Literary interlude, with illustrations and commentary

    That thirty days had taught the punk a les­son. It had made him feel badly, cost­ing Violet all that money. Every time she’d had enough saved to divorce the Old Man she’d have to spend it put­ting in the fix for him. He’d brooded about it the whole thirty days, and made up his mind that the first thing he’d do when he got out would be to steal the divorce money for her.

    He’d picked on Gold’s Department Store when a goodly crowd was there.

    Sparrow had been steal­ing odds and ends off Gold’s coun­ters since he was in short pants. He knew the only gun in the store was an ancient cow pis­tol car­ried by the old man who runs the freight elev­at­or. The elev­at­or man is even older than old Gold; all he does is lean against the shaft, half asleep all day. It’s like a pension.

    Sparrow had felt that if he could get the gun off the old man without get­ting him­self shot straight through the head the rest should be fairly easy. He began drink­ing on the notion next door to Gold’s, and, as the after­noon wore on, the more nat­ur­al the notion had appeared. He was­n’t able to under­stand why he had­n’t thought of it long before. 

    But when he’d shuffled out of the bar and seen how swiftly the long street was dark­en­ing, he’d gone cold sober with the recol­lec­tion of his recent thirty-day stretch and had to return, in a hurry, to the bar.

    He’d got­ten drunk all over again on Vi’s cred­it, which was good so long as Stash held down his ice­house job. But by nine o’c­lock the cred­it gave out and he’d been brood­ing on the idea so long he could­n’t back out. To fal­ter would have been to reneg on Frankie as well as on Violet, he felt. Both had done so much for him—and what had he ever done for either? Nothing. Not a thing. He nev­er did any­thing for his friends but use up their cred­it and get them in trouble. He’d do some­thing big for them all. Right now.

    So shuffled, cap yanked low, straight down the middle aisle—Ladies’ Home and Fancy Footwear—to the freight elev­at­or where the ancient house dick lounged in dreams of long-lost daily doubles. Sparrow shoved his com­bin­a­tion flash­light pen­cil into the small of the old man’s back, grabbed the gun, shoved him into the lift and snarled just like Edward G. Robinson, “Into the base­ment wit’ the rest of the rats—cop­per.”

    His glasses had clouded up, but he heard the door of the lift crash shut and the cables whin­ing down­ward and the dozen-odd cus­tom­ers began turn­ing slowly toward him like people in a slow-motion movie. In that moment he saw him­self through all their eyes: a card­board cow­boy in horn-rimmed spec­tacles wav­ing an over­sized cow gun. He heard his own shrill voice car­ried away down end­less nylon aisles on the scud­ding of the over­head fans.

    “Face the waw-awls, everybody!”

    He saw them turn­ing, by ones and twos, old Gold with a steel wash­board under his arm and the cash­ier­’s face white as a split apple against the parched black line of her brows just as she took a head­er and he hollered, “Leave her lay! She oney fainted!”

—Nelson Algren, The Man With The Golden Arm, 1947

A thought that fre­quently passes through my mind as I’m read­ing this: why on earth would any­body think to make a film out of it? Really. Because, as com­pel­ling as its char­ac­ters are, it’s not as if the text really runs on what you’d call nar­rat­ive drive/momentum. It would hardly be inapt, based on this nov­el and on the short stor­ies in The Neon Wilderness, to call Algren the James Joyce of the under­belly of Chicago. And of course by “James Joyce” I mean the James Joyce of Dubliners, not the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake or even the James Joyce of Ulysses. Yes, The Man With The Golden Arm has a story, and a fairly hor­rif­ic and tra­gic one, but it’s not really in so much of a hurry about telling it; it’s more about present­ing these des­per­ate char­ac­ters, show­ing their vari­ous enact­ments of des­per­a­tion, try­ing to pull some mean­ing out of the whole sad, sorry mess they’re all in. And there is some­thing about the way Algren por­trays his characters—who, as you see from the above pas­sage, are very expli­citly shaped in parts by the pop­u­lar cul­ture of their time—and tells their vari­ous stor­ies, that act­ively res­ists the urge to fil­ter the stuff into cinema. Still. The book was a “scan­dal­ous” best seller. A good many ambi­tious act­ors saw the role of a life­time, or at the very least an Oscar nom­in­a­tion, in the role of Frankie Machine. A film was inevitable.

As a sol­id Preminger man, I can­not be accused of hav­ing any axe to grind when I state that there isn’t a single sol­it­ary frame of his 1955 film of The Man With The Golden Arm that in any way cap­tures the atmo­sphere of the Algren book. Marilyn Ferdinand, a very per­cept­ive and lively film blog­ger who has a little bit of a truc­u­lent streak that can come up when you least expect it, is offen­ded by the film ver­sion to the very depths of her Chicago soul; “Why I Will Never Call The Preminger Abomination By Its ‘Title,’ ” she sub­titles a 2008 post on the sub­ject. it’s not just the poor set design or the fact that Preminger and writers Walter Newman and Lewis Meltzer changed the story from a har­row­ing tragedy to one of redemp­tion; it has to do with Preminger’s feel, or lack there­of, for the mater­i­al at hand. As Algren noted, a little bit­terly (he was long haunted by what he con­sidered the cine­mat­ic betray­al of his work): “…[T]he life of the com­mon man has nev­er filtered into Otto’s brain and emo­tions; or into his tal­ent such as he has. The book dealt with life at the bot­tom. Otto has nev­er, not for so much as a single day, had any exper­i­ence except that of life at the top.”

There’s some­thing to that. Especially when you look at the second film Preminger made after Arm, an adapt­a­tion of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, and note the sheer seem­ing effort­less­ness with which that film imme­di­ately evokes the world of the priv­ileged European leis­ure class. For Arm, Preminger had to invent a world of which he had no real know­ledge. He was not really up to the task.

And yet. There are cer­tain aspect of the film that are exactly on tar­get with respect to the book. Never, as I said, as far as atmo­sphere is con­cerned. But Preminger’s cast­ing of Arnold Stang as Frankie Machine’s hap­less “punk” cohort Sparrow, and the way cos­tume super­visor Mary Ann Nyberg dresses Stang, down to those tortoise-shell spec­tacles; Stang seems to step straight out of the book.

It is pos­sible, read­ing Arm, not to pic­ture Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, and Kim Novak as you seep up the actions and thoughts of Frankie Machine, Zosh, and Molly. (In the book, the last of these char­ac­ters has black hair and is for all intents and pur­poses still a teen­ager, which helps.) It is not pos­sible to read of Sparrow and not think of Arnold Stang. 

Interesting, too, that the book and the film are now so cul­tur­ally inter­twined that the front cov­er of a “50^th Anniversary Critical Edition”  of Arm has a cov­er taken from Saul Bass’s legendary open­ing title designs for the film.
  Not some­thing that Algren would likely be pleased by. 

Does all this mean that Preminger’s The Man With The Golden Arm is a bad film? It’s not a per­son­al favor­ite of mine, but Chris Fujiwara mounts a typ­ic­ally com­plex, cogent pos­it­ive account of it in his crit­ic­al bio­graphy of Preminger, The World And Its Double; read­ing some of its pas­sages, you’d be inclined to believe that the film gets closer to the mar­row of Algren’s vis­ion than it actu­ally does, at least by my own lights: “Throughout the film, the drama is inter­i­or­ized, psy­cho­lo­gic­al, played out seem­ingly among the men­tal images of beings and things (the second shot in the film, a close-up from inside Antek’s of Frankie peer­ing through the win­dow, already alerts us to the priv­ileged emphas­is that Frankie’s sub­ject­ive exper­i­ence will receive through­out). Drawn to ever smal­ler spaces, the film seals itself off (as Schwiefka’s mara­thon poker game seals itself from the sun­light) locks itself in (as Frankie has him­self locked in Molly’s bed­room when he tries to kick his habit). Camera move­ment in The Man With The Golden Arm tends to define sub­ject­ive men­tal states rather than explore the con­tours and sur­faces of an out­er world, and it cre­ates a suf­foc­at­ing atmosphere[…]”

I find the sets and the light­ing too flat to really get there in terms of suf­foc­a­tion. I also feel that the atmo­sphere Algren goes for and get is rich­er; both suf­foc­at­ing and expans­ive. I understand—indeed, most of the time in my crit­ic­al prac­tice I insist—that a book and the film upon which it’s based be taken and assessed as two entirely dis­crete objects. But I have to admit that read­ing Algren has kind of spoiled me for Preminger.