There have been more film (or TV) adaptations of Herman Melville’s entry in the sweepstakes for Great American Novel—Moby-Dick—than can be counted on two hands. Two versions staring John Barrymore as Capt. Ahab had already been made before the arrival of talkies. Since then, it’s been pretty much a free-for-all in which it is pretty much universally agreed that cinematic version of Ahab’s quest for the white while is deserving of being called a “classic.”
By contrast, three novels by Cornell Woolrich were adapted into what are universally recognized classics and—depending on the film scholar you ask—anywhere from an additional two to as many as seven other films should be equally recognized as outstanding examples of their particular genre.
Does this mean that Woolrich is a superior writer to Herman Melville? Of course not and one would likely have great trouble tracking down a critic who would suggest such a thing. Woolrich’s peculiarly robust ability to write a great story that adapts easily into the visual medium of film underscores what makes him a writer worthy of note.
The most famous adaptation of a Woolrich story into a classic film is “It Had to be Murder” which became Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. That particular example has much in common with what many consider an even greater adaptation of a Woolrich work: the novel and subsequent film Phantom Lady. Whether adapted from a fast-paced short story or a more expansive novel, one of the elements which makes Woolrich fun to read and watch is that much of his fiction is centered in the world of criminal activity, yet refreshingly free of private detectives and where cops usually hinder rather than help solve the case.
Woolrich’s great genius was looking at the world of crime fiction of the 1930’s and seeing something that was desperately missing and—more importantly—something that could be exploited to his own advantage. Fictional crime in during this period was dominated by the two great American detectives Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and the working-class average Joes who fell into the death spiral of criminal behavior in the novels of James M. Cain. What was missing from this landscape was the innocent falsely accused of a crime who had to take it upon himself (or, often, an associate) to clear his name because the police were just part of the working against him.
The story that becomes the film Rear Window would simply not work as well if the housebound voyeur were a private detective and certainly not if he were a cop. Woolrich realized that the key to staking his claim in the landscape of crime fiction in which one was guilty until they could prove themselves innocent was that for it to really work, the reader had to identify with the accused. And for this to take place, it was imperative that they be believable, but not believed. So effective was his strategy that he could make it work in stories where the person was innocent but accused, where the person was guilty but not of the crime suspected and even where the innocent was merely a witness and not suspected at all.
Making the hero of “It Had to be Murder” just an ordinary guy who gets bored in his apartment and accidentally witnesses a murder is such a stroke a genius that Hitchcock did not just adapt it for Rear Window; by the 1950’s he had almost completely turned his back on telling stories about actual criminals to make a series of movies about innocent victims and witnesses.
Cornell Woolrich is rightly credited with being a significant influence on the film noir genre of the late 1940’s, but few ever point out that the plot for many of short stories (and novels) serve as a template for the latter career of Alfred Hitchcock. To what degree Hitchcock was actually influenced by Woolrich can never be known, but leading up to Rear Window he made Strangers on a Train and in the wake of his Woolrich adaptation he would not just make several films about wrongly suspected character, he would even make a film actually titled re The Wrong Man.
A title which could equally well serve for any number of short stories by Cornell Woolrich and some of the great films adapted from his fiction like Fear in the Night (and its remake less than a decade later re-titled Nightmare), Deadline at Dawn, The Chase and Black Angel. All of which (except Nightmare) preceded Hitchcock’s Rear Window and all of which serve up the same basic plot device that would dominate Hitchcock’s films of the 1950’s. What Woolrich recognized before any other writer in the crime genre and what he recognized before Hitchcock (and what Herman Melville never realized) was that nothing can hook a reader into a story quite like the horrifying nightmare of being sucked in by outside forces and forced to prove your innocence rather than the other way around that is the supposed foundation of American justice.
Perhaps Woolrich tapped into a collective fear experienced by readers around the world: that deep down inside everyone knows given the right circumstances they would be hard-pressed to prove they are telling the truth in a world where everyone thinks they are not.
