"It all started with 'Chinatown' when I was a senior in high school," says Charles Pappas, the La Crosse author of "It's a Bitter Little World" -- a dark, cynical and sassy compilation of the "smartest, toughest, nastiest quotes from film noir."
"Except for the occasional 'A Clockwork Orange,' it was mostly 'Towering Inferno's or 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull's. Then along came 'Chinatown' in 1974 with that oh-so-Greek tragedy way of looking at the world through manure-tinted glasses: what you need to live gets you killed."
And like so many tragedies, life struggles and inevitable downfalls, it all starts with a woman. In his book, Pappas traces the genre of film noir back to Antiquity, specifically claiming the doomed saga of Orpheus chasing, and eventually dying for, his beloved Eurydice to perhaps be the origin of this sinister style of storytelling.
Organized by themed chapters and by decades, this collection of classic and contemporary film noir quotations takes the reader down the dark alley of the genre's development over the years, placing a crucial focus on the hard-hitting dialogue that makes noir so bold and unsettlingly humorous.
"Movie making in the 20th and 21st centuries is a collaborative enterprise equal to cathedral building in the Middle Ages, with results every bit as stunning," says Pappas. "(But) it wasn't just the genre and the unhappy ending the director Roman Polanski ('Chinatown') forced on the screenwriter Robert Towne -- it was the language. The words were like strip teasers in a world of Mayberry Aunt Bees."
For over two years Pappas lurked about in noir newsgroups, reading everything he could get his hands on in preparation for the list of 300 films he thought to be the "kingpins of the genre."
Some, of course, we're a dead given -- "The Conversation," "Maltese Falcon" and "Touch of Evil;" whereas others -- like 1947's "Nightmare Alley" -- he dubs "gems that our cultural Alzheimer's has forgotten."
His own love for the genre -- and film in general -- was also a major catalyst for the compilation.
"My film resume consists of about 5,000 ticket stubs and dozens of bottles of Visine from watching Turner Classic Movies," he says. "Plus, I was once married to an actress in New York who looked like Linda Fiorentino in 'The Last Seduction.'"
The beauty of this book is that it showcases how the genre cleverly dispels wisdom about life and death by literally letting the films speak for themselves.
"A French writer named Raymond Queneay said that the difference between fiction and real life is that fiction is usually about love and real life is about hunger. That's what I want to trumpet about noir -- it's about hunger. Hunger for sex, money, revenge, even identity."
"It's a Bitter Little World" is the first part of a projected series on noir and popular culture from Pappas.
"I'd like to follow up with a quote book from television noir. Even though TV was about as dangerous as a bowl of Campbell's chicken noodle soup, there were the occasional dark spots, like a 1950s NBC series called 'Foreign Intrigue.' You had 'The Naked City,' some early episodes of 'Dragnet,' and 'The Twilight Zone,' to name a few. Rod Serling had a view of life that wasn't jaundiced -- it was gangrenous.
"Today there's more TV noir than you could shake a fedora at -- 'Deadwood,' 'The Sopranos,' 'The Wire.' Noir has seeped like a blood stain into fashion, writing, marketing and everything. It's overtaking apple pie and mom as the American style."
"It's a Bitter Little World" is published by Writer's Digest Book and is available at bookstores everywhere.
OnMilwaukee.com staff writer Julie Lawrence grew up in Wauwatosa and has lived her whole life in the Milwaukee area.
As any “word nerd” can attest, you never know when inspiration will strike, so from a very early age Julie has rarely been seen sans pen and little notebook. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee it seemed only natural that she major in journalism. When OnMilwaukee.com offered her an avenue to combine her writing and the city she knows and loves in late 2004, she knew it was meant to be. Around the office, she answers to a plethora of nicknames, including “Lar,” (short for “Larry,” which is short for “Lawrence”) as well as the mysteriously-sourced “Bill Murray.”
