French New Wave for American audiences. Shot wide with Panavision's (then-new) 40mm lens to convey a sense of bleak emptiness, its unconventional, highly visual narrative structure incorporated disjointed flashbacks, Dutch angles, and eccentric uses of sound editing to get us inside the head of professional thief "Walker," indomitably and definitively portrayed by Lee Marvin. The impact of Point Blank on the whole taxonomy of hardboiled film cannot be underestimated.

Boorman's career subsequent to Point Blank, which he now assesses as "a flashy film made by an angry man to get attention," is distinguished by a wide range of movies centered around the concept of the human quest (for redemption or identity, restitution or retribution) and the value of mythology and the natural order. In Point Blank, that mythology is the universe of noir, and that humanity is strictly Darwinian. Everyone in a Boorman film, ultimately, is seeking a way out or a way home, and most of these roads usually lead to damnation, even in victory.

Lee Marvin remained onboard for Hell in the Pacific (1968),then Boorman courted Academy Award grace with a Conradian story of an incursion by urbanites into a rural hell in Deliverance (1972), based on the James Dickey novel. Then came Zardoz (1974), a sort of revisionist science fiction fairy tale, an "anti-2001: A Space Odyssey" that, today, views like L. Frank Baum on low-grade LSD. Even more surreal was Boorman's approach to the thorniest proposition available to an up-and-coming director in the mid-1970s: How to make a sequel to The Exorcist? Though Zardoz and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1978) were reviled upon release, both have ironically become cult favorites. Boorman's love of myth found one of its most beautiful expressions in Excalibur (1981), a sumptuous retelling of Arthurian legend, followed by The Emerald Forest (1985), another fable of equal parts Conrad and coming-of-age myth.

After his most popular film, the semi-autobiographical Hope and Glory (1987), and Where the Heart Is (1990), I Dreamt I Woke Up (1991), Beyond Rangoon (1995), and a brief excursion into TV with the Picture Windows episode 'Two Nudes Bathing" (1995), Boorman returned to the gangster idiom with The General (1998), shot in luscious black and white and based on the real-life history of Dublin gangster Martin Cahill (Brendan Gleeson), who stole over $80 million in a lengthy crime career that once even included the burglary of Boorman's own house!

Boorman next adapted the John Le Carre novel The Tailor of Panama (2001), starring Pierce Brosnan as Andy Osnard, "the anti-James Bond," in a story that Boorman admits is "the underside of the Grail myth." Equal parts internecine spy game, political puzzlebox , and black farce, the film stars Geoffrey Rush as Harry Pendel, a Cockney ex-con who engineers Osnard's comeuppance.

Of the "post-modern" editing style he helped to foment, Boorman now sees it as a kind of "new brutalism, where the camera changes speed and jumps around and all that stuff … (it's telling you) 'you're watching a film.' That doesn't particularly appeal to me."

Dave's Handy Pocket Guide to the Big Three

The roots of films noir and hardboiled fiction are so intertwined and cross-referential that if you've clicked here, you may still be asking yourself: "But what's the difference among Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain? without all the ephemera, please."

Pretend this is a Giant Golden Book, and you're looking at the timeline.

First came Papa – Ernest Hemingway, the literary giant, the warrior poet, the macho man's man, who wrote the cornerstone novel To Have and Have Not, and the short story, "The Killers."

Before Hemingway, there's Edgar Allan Poe, who helped legitimize the short fiction form in America and arguably created the subgenre of detective fiction with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841. His character, C. Auguste Dupin, is a sort of proto-forensic psychologist, as was Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who came along in 1887, and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, who followed in 1890 (Miss Jane Marple didn't show up until 1930).

One big admirer of Hemingway was Hammett, who helped take crime out of the parlor room of detection mysteries and cast it back down into the mean streets, where it belonged. Hammett's Continental Op was the first significant hardboiled hero. Tough and colloquial, clipped and fast-paced, Hammett's no-nonsense, aggressive style legitimized hardboiled writing in a world that turned up its nose at dime magazines, earning him the title "the Hemingway of the pulps."

And what of those pulps? The important one is Black Mask, founded in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George J. Nathan, who published the premiere tough-guy private investigator story, "Three Gun Terry" by Carroll John Daly, in 1923. ""I have a little office which says 'Terry Mack, Private Investigator,' on the door; which means whatever you wish to think it," says the protagonist. "I ain't a crook, and I ain't a dick. I play the game on the level, in my own way." (One reason so many of the central characters in Black Mask and its assorted spinoffs were private eyes was due to a growing public mistrust of the police.) Black Mask published the first such efforts by Hammett ("The Road Home," under the "Peter Collinson" pen-name, in 1922), future Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner ("The Shrieking Skeleton," under the "Charles M. Green" pen-name, in 1923), and Raymond Chandler ("Blackmailers Don't Shoot," in 1933).

Chandler was more literary and craftsmanlike, preferring to emphasize mood, setting and atmosphere over plot, and conferring upon his private dicks the mantel of tarnished knight. He was a romanticist and an expert at writing machine-gun, wise-cracking banter.

After Chandler, along came James M. Cain – who disdained the "hardboiled" label and wrote of feverish sexual obsession from within the crime genre. Cain's models for the crime of passion and the femme fatale were definitive. His tales were frequently misogynistic and misanthropic, but also forceful, volatile, and perverse. Chandler made no secret of the fact that he disliked Cain's writing.

Then came Cornell Woolrich, who produced scores of dark, brooding stories for the pulps from 1936 through 1946 – tales that often blended horror and suspense in the same way that H. P. Lovecraft was concurrently mixing up science fiction and horror over at Weird Tales. Woolrich preferred ordinary cops dealing with what he called "impossible crimes" over the by-now standard series detectives; his stories were puzzle-boxes that did not emphasize the solution. He was a gamesman who concocted mazes of intrigue laced with pitch-black humor, and crossed genre boundaries with impunity. An admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Woolrich was probably a better storyteller than Hammett, Chandler, or Cain, but never won the literary prestige of the Big Three.

CHOW YUN-FAT (b. 1955)

"There's tough, there's tougher, then there's Chow Yun-Fat."

-- Richard Corliss

A charismatic international superstar by virtue of his breakthrough in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986), Chow Yun-Fat epitomized the super-suave, gun-savvy hardboiled hero in an age when most Asians were only considered for the kung-fu and "chop-socky" films that were for decades a mainstay of the Shaw Brothers studio. Owing more to Cary Grant than Bruce Lee, Chow's signature duster and sunglasses (and omnipresent toothpick) from A Better Tomorrow instantly became cult wear throughout China, while Woo's retailoring, to a strictly Chinese idiom, of spaghetti westerns, French gangster films and film noir set a new standard for modern epics of bullets and betrayal, providing an inspiration for nearly anyone with a hankering to produce a movie about the criminal underworld.

Born on Lamma Island, Hong Kong, Chow quit school at 17 to enroll in the actor's training course at TVB, where he was a classmate of Ringo Lam's. He was signed as a contract player almost immediately. As Chow told Richard Corliss, "For the next fourteen years, I did over a thousand TV series, mostly soap operas and dramas." Chow starred in the drama series Hotel (1976) for 128 episodes, and accumulated a fan base by playing a gangster in 1930s Shanghai for the series The Bund (1981 His first feature film role of note was as a Vietnamese refugee in Ann Hui's The Story of Woo Vet (1981) – later retitled (for video release to sound more hardboiled, to cash in on Chow's subsequent success) God of Killers.

When Chow first met John Woo, Woo noted that he was not impressed so much by Chow's acting skills as by his charity work with orphans, which demonstrated Chow was "a strong man with a good heart." As Corliss observed, "he's not just red meat – he's caviar."

And one of those diehard fans who immediately procured a duster and shades, in the wake of A Better Tomorrow, was named Quentin Tarantino.

Chow appeared in seven other films in 1986, but non so memorable or career-making as his turn as "Mark" in A Better Tomorrow – in a role originally intended for veteran Ti Lung, in a film intended to introduce pop music idol Leslie Cheung to the Hong Kong cinema audience. Unfortunately, Mark dies in a hail of gunfire but this did not deter John Woo, who immediately cast Chow as Mark's twin brother for the followup, A Better Tomorrow 2 (1987). (The final film of the trilogy, A Better Tomorrow 3 [1989], directed by Tsui Hark, is a prequel which shows, among other things, how Mark acquired the duster and shades!).

Next for "Hong Kong's hardest-working actor" was Ringo Lam's City on Fire (1987), and a mind-bending thirteen films after that (including Prison on Fire), came John Woo's The Killer (1989), the role that cemented him in the consciousness of moviegoers as the action hero of the end of the 20th Century. From this point, many Americans began to actively seek out Chinese cinema product, and Chow was everywhere, from playing a chocolate-munching idiot savant in God of Gamblers (1989) to a slick art thief in John Woo's Once a Thief (1990) – try to imagine The Pink Panther directed by Sam Peckinpah, and you've got Once a Thief.

Woo's Hard-Boiled (1992) was next, followed by Lam's Full Contact (1992) – two movies that, astonishingly, upped the ante on the bullets and body-counts while soaring the blood pressure of action fans worldwide. After Full Contact, Woo emigrated to the U.S. to make Hard Target (1993) with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Chow did not follow until 1997 (the year Hong Kong was re-absorbed into Mainland China), to make inroads on the American market with The Replacement Killers (1998) and The Corruptor (1999), neither of which impressed much, since Chow's command of English was dicey at best, and directors Antoine Fuqua and James Foley were at the mercy of trying to replicate John Woo's trademark style for Westerners.

That all changed, quite unpredictably, with Anna and the King (1999) and Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Chow's third domestic movie demonstrated him a quick study when it came to speaking English, whereupon he returned to China to act (in a literal throwback to the days of A Chinese Ghost Story and Zu, Warrior of the Magic Mountain) in a romantic tale of flying monks, martial arts and the quest for a stolen jade sword in 19th Century feudal China. The film lyricism and beauty captured the Western world by surprise, and it was nominated for 10 Oscars, breaking the record for Academy Award nominations for a foreign film.

STEPHEN FREARS (b. 20 June 1941)

Stephen Frears wanted to be a barrister, and instead wound up in the film industry after having earned a law degree at Cambridge University. By way of the Royal Court Theatre he was introduced to famed British director Karel Reisz, who signed him on as an assistant director during the filming of the cult comedy, Morgan (1966), where Frears met two men fundamental to his budding movie career – Albert Finney and iconoclastic director Lindsay Anderson. Anderson hired Frears as his AD on his "British Rebel Without a Cause/The Wild One," the surreal and nihilistic IF … (1968). Finney became the star of Frears' debut as a director in the noir satire Gumshoe (1971) – about a modern romanticist who fantasizes himself as a private eye.

Frears spent the new few years doing a wide palatte of projects for British television, and would not return to the big screen – or the arena of film noir – until his next theatrical feature, The Hit (1984), which, like Gumshoe, "twists" the crime genre, but in unexpected ways. Equally straddling the sensibilities of the British Crime Wave and the post-French New Wave noir films, The Hit offers the downbeat yet blackly sardonic story of an assassin (Terence Stamp) retired to Spain, and the killer (John Hurt) sent to dispatch him as payback for old betrayals.

Ironically, it was not The Hit but My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) that became Frears' breakthrough film, followed by an eclectic but widely-cast net that included Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), Prick Up Your Ears (1987), and Frears' first brush with Big Hollywood Filmmaking, Dangerous Liasions (1988). While glossy and competent, and not a bad representation of the novel, intriguingly cast, it was alien to the tight, low-budget, "independent" film feel that Frears felt conferred more freedom to a cinema storyteller, and his next film (and return to noir), The Grifters(1990) can almost be viewed as his response.

The pedigree of The Grifters was unassailable – based on a novel by Jim Thompson, with a script by Donald Westlake – it is a hauntingly "confined" film about the societal bottom-feeders that Westlake once termed the "bent" (as opposed to straight), the con-men and hustlers and career criminals whose existence is ignored by their very prey. Most of the story seems to take place in back rooms, safe houses and hotel suites; at dusk or night; adding a claustrophobic sense of doom to the proceedings. When the story moves outdoors, or into the daylight, its methodical business-as-usual violence becomes all the more striking. Frears wound up with an Academy Award nomination as Best Director for his efforts on this film.

He was immediately attached to another big-budget, big-star movie, Hero (1992), the creative frustrations of which rebounded him toward a BBC production shot in sex weeks flat, The Snapper (1993), proving that Frears was more than willing to pass over plum big-studio gigs in favor of a good story, well-told. The post-Reservoir Dogs world of neo-noir anxiously awaits his inevitable return.

JACK HILL (b. 28 January 1933)

A product of the Roger Corman fast-mo "school" of filmmaking, Jack Hill began as a sort of prodigy-with-promise who to date has never gotten to break out into mainstream filmmaking, yet is responsible for some of the most interesting movies in the subgenre of blaxploitation, women-in-prison / "girl gang" movies, and cult mainstays galore, the type of director destined for Psychotronic canonization and legend status in the area of drive-in double-bill exploitationers.

A classmate of Francis Ford Coppola at UCLA in the 1960s, Hill was first recruited by Corman to prop up his notorious "shot-in-three-days" pastiche quickie The Terror (1963), writing filler dialogue to explain the non-plot while Coppola and Monte Hellman patched other holes. Hill's next assignment, with Coppola, was a rescue job on footage obtained from the Soviet epic Niebo Zowiet (1959), cutting, pasting, rewriting and shooting new footage with American actors and adding outrageous phallic/vaginal space monsters to produce the red-headed stepchild Battle Beyond the Sun (1962). After assisting Coppola by recutting and shooting insert footage for his directorial debut, Dementia 13 (1963), Hill next tried to rescue a Corman murder mystery, Portrait of Terror, which wound up being spliced together with a completely different film (Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire) and released as a casserole called Blood Bath in 1966.

Corman next called on Hill to add 12 minutes of footage to The Wasp Woman (1960) to qualify it for a TV syndication sale (which required a minimum 75-minute running time). As Hill told Jeffrey Frentzen in a 1985 Fangoria interview, "(Roger) would throw these impossible tasks at you, and you had to find a way to solve them. There was one scene I put myself into, because we couldn't get money to hire an actor. We shot it in Roger's office with me behind a desk." As Hill was readying to eviscerate another Russian sci-fi film purchased by Corman (taken over by Curtis Harrington and eventually released as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, 1965), he was approached by a pair of real estate financiers who wanted to get into the movie business and had gotten ahold of a treatment by Hill, titled Cannibal Orgy, Or: The Maddest Story Ever Told … which resulted in Hill's debut bow as director on one of the most famous cult films ever, Spider Baby (1964).

After directing Pit Stop (1969), in independent racecar movie shot in "Crashorama," Hill was engaged by producer Luis Enrique Vergara to write and direct no fewer than four separate films in four weeks – Isle of the Snake People, The Incredible Invasion, House of Evil, and The Fear Chamber, which stands technically as Boris Karloff's "final" film. The producer had cut a deal with Karloff for limited availability, and Hill had to figure out how to juggle usage of the aging and emphysematic character actor while wiring those shots into four separate stories. Then Vergara ran out of money in mid-shoot … then he died!

Hill repaired to the Phillipines to shoot two enormously successful films that kicked off the "Women in Cages" subgenre of the 1970s – Big Doll House (1971) and Big Bird Cage (1972). Big Doll House features the first speaking role by soon-to-be feminist superheroine Pam Grier, whom Hill immediately tapped to star in Coffy (1973) Between these two films and a pair of hard-"R" sleepers packed with Playmates, The Swingin' Cheerleaders (1974, which Hill described as "a Disney sex comedy") and Switchblade Sisters (1975, shot in 18 days for $250,000). In 1974, Hill was ordained "Man of the Year" by Actresses for Action, a group campaigning for bigger and better acting roles for women.

Coffy was followed by Foxy Brown1974), again with Greer in the lead, cementing Hill's reputation as a seminal director of the great drive-in flicks of the 1970s. Hill bit the bullet and threw in with Corman again for the disastrous Sorceress (1980), which Corman edited down to fit into two film cans instead of three to save on shipping costs. Disillusioned with the grind, Hill retired to other pursuits, principally writing novels. As Switchblade Sisters and others trickled down to video, they were seen by Quentin Tarantino, who can be said to be at the head of a Jack Hill revival, through retrospectives and re-releases. Hill has also indicated a desire to resurrect his directing career with a new script written in the late 1990s, Tangier.

...