Pulp Fiction discussion

I have a xerox of the shooting script for The Burglar,” dated 1954. David Goodis wrote the script as well as the book. Paul Wendkos directed. The first pages include a “schedule” which lists day-by-day the interior or location. The actors appearing in each day’s shooting are mentioned.
A writer’s revision of a novel as he adapts it for a film always noteworthy. There are two scenes in the film that make this point powerfully.
1. The first occurs after the trigger-happy fool Dohmer shoots a cop during the ride to Atlantic City. Nat and Baylock hole up in a shack in a marshland near AC. After returning from town, Nat sees Charlie, and the corpse of Baylock. Charlie wants the diamonds and fast. Then Della walks in. (Working for Charlie, she had enticed Nat to her large house and they began an affair. But she fell hard for him—see Nightfall).

After Charlie leaves, she tells Nat she wants to run away with him. The diamonds are not important, difficult to fence with Baylock dead, and they love each other. Nat refuses. “I promised [Gladden’s] father.” “What are you, one of those knights in shining armor?” He calls Gladden to warn her Charlie is going to take the loot and kill her. She collapses, inconsolable. As we last see her, “It doesn’t matter where she is going.” [cf Black Friday]
Key stage direction: “Harbin takes a few steps in her direction. Then he stops, turns slowly and he FACES CAMERA. We see the anguish of irretrievable loss on his face.” Here Goodis requires great acting from Martha Vickers and Dan Duryea. It makes clear also how much Nat is hindered, and ennobled, by the belief that his foster father, when he told Nat to always protect Gladden, meant to be a brother to her. He mentions at one point that he had “played a trick on himself,” playing into the hands of cruel fate. In my book I discuss how many of Goodis’ characters live under a paralyzing shadow of incest.
In the previous scene where Gladden and Nat are alone, she tells him he is a “mechanical man,” and she is “tearing up the contract” he made with her father. She’s walking out. She regards him as “dull, lifeless, as though he is a stranger.” At this point, the love story is Nat loves Della. Period. Not so in the book, where, faced with the threat of death from Charlie, or prison and walled off from Gladden, Nat can say at last he loves Gladden. Now, he thinks of his foster father as a kind of angel, moving him to her, not away.
2. The film’s final scene takes place on Steel Pier, and involves a kind of fun house, a hall of mirrors that like the one in Welles’ Lady from Shanghai. Nat leads Charlie away from Gladden, into a shootout. Gladden sobs uncontrollable as Nat dies. Charlie is apprehended. The police captain has the last word, identifying the corpse as “victim.”
Nicely ambiguous, but it can’t hold a candle to the book. Perhaps the producer of a movie that needed a much larger audience than a newsstand paperback could not risk the kind of poetic mystery Goodis’ language could attain. Paul Wendkos said that Goodis thought of himself as an entertainer, not a literary author. To be successful, a thriller movie (burglars who did carry guns, a noir cop who would kill even a girl he loves to make a score; a femme fatale who falls for the protagonist; an over-scrupulous and thus frustrated hero and heroine) needed a larger audience, a pass from the censors (the code), and more lucrative profits, than a newsstand paperback.
Everyone who has read The Burglar knows *its* powerful climax, which indicates how far out of the ordinary love story Goodis takes his tale. Gladden and Nat are embracing, but . . . . Without spoiling it for those who haven’t, the denouement begins on the beach. The loot is somehow not the obscure object of desire, but rather a kind of McGuffin. Charlie is not, as he has been throughout, cool headed. That is b/c when Della told him she was in love with Nat, he strangled her. Now “there is nothing in my life.” They grapple, and Gladden blows Charlie’s head off. Then the action moves beyond the paltry loot, and mundane A.C , and its beach, into the ocean and the moonlight (Allusion to Double Indemnity?). They plan to swim far out and then come ashore. Gladden tires. Nat, to the end, fulfills his obligation. “There was only one thing to do, the honorable thing to do.”
Love. Obligation. Togetherness. The inevitable. Mystery. Life is beautiful, and cruel.

This is a valuable way to compare the book and the first film of "The Burglar". I was fascinated because it is the only screenplay Goodis wrote of his own work. Your detailed comments are valuable. I wrote a paper some years ago about loyalty in Goodis' novel which I am tempted some day to revise and expand. The theme of loyalty runs through the book. I agree that the film version is far less effective than the novel. In my Amazon review of the film I wrote:"Goodis' adaptation of his novel is the weakest element of the film. The script includes long scenes of introspective dialogue by the main characters which tends to slow down the action elements that Wendklos emphasizes. The movie's story line differs considerably from that of the book and lacks the subtlety and poignancy Goodis brought in his novel to his exploration of the nature of loyalty." The film is still worth seeing for itself and for its interpretation of the novel. Regards.

Thank you so much for the comments, Robin. You should come back to your paper on loyalty in Goodis. Loyalty is often ambiguous to him. Cassidy’s loyalty to Mildred limits him by submerging mutuality into raging bouts of violent self-destructive passion. Nat’s loyalty to his foster father makes him honorable and leads him to realize too late how he has been unable to express desire. In The Moon in the Gutter, Kerrigan’s loyalty to the memory of his sister prevents him from being able to leave his blighted neighborhood to be with the woman from the Main Line who really loves him. In Night Squad, the self-hating hero, Corey, replaces his loyalty to the vicious crime boss Grogan with loyalty to the head of the Night Squad, who has responded to the boss’ killing his family with equal sadistic degeneracy in hunting down and torturing the members of he gang who acted on Grogan’s orders. Like so much else in Goodis, the heroes “play dirty tricks” on themselves, forbidding themselves happiness. I agree completely with your criticism of the film The Burglar. But I really did not mind the somewhat stagnant dialogue b/c Goodis’ language creates its own world, starting with language of the common man, both naturalistic and mythic at the same time. I loved that, just as I love the location shooting. The latter revives an America that both invigorated and hurt the people who lived it.