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Sneak Peek!

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Sneak Peek! 〰️

In celebration of Noirvember, MovieJawn is collaborating with Erik Kreffel of Noir Crazy! Each week we will walk down the dark alley for a different theme within the genre to peek between the blinds and showcase some of Erik’s work that he created specifically for MovieJawn. Read all our Noirvember articles here.

Copies of Erik’s publication Noir Crazy are available for purchase here as well as other noir themed items. Follow Erik on Instagram, Substack, Twitter, and contact him here for commissions.

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

While the Hays Code was in effect, the only way a film could depict violence and cruelty without threat of censorship was if legal justice and moral purity prevailed in the end. This way, the audience would never learn the “wrong” lesson. There could be no crime free of punishment. Following this, understanding that no publicity is bad publicity, no notorious criminal could be depicted, no matter their fate. Let us leave no chance that the wrong lessons will be gleaned from violence.

Ida Luipno had bought the rights to produce a film about the mass murderer Billy Cook from Cook’s attorney. Regulations against newsworthy criminals were against her desire to lean towards contemporary realism as head of Filmakers [sic] productions. A press release written by Lupino and her co-producer Collier Young describes The Hitch-Hiker as “com[ing] to the screen right out of the newspaper headlines,” and after describing Cook’s string of kidnappings and murders across the Southwest United States, boasts that “the William E. Cook story [was] adaptable to excite cinemagoers who knew the loneliness of the open road.” There’s a tension here, between the gung-ho assertion that what’s newsworthy will be a hit, and that bleak sentiment which must follow to be universal, that every American cinemagoer must know “the loneliness of the open road.”

All that Lupino had to do to get her film approved was to change the criminal’s name from William E. Cook to Emmet Myers. The details of his crimes remained largely the same; as did his appearance, including his right eyelid, paralyzed halfway shut. Missing from actor William Talman’s portrayal are a set of finger tattoos reading “HARD LUCK” and then there’s the noticeable age gap between the actor and his subject: with his thick head of hair and perpetual grimace, Cook could have passed for James Dean. But on the screen, righteous anger is a lost cause. As Emmet Myers, Talman is gaunt and stiff, his actions conveyed more by taut close-ups of a gun or a smirk than his physical performance. When he talks about his childhood, about the first time he stole a watch, such a past is faded, aged beyond time alone, like skin left bare in the California Sun

Read the rest of this article here and support Jo!