Waltz into Darkness, by Cornell Woolrich
Waltz into darkness, by Cornell Woolrich
Originally published, 1947.
Cornell Woolrich was a favorite of moviemakers: his novels and stories were adapted into more than 25 motion pictures, with Rear Window as probably the most famous. Two (Francois Truffaut’s 1969 film Mississippi Mermaid and 2001’s Original Sin—which, though it is already largely forgotten in whole, has achieved an extended internet lifespan in the form of a much-viewed clip of an explicit sex scene) were based on Waltz into Darkness, a 1947 novel published by Woolrich under the pseudonym William Irish. Both of these adaptations postdate Hollywood’s noir explosion of the 40s and early 50s, and the story takes place not in hardboiled Chicago or Kansas City but in post-Civil War New Orleans. Still, this is a classic noir study of a femme fatale—in this case a woman who goes by the names Julia and Bonnie. The two women who have played Julia/Bonny, Catharine Denueve and Angelina Jolie, are beautiful actresses who can possess a serpentine coolness on screen that is, despite the deficiencies of both films, appropriate for the role.
Louis Durand is a businessman hoping to augment his financial happiness with a marriage to a mail order bride. When he arrives at a steamboat dock to meet her for the first time he finds not the plain looking woman whose photograph he was sent but a beautiful young girl. The girl, Julia, gives an unconvincing explanation as to why she deceived him about her looks, and Louis, pleased by her beauty, lets none of her ensuing suspicious behavior—a coarse crossing of the legs, the neck snapping of a song bird—convince him that she is not really the woman she claims to be, until, that is “Julia” cleans out his bank accounts and disappears. This expected betrayal, coming less than a third of the way through the book, turns Louis murderous: he stalks women who resemble Julia on the streets, hires a private detective, chases a mask wearing girl through Mardi Gras to press a revolver into her chest. These hallucinatory chapters are a fine writing performance by Mr. Woolrich, whose style throughout the book is more fluid and graceful that those of his tough guy peers.
After a chance dinner invitation brings Louis back in contact with Julia, who explains that her real name is Bonny, and he is placated by her flimsy sob story, we know that loss of money was not what drove Louis to near insanity but the loss of love. And to protect this woman he will not only cheat and murder but allow himself to be murdered.
As is typical in noir the femme fatale’s motives are ambiguous. We see her through Louis’s eyes, and are only privy to the careful chosen thoughts she shares with him. She exists as much as hints and clues left behind—as when the name “Billy” is seen on a burnt letter in a fireplace—as she does as a full bodied presence. Julia/Bonny, however, has more depth than other characters of her type—since she is revealed early on as a thief and liar, the reader doesn’t have to spend a lot of time wondering when she will show her evil, but rather is given a few hundred pages to watch her vacillate between the world she is comfortable in, that of con games and crime, and that which she aspires to, the high class life of New York fashions and fine dining. That her behavior in both of these worlds is that of a sociopath is hardly surprising, given the way that female strivers were commonly portrayed. (And perhaps still are: one of the more frequently voiced views of Hillary Clinton was the ominous one that she would “do anything to win.”) I’ll leave to the reader to judge whether the ending reveals that Julia/Bonny is a more complex being than we imagined or a hopelessly cardboard figure having an unconvincing epiphany. That Louis becomes a vehicle for her redemption, short-lived though it may be, just as she is the vehicle of his brilliantly described downfall is a nifty turnaround of a noir convention.