Jim Beaver (JUMBLEJIM@prodigy.net)
Mon, 4 Oct 1999 09:57:03 -0700
>Berlin Noir worth it? Are you kidding? Only one of
the best, toughest
>noir trilogies of recent times. Please read
it.
I've only read the first of the trilogy so far, but did
anyone else feel that Kerr was trying to capture a kind of
Marlowesque way with words yet not quite doing so? I felt
that the Atlantic Ocean kept getting between Kerr and the way
he was trying to sound. It reminded me of a meeting I had a
few years back with the British director John Guillermin, who
was directing a Western. I had a line in the script, as a bad
guy talking to the good guy who had asked me and my gang to
do something: "C'mon, make us, hayseed." Guillermin insisted
that the line be read "Make us hayseed," without the central
comma. I looked puzzled I suppose, so he explained that this
outlaw was daring the good guy to "make us into hayseed."
Well, as a fairly good ol' boy from Texas, I tried to explain
to His Britness that hayseed was a term of derogation and not
a descriptive noun such as he believed. But there was no
convincing him. I felt, similarly, reading Kerr, that he
didn't quite have a handle on the slang or rather, the
Chandlerian syntax he seemed to seek.
Long story to possibly no great end.
Jim Beaver
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