OBITUARY: AI BEZZERIDES: SCREENWRITER VICTIM OF THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST, HE IS RENOWNED FOR THREE CLASSIC AMERICAN FILM NOIRS
Ronald Bergan
The Guardian – United Kingdom
Feb 06, 2007
In 2005, two feature-length documentaries appeared: they were Buzz,
and The Long Haul of AI Bezzerides, and they were built around the
reminiscences of a fragile nonagenarian in a woollen cap, filmed at
his modest home in Southern California. On camera, AI (Albert Isaac)
Bezzerides, who has died aged 98, recalled his Armenian mother and
Greek father; the way he put himself through college by driving trucks,
like his father, and doing other tough jobs; his friendships with
William Faulkner, William Saroyan, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum,
and the period from 1942 to 1959, when he was one of Hollywood’s
top screenwriters.
Although Buzz, as he was known, scripted war films and westerns,
his main claim to fame were his screenplays for three classic film
noirs: Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), Nicholas Ray’s On
Dangerous Ground (1952) and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955),
each featuring hard-boiled disillusioned loners, archetypal anti-heroes
of the genre.
Bezzerides was born in Ottoman Turkey, and moved to America with his
parents before he was two. He never forgot his proletarian roots nor
his Balkan heritage. There is the Greek immigrant trucker Nick "Nico"
Garcos (Richard Conte) in Thieves’ Highway; the Greek small farmer
also called Nick Garcos (George Tobias) in Juke Girl (1942); a Greek
deep-sea diving father (Gilbert Roland) and son (Robert Wagner) in
Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) and Nick, the Greek motor mechanic
(‘Va-va-voom – pow!’ is his pet phrase) in Kiss Me Deadly, who is
crushed under a car. The Angry Hills (1959), starring Robert Mitchum,
is set in Greece during the second world war.
Bezzerides dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley,
where he was studying electrical engineering, because he wanted to be
a writer. He was working as an engineer for the Los Angeles Department
of Water and Power when his novel, Long Haul (1938), was turned into
the Raoul Walsh film They Drive by Night (1940), with George Raft and
Humphrey Bogart as struggling wildcat truck-driving brothers hauling
California produce on long distances.
It was only after Warner Bros paid him $2,000 for the rights to his
novel and put him under contract as a $300-a-week screenwriter that
Bezzerides discovered that a script based on his book had already
been written by Jerry Wald.
"I grabbed their offer so I could quit my putrid career and become
a writer," he explained.
His first Warner Bros screenwriting was Curtis Bernhardt’s Juke Girl
which, despite its title, was an impassioned plea for the rights
of migrant workers, led by Ronald Reagan, in his more liberal days,
and Ann Sheridan, in the title role. "Look bud, every time a freight
train shakes itself, fleas like you come hopping out" is her initial
reaction to itinerant farm worker Reagan.
Bezzerides saw out his Warner Bros contract in wartime by writing
additional dialogue for a number of the studio’s propagandistic war
films such as Action in the North Atlantic (1943) with Bogart as a
heroic first officer. The climax shows Bogart and his men greeted
by cheering Russians, a sequence which became an embarrassment for
Warners during the paranoid cold-war era. The screenplay was credited
to John Howard Lawson, who was blacklisted in 1948 and imprisoned for
not testifying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Jules Dassin also fell victim to the HUAC after directing Thieves’
Highway, as did Robert Rossen, who co-wrote Desert Fury (1947) with
Bezzerides. Buzz survived the blacklist, but was put on a grey list,
meaning that he was continually at risk, he was not able to get top
salaries and was constantly under threat from producers who exploited
him. Prior to the dark days, Desert Fury was rare, not only for being
one of the few films noirs in Technicolor, but a delirious melodrama
which hinted at homosexual desires (Wendell Corey for his crooked
boss John Hodiak).
Thieves’ Highway was based on Bezzerides’ novel Thieves’ Market,
published in the same year as the film, written out of the author’s
youthful experiences as a Californian trucker. Independent trucker
"Nico" Garcos (Conte) soon lands in the brutal and crooked underworld
of the produce markets.
Nico: "Hey, do you like apples?" Rica (Valentina Cortese as an Italian
hooker whom Nico says resembles "chipped glass"): " Everybody likes
apples, except doctors." Nico: "Do you know what it takes to get an
apple so you can sink your beautiful teeth in it? You gotta stuff
rags up tailpipes, farmers gotta get gypped, you jack up trucks with
the back of your neck, universals conk out. . ." Rica: "I don’t know
what are you talking about, but I have a new respect for apples."
During the 1950s, Bezzerides, now a writer for hire, delivered Sirocco
(1951) starring Bogart as a world-weary expatriate gun-running in
Syria in 1925, and On Dangerous Ground, which saw Buzz back on more
satisfying noir territory.
Robert Ryan is a thuggish cop hovering on the brink of a nervous
breakdown, who ends up falling in love with the blind sister (Ida
Lupino) of the killer he is after. As Lupino tells him, "Sometimes
people who are never alone are the loneliest."
However, the peak of Bezzerides’ achievement was the cryptic
screenplay for Kiss Me Deadly, a multi-layered film noir that used a
Mickey Spillane pulp novel as the basis for a gripping allegory of
1950s America. "I was given the Spillane book and I said, ‘This is
lousy. Let me see what I can do’," Bezzerides recalled. "So I went
to work on it. I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it . . . I
tell you Spillane didn’t like what I did with his book. I ran into
him at a restaurant and, boy, he didn’t like me."
What Bezzerides did was turn the novel around, making Spillane’s
private-eye hero Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) into a narcissistic bully.
Hammer: "I bet you were out with some guy who thought ‘no’ was a
three-letter word."
Christina (Cloris Leachman): "You have only one real lasting
love." Hammer: "Now who could that be?" Christina: "You. You’re one of
those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes,
his car, himself."
And later, Hammer: "You’re never around when I need you." Velda
(Maxine Cooper): "You never need me when I’m around."
A year before the director Robert Aldrich died in 1983, he rang
Bezzerides.
"He wanted to tell me that he had just re-read my script for Kiss
Me Deadly.
When I asked why, Aldrich told me, ‘I wanted to see how I could’ve shot
it in three weeks. You know what? It was all there in the script.’"
In the 1960s, he turned very successfully to television, writing
episodes of The Virginian (1962) as well as creating the Barbara
Stanwyck television series The Big Valley (1965-69), for which he
wrote around 100 episodes, though he complained that its ethnic
richness was diminished by the producers.
Bezzerides, who claimed, "I was never part of the picture people. I
just wrote," is survived by his son and daughter from his first
marriage, and a daughter from his second to the screenwriter Silvia
Richards, who died in 1999.
Albert Isaac ‘AI’ Bezzerides, screenwriter and novelist, born August
9 1908; died January 1 2007
