Ask A Genius 763: Raymond Chandler Quotes
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/06/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.” – Raymond Chandler.
Rick Rosner: I believe Raymond Chandler worked for insurance, he was an insurance executive. I think he was married to a wife who was older than him and who was indisposed or a pain in the ass in some way. So his Private Eye novels were probably wish fulfillment, perhaps. Or maybe he just, I don’t know, we could Google him. I don’t have anything interesting to say about him. I don’t know how many books he wrote, maybe half a dozen.
Jacobsen: Here are two more quotes.
Rosner: Okay.
Jacobsen: Raymond Chandler again. “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket”
“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back”
Rosner: Okay, again, that doesn’t trigger a whole lot. He was a hard boiled Private Eye type writer. Didn’t he write Double Indemnity also?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: So, he worked in insurance. Double Indemnity has an insurance angle that Barbara Stanwick seduces Fred McMurray into killing her husband for the insurance. She lives in Pasadena and Double Indemnity was written and filmed before they had freeways. So, it was probably a longer trip from L.A proper to Pasadena, which is 20 miles northeast of most of Los Angeles; big fancy houses, old money. Well, we can talk about noir a little bit. People liked movies with antiheroes where shit went bad in the ‘40s and ‘50s. We could try to figure out why. Maybe the haze code, which tried to enforce proper behavior in movies, was lessening enforced by then. It started in the 20s or 30s and before that, movies were pretty salacious, a lot of them.
Or maybe people made noir movies because they could be salacious as long as, according to the code, people got their comeuppance. Fred McMurray does bad, but then he gets caught and he’s going to get the chair for murder. I mean, movies were made on much smaller budgets back then. A lot of noirs were shot in black and white. At the same time there were a lot of period dramas and books adapted from famous novels, the kind they’d make you read in school and those had sumptuous sets with lots of molding, because I guess it was relatively cheap to build a set that looked fancy and set it in the 19th century and it was just wood. And with noir stories, it’s just murder and other forms of mayhem and betrayal. And as long as you gave people their dose of bad behavior, maybe people didn’t mind, but the movie didn’t cost anything.
I haven’t been very helpful with these quotes.
[Recording End]
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