By Gary Deane
"No, nobody knew, but I told him. As I watched while he sank into the quicksand, I told him, and was it sweet."
Gil Brewer wrote intoxicating pulp and lots of it—hundreds
of short stories and novels, bannered with heady titles like The Vengeful Virgin, Nude on Thin Ice, The
Bitch, Backwoods Teaser, Appointment in Hell, and So Rich, So Dead. The sexually fraught tales of male lust,
feminine wiles, and the seductive power of nothing left to lose are pure noir—though
in Brewer’s world, noir’s fated Everyman gives way to a never-ending lineup of
losers and lowlifes, suckers and stooges, and the easily-angered and ever-resentful.
Brewer began writing with hopes of becoming a mainstream
novelist. But by the early 1950’s, he’d given up on getting noticed and joined the
meaner world of paperback originals and second-tier men’s magazines—a pulp purgatory
from which he’d never escape. By the 1970’s he’d fallen victim to changing
times and tastes, along with his own disillusionment and descent into mental
illness and addiction. In 1983, he died of alcohol poisoning.
The sexual mayhem, unrelenting despair, and breathless,
headlong pace of nearly everything he’d write also left Brewer out in the cold as
far as radio, television, and movies went. Not that he really cared. He was leery
of them as they were of him. Still, two of his earlier paperbacks managed to
get optioned. The first, The Brat, never
got off the shelf. However, the other, Hell’s
Our Destination, eventually found its way to the screen in 1957 under the
title, The Lure of the Swamp. (Years
later, renegade French director Jean-Pierre Mocky would adapt Brewer’s ‘A
Killer is Loose’ (La machine à découdre,
1986) and 13 French Street (2007),
based on two of his most popular Fawcett Gold Medal titles. American indie
director Scott Ziehl also used Brewer’s 1954 novel ‘Wild to Possess’ as a
starting point for his 2004’s Three Way.
All three failed to do the books justice, especially the latter, a dreary
erotic thriller which over-complicates what was already complicated enough, turning
Brewer’s heady piece of Gold Medal trash into so much waste.)
Backing production of Lure of the Swamp was
Regal Films, an independent studio which launched in 1948 with Pitfall, Andre de Toth’s iconic film
noir starring Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott. Among Regal’s directing hopefuls
was Hubert Cornfield, son of Twentieth Century Fox Studios executive, Albert
Cornfield. Born in Istanbul and raised in France, the younger Cornfield had
developed friendships with members of France’s ‘New Wave’, including Jean-Luc
Godard and Francois Truffaut, both of whom shared his enthusiasm for the American
hard-boiled tradition in fiction and films. After graduating from college in
the Eastern U.S., Cornfield headed to Hollywood where Billy Wilder, William
Wyler, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz would sponsor his application for membership in
the Directors Guild of America. Card in hand, Cornfield soon scored his first directing
assignment, Sudden Danger (1955), the
second of five police procedurals starring Bill Elliot as a Los Angeles police
detective. Though the programmer was never meant to be anything more than a throwaway,
Cornfield showed both a feel for the material and proficiency in running a set.
The following year, he was assigned to direct The Lure of the Swamp.
An atmospheric, spectral film noir, Lure is set deep in the swamplands of southern
Florida. Simon Lewt, a local outfitter (played by Marshall Thompson), is hired
by James Lister (Willard Park), a tough-looking customer in a suit, who wants Simon
to guide him through the waterways. However, once in, the man asks to go on alone.
Later, Simon hears gunshots and goes looking for Lister, only to see him toss a
suitcase overboard. Days after, Simon sees a newspaper story about a bank
hold-up; also, a photo of Lister, the suspected robber, found dead in Miami. The
money—nearly three hundred thousand dollars—'remains missing’. Simon then begins
to get visitors: a beautiful femme called Cora Payne (Joan Vohs), who tells him
she’s a magazine photographer on assignment; a suspicious-acting somebody named
Steggins (Leo Gordon), asking about a man with a suitcase; and a roughneck
introducing himself as Henry Bliss (Jack Elam) who tells Simon outright he’s
looking for the cash and offers him a split. Simon refuses. But eventually
thoughts of what the money might bring start to consume him—as does the big-city
allure of the comely Cora.
In his first real test as a director, Cornfield gets big-name performances from his actors, especially Thompson, who earlier in his career had seldom been asked to be anything more than boyishly genial. The boy-next-door later would yield to conflicted, sometimes lethal protagonists in a number of serviceable B noir releases: Mystery Street (1950); Dial 1119 (1950); The Basketball Fix (1951); The Tall Target (1951); and Crashout (1955). Thompson hits his mark in Lure as the complacent-at-best, fatalistic-at-worst backwoods loner who suddenly finds himself deep in unknown territory. Simon’s girlfriend (Joan Lora), the daughter of the local storekeeper, works hard to keep him interested in both her and the prospect of a life together. He’s made it clear that he sees domestic life as just another dead-end. Cora, on the other hand, offers him the promise of everything he’s never had.
Joan Vohs, a Radio City Rockette at age 16, was an
in-demand high-fashion model before taking the call from Hollywood. Voh’s career
in film and television was intermittent and, in Lure’s early going, she’s uneven as a woman pretending to be someone
she’s not. However, as Cora begins to tighten her grip on the woefully simple
Simon, Vohs finds her rhythm as the duplicitous femme. Supporting tough-guys Jack
Elam and Leo Gordon are each as scary as the other, with Gordon taking most of
the movie to reveal who he is and what he’s about.
The
Lure of the Swamp itself is a slow reveal which catches us
off guard and works us over like a canny counterpuncher. Cornfield’s low-budget
genre efforts still pack a powerful punch, recalling Noel Coward’s remark about
the terminal potency of cheap music. It’s as easy to exhilarate in the treacherous
languor of The Lure of the Swamp as
it is in the heart-stopping suspense of Plunder
Road (‘57), Edmond O’Brien’s feverish impersonation of a dead man in The Third Voice (‘60), or the unnerving
jealousy of Mercedes McCambridge in Angel
Baby (’61), Cornfield’s other equally restless noirs. All are sharply
detailed, with the action and dialog edited with the skill of a gem cutter and
with little or no music accompaniment needed to lift the pace.
Cornfield was among the more idiosyncratic studio filmmakers
of post-war Hollywood. Andrew Sarris, in his taxonomy of American directors,
found a slot for him under ‘Miscellany’, taking note of his “European
sensibility”—holding true for The Lure of
the Swamp, a movie that raises the concept of fate to existential proportions.
At once tawdry and eerily elegant, The
Lure of the Swamp both captures the lurid poetics of Gil Brewer’s book and
shares the brutal determinism of Plunder Road and The Third
Voice, movies in which felons fall to betraying each other—and destroy
themselves in the doing.
However, too often and in too many ways, Cornfield
proved to be his own worst enemy. He struggled in Hollywood, with few of his productions
going smoothly—before, during, or after. In what was to become a familiar refrain,
he accused the studio of sabotaging The
Lure of the Swamp by cutting the print without telling him. He went to war
with the producers and crew of Plunder
Road during production and took to calling it ‘Blunder Road’. On his
biggest assignment, Night of the
Following Day (1968), conflicts between Cornfield and Marlon Brando (an actor
he despised) got so out of hand that Cornfield had to leave the picture, with cast
member Richard Boone stepping in to complete it.
Los Angeles film journalist F. X. Feeney said of his
difficult but long-time friend, “Hubert could go from charming to belligerent
in a heartbeat. He demanded one’s attention always with a child’s sense of
entitlement. He fought with all his friends sooner or later always loudly and
often over trifles…Such regal self-importance hurt his career when he was young
and his Casanova recklessness when it came to sleeping with the wives and
mistresses of backer and allies never helped”. Feeney goes on to say, “These
were traits easy to forgive…he was so open, so honest, I couldn’t help but love
the man.”
By the time Night
of the Following Day came around,
Cornfield was living in France, having retreated there in the mid-1960’s after
his career in Hollywood had come to a halt. His only other output abroad would
be limited to a single film, Les grands
moyens aka Short and Sweet (1976)
a noir-inflected crime comedy. When his marriage broke up in the late 1970’s,
Cornfield returned to Los Angeles. Things worked out no better for him there. Unable
to find a job in the industry, he worked as a house painter and lived and slept
in his van amidst the paints and solvents. It’s thought it was this which caused
the throat cancer that nearly killed him, though Cornfield bounced back after
surgery as self-willed as ever. He led a largely solitary life but remained
active: walking, skiing, working on scripts, and going to the movies, including
special showings of Plunder Road and The Third Voice at which he would guest at
the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. After Cornfield
passed away in June of 2006, a tribute was held at the Cinematheque the
following August. A year later, the Cinematheque Français in Paris would celebrate
him with a special Un Hommage à Hubert Cornfield. Among the
films screened was The Lure of the Swamp,
a favorite of French audiences who looked upon Cornfield as an authentic American
auteur.
Time has rewarded Hubert Cornfield, as it would Gil
Brewer who’s since found critical validation as the writer which he believed
himself to be—thanks to well-disposed publishers like Hard Case Crime and Stark
House Press which have issued reprints of many of his books. Brewer, a high
school dropout raised in poverty in Upstate New York, was a man who felt too
deeply and cared too much. Yet Cornfield and Brewer, two of life’s most
dissatisfied customers, shared similar creative sensibilities and
ambitions, each hungry to create something of true depth and meaning in popular
works seething with raw emotion. In whatever heaven or hell awaited, the pair would have had lots to talk about.
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