On A Kiss Before Dying, complexities of book-to-film adaptation, and the world of noir

I’ve been thinking about books, especially in the crime and suspense genres, which are highly resistant to being filmed – or at least resistant to being filmed faithfully. In other words, it may be possible to turn the basic plot into an excellent movie, but the nature and method of its suspense would be unlike that of the book, because of fundamental differences between literature and cinema.

Consider one of the best crime novels I know of: Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, which was filmed twice in America (in 1956 and 1991) and loosely adapted by Bollywood for Shahrukh Khan’s star-making Baazigar. In each case, the film had to make significant departures from the source material; to understand why, here’s a plot outline of Levin’s novel.

(Note: no major spoilers – most of what I’m about to reveal is contained in the first dozen or so pages, and I’m not giving away the central twist.)

A young man, a gold-digger, has been romancing a girl named Dorothy, the daughter of a rich entrepreneur. For reasons I won’t get into here, he decides to kill her, and the first third of the book (approx. 90 pages) is about the carrying out of his scheme. Throughout this segment, we are privy to the furious ticking of his mind – his anxiety when things don’t go as planned, his careful anticipation of glitches, even his self-congratulatory smugness. The narrative is in the third person, but we are as close to his inner state as it’s possible to get; the writing is so taut and intense that even as the reader condemns him morally, it’s hard not to feel personally invested – even implicated – in his actions.

But here’s the rub: we only get a bare-bones description of this man (he’s blond, blue-eyed, very handsome), and most crucially we never learn his name. He is referred to simply as “he”, and though that might sound forced or gimmicky, it works here because Levin so masterfully ties us to his protagonist’s consciousness. (After the first few pages, “he” becomes as precise a pronoun as “I” would be in a first-person narrative; the word can only possibly refer to one person. Some readers might not even realise that they don’t know “his” name until quite late in the story.)

Levin’s reasons for doing this become apparent in the next part of the book, as Dorothy’s sister Ellen starts making private enquiries about the men her sister may have been involved with at the time of her death. She encounters a few of them, and of course she learns their names. But the reader is flummoxed: we are now seeing things through Ellen’s eyes and it’s possible that the killer is one of the men she meets, but we have no way of knowing who it is. Because of the shift in perspective, the person we knew so intimately in the first section of the book is now a stranger to us.

This, then, is the set-up for the novel’s major twist. Like all of Levin’s books, A Kiss Before Dying is made up of several ingeniously constructed moments of suspense – but the revelation of the killer’s identity is the pièce de résistance. 

Given this summary, I’m sure you can see why A Kiss Before Dying is so difficult to film exactly as it was written. A movie (at least a movie that uses a conventional narrative structure**) would have to show us the murderer’s face right at the beginning – which means that when Ellen begins sleuthing, the viewer wouldn’t be in the dark about his identity. The film would have to generate suspense using other methods, perhaps by changing the story’s focus or chronology, or by keeping us initially uncertain about the man’s intentions. (The book dives straight into his psyche by opening on this classic pulp-fiction note: “His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him...”)

I wrote in this post about another Levin book I love, The Boys From Brazil. His best work creates an almost tangible sense of paranoia, which transcends conventional ideas about “suspense” writing. I can read The Boys From Brazil and A Kiss Before Dying over and over and discover something new each time, long after their major plot secrets have been revealed; these books are lessons in how to construct a story by putting together little details, and I think any budding writer – even one with “literary” rather than “genre” aspirations – can learn from them.

But there’s something else to be said about A Kiss Before Dying: in addition to being an excellent suspense novel, this is also a fine entry in the tradition of American noir literature of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

One of the essential themes of noir is the discontent that can lead people into a life of crime – the gnawing sense that the world is an inherently unjust place and that there’s a better life to be had, if only you can reach out and seize the moment. (Eventually, of course, even minor transgressions lead into mazes and cul de sacs, and the best-laid plans unravel.) The killer in A Kiss Before Dying is first and foremost a social menace and an opportunist, but he is also a small-town lad obsessed with a giant copper-manufacturing corporation that is making much more money than it knows what to do with – and there is a sense in which his story can be read as subtle social commentary.

This makes an interesting contrast with the Shah Rukh Khan character Ajay in Baazigar. Such were the imperatives of mainstream Hindi cinema in the early 1990s that this psychotic “hero” had to be given an elaborate back-story to partly justify his murderous acts. (As a boy, he watched his family being driven to ruin by the businessman whose daughters he now targets. As an adult, he earns a quasi-heroic death scene in his adoring mother’s arms; any Hindi-movie leading man who passes thus can automatically be considered redeemed on some level.) The protagonist of A Kiss Before Dying doesn’t have a dramatic revenge motive of this sort, and there is no attempt to turn him into a sympathetic character – but Levin does permit the reader to think about the personal circumstances and ambitions of an intelligent young boy from a family that’s struggling to make ends meet; a boy who has little interest in the mundane jobs he has to hold down, and who comes to believe that he deserves better. Where might his sense of the unfairness of things lead him? It's a classic noir question.

Where the dragon bears down on the lambs

Martin Amis once wrote with admiration about another fine practitioner of popular fiction, Thomas Harris – specifically about Harris’s first two Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs: “Lecters I and II are thrillers, procedurals of pain and panic, and they involve the reader in various simplifications and unrealities. But Harris maintains human decorum too. His prose is hard and sober and decently sad as he takes us to the place where the dragon bears down on the lambs.”

That last sentence applies to parts of A Kiss Before Dying too. There are moments of unexpected poignancy here: in a casual description of the things packed by a giddily romantic, gullible young woman for a honeymoon she will never go on; or in the betrayal felt by another lady, a loner, who discovers that her emotions have been toyed with. Even some of the throwaway passages are revealing: when a girl, a side-character, ends a mostly subdued letter to a murder victim’s father with a frivolous reference to the current fashion trends in her college, we get a glimpse into the inner world of a student who wants desperately to fit in.

Levin was just 23 years old when he wrote A Kiss Before Dying. This is credible if you look at the confidence and audacity of the book’s structure, and the many risks he takes; only a (very precocious) young writer with nothing to lose would try some of the things he does here. But when you consider the real feeling expressed here for the lonely-hearts and misfits who make up the victims (and occasionally the wrongdoers) of the noir world, it’s staggering to think that this book could come from such a young person. At 23, even as he wrote a bloody good page-turner where our point of identification is largely with the killer, he also found a way to evoke sympathy for the lambs that get preyed on by dragons.

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** One avant-garde approach to filming the first section of A Kiss Before Dying would be to let the killer’s eyes be the camera – so that we see everything from his viewpoint and never get to see his face at all. Something like this was done in the 1940s Hollywood film Lady in the Lake, but needless to say it’s a gimmicky technique, and if it isn’t well-executed it can easily become laughable or just monotonous.

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Important note: if you plan to read A Kiss Before Dying, do avoid reading about it on Wikipedia or even the plot summaries on Amazon.com – some of these rather foolishly give the killer’s name away. And if you do buy it, I'd recommend this lovely-looking Pegasus edition, available on Flipkart.

[Some related posts: Noir's arc - an anthology of American noir writing; Levin’s The Boys From Brazil; Thomas Harris, monster-maker]

Collecting trivia: actors and real-life characters

Just realised that Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, is a few months older than Zuckerberg in real life. Can anyone think of other instances of actors playing real-life characters who were younger than them? I have a niggling feeling that there have been a few such cases (and possibly a couple that are very obvious), but I can't put my finger on many.

The ones I have so far:

- Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford were both several years older than their real-life characters, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, in the film about the Watergate expose, All the President's Men.

- Gary Cooper as baseball star Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees.

- In The Great Dictator, Charles Chaplin played Adenoid Hynkel, a barely disguised version of Adolf Hitler (who was a mere four days younger than Chaplin in real life).

- In The Boys From Brazil (an adaptation of Ira Levin's excellent novel), Laurence Olivier played a Nazi-hunter modelled on Simon Wiesenthal - who was a year younger than Olivier - but the character had a different name.

As you'd expect, there are a few close contenders from biographical movies about sportspeople and musicians who achieved a lot at a young age: in Fear Strikes Out, Anthony Perkins played Jimmy Piersall, who was just two years older than him. Then there's James Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story (four years) and Paul Newman as the boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (six years).

Any additions to this list? Movie buffs?

Update: just to clarify what I mean, I'm talking about actors who were born before the real-life people they portrayed.

In praise of Ira Levin/The Boys from Brazil

In one of those little coincidences, I had just finished rereading Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil when I heard that Ira Levin had died. It was disappointing to see how thinly spread the reports/obituaries were, and that many of them seemed to think Levin was a significant figure mainly because of the films adapted from his suspense novels – notably Roman Polanski’s version of Rosemary’s Baby, the two adaptations, made 30 years apart, of The Stepford Wives, and the bloated but competent enough film of The Boys from Brazil, starring Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck. (Indian connection: Shah Rukh Khan’s star-making Baazigar was inspired by Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying.)

It's sad that Levin’s achievements as a writer have been so underplayed. He was not a prolific novelist by any standard, much less the standards of genre fiction (he published only seven books between 1953 and 1997 and this may be part of the reason for his low profile), but he was a master not just at thinking up highly suspenseful plots but also at the art of maintaining suspense over the course of a book. His writing style, functional though it appears to be, conceals a delicate craftsmanship, especially in the way he accumulates little details and uses them to create menace. This means that though all his books contain a frisson-generating twist (or a few minor twists and one major surprise), most of them survive multiple readings. It’s possible to revisit them even after their secrets have been digested.

My favourite among his books is probably The Boys from Brazil, and I remember that it took a while for me to sink into it the first time around. The opening chapter, with its series of quotidian details, can try the patience of a reader who expects a thriller to supply facile thrills right from the first page. A private plane touches down at Sao Paulo airport, three men – one in a white suit, the focus of our attention – emerge and drive to a Japanese restaurant where a room has been reserved for a party. Once inside, they set about examining every corner of the room, our only indication that something suspicious is afoot. Then the other guests arrive, the men exchange greetings in Portuguese and Spanish but switch to German as they begin to converse more freely; they banter, allude to old times. Food is served; they flirt with waitresses. All these details are presented in staccato sentences that gradually build layers of tension; we sense that this is leading up to something bigger.

Soon enough, the men get down to business and we learn that this is a meeting of former Nazis presided over by Josef Mengele (a real-life physician known as the Angel of Death for his medical experiments in concentration camps), its agenda being that 94 men – all civil servants, all 65 years old, living in different parts of the world – have to be killed on specified dates in the next two years. These killings, Mengele says, without providing his accomplices (and the reader) any further explanation, will help fulfill a plan to “restore the supremacy of the Aryan race”.

Levin’s skill here as elsewhere lies in presenting facts passively, as if by a less-than-omniscient narrator who doesn't know anything about the characters' motivations but is simply recording their movements; he slowly brings together the elements of a scene before revealing their full implications and pulling the carpet out from beneath the reader’s feet. (This is why the most apt jacket description I’ve read on a Levin novel – on an edition of Rosemary’s Baby – simply goes: “The young couple. The new neighbors. The suicide. The amulet. The doctor. The herbs. The anagram. The baby.”) Another good example of this occurs later in the book, when Yakov Liebermann, an aging Jew who has dedicated his life to tracing fugitive Nazis, realises what Mengele’s true motives are. Levin doesn’t immediately tell us about Liebermann’s realisation: instead he describes his movements – staring silently at his food, excusing himself from the table, going into the next room – from the perspective of his dining companions. One of them looks through a doorway, sees Liebermann “standing in profile, head bent to an open book, rocking slightly”, and wonders if this is a case of a “Jew at prayer”. This is rich imagery, for when Libermann returns we discover that what he was looking at wasn’t a prayer-book (sorry, no spoilers), and the reason for the swaying is that he was in a state of shock.

Levin’s few stylistic experiments work very well too, because he uses them with discernment – for instance, there’s a passage where Liebermann, while giving a speech about the Holocaust to a group of young German students, decides to pick their brains for the solution to the “why are these 94 men to be killed” question. At a couple of points in this chapter – often right in the middle of an exchange between Liebermann and a student – Levin cuts to a very brief description of one of Mengele’s assassins carrying out a killing. The effect of this sudden break on the unprepared reader is difficult to describe – you really have to experience it for yourself (the first time I read it, I wondered if there was a printing problem in my copy of the book). Speaking in cinematic terms, it isn’t so much like cross-cutting as introducing an unrelated, two-second visual in the middle of a scene to unsettle the viewer. Here, it adds urgency to the narrative, reminds us that even while these discussions are taking place in this closed hall, Mengele’s plot is being put into practice and time is running out. It’s very effective.

At the heart of The Boys from Brazil is a premise out of science-fiction (though one that’s less likely to be considered science-fiction today than it was in the mid-1970s), and this, along with the demands of the genre, means that the reader is required to suspend disbelief. But Liebermann (memorably played by Olivier in the 1978 movie version) is a completely believable protagonist, one we can whole-heartedly engage with, even without the knowledge that he’s based on the real-life Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. This is a persistent, slightly crabby old man, constantly aware he is short on time and resources, and that many people, some of them Jews, look at him with bemusement. He has mood swings: he’s saddened by how little the Holocaust means to modern young people (struggling to conceal his shock when an otherwise sympathetic girl unthinkingly refers to Mengele’s work at Auschwitz as “research”) but also encouraged by the support he receives from unexpected quarters; and, at the end of the novel, he’s still optimistic enough about the human spirit to make a generous decision. He’s a character we can genuinely care about, and this, along with Levin’s eye for detail, for a gesture that can acquire retrospective significance, gives The Boys from Brazil a staying power that many other suspense novels lack.

[Pradeep Sebastian, who is one of Levin’s biggest champions – a couple of his Endpaper columns for the Hindu, including this one, were about Levin’s work – has a nice tribute here.]

Books that share genes: Ira Levin, Steven Pinker

It's always fascinating when the books I’m reading at various times suddenly intersect each other in unexpected ways - thematic similarities, a piece of dialogue here, a phrase there, a striking bit of imagery that evokes a line read somewhere else. At times it’s simply the case that I’m going out of the way to relate two things to each other, even when the link is tenuous. But that certainly isn’t what happened in the most recent instance. A few days ago Amit Varma gave me Steven Pinker’s acclaimed book The Blank Slate, a revisiting of the human nature debate - to what extent people’s behaviour is determined by their genes as compared to their environment. It’ll take me some time to get through (non-fiction not being my strongest point as a reader) but I read the prologue and it looks very interesting.

Anyway, I took the Pinker home, set it down and got back to the book I was already halfway through, Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil - a creepy 1970s thriller about a Nazi plot...but no, I’m not going to do the spoiler thing this time. Enough to say that it has to do with genes and with controlling environments to foster a certain type of human being. And that it’s probably more relevant today than when it was written. I was struck by the link between these two books that occupy such completely different genres.

Levin has the ability to get under your skin and stay there. Despite being a writer of bestsellers, a novelist working in a popular genre, he somehow has a reputation more as a cult author than a mainstream one. (It’s amazing how little on him there is on the Web and strangely his books are rarely ever available in a firsthand bookstore in Delhi, though you’ll see the occasional moth-eaten copy in roadstalls.) Paranoia is the key to his stories - from a young housewife worrying that her husband might be in collusion with Satanists (Rosemary’s Baby) to another young housewife (The Stepford Wives) finding herself in a little town where all the women are unnervingly docile. The Boys From Brazil takes this to another level: here, an elderly Nazi-hunter (based on the real-life Simon Wiesenthal and played by Laurence Olivier in the 1978 film version) tries to find out why a group of Nazis, under the instructions of the notorious “Doctor Death”, Josef Mengele, are plotting the murders of unconnected 65-year-old men in various countries.

Having already seen the film years earlier, I was familiar with the central plot revelation, but that didn’t make the book any less effective. Read The Boys From Brazil and any other Levins you can scrape off the Daryaganj sidewalks (if you’re in Delhi) if you’re seeking genuine, subversive thrills. Meanwhile, I’m starting on the Steven Pinker (which, incidentally, has a brief reference to Mengele and his sadistic experiments in concentration camps).