A NOIR blending violence, sentimentality, and comedy may struggle for balance and Johnny One-Eye (1950) certainly does.
I could not recall having seen this movie before and I was expecting the Johnny in the title to be a gangster, somebody sprouting wise-cracks and New York slang, given the movie is based on a Damon Runyon short story. A fair way into the movie we find Johnny is not a gangster, not even a person.
FATE TORTURING THE WORKING STIFF is a subset of film noir and includes Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) Scarlet Street (1945) D.O.A. (1945) Quicksand (1950) Kansas City Confidential (1952) The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and 99 River Street (1953)
What made the real-life story surrounding Quicksand both poignant and ironic was working stiffs, director Irving Pichel, and musical composer Louis Gruenberg, were blacklisted after it and one of the lead actors, Peter Lorre, was bankrupted by bankrolling it.
The full story about the behind-the-scenes turmoil of Quicksand is yet to be told. It cries out to be turned into a film noir directed by Martin Scorsese or the Coen Brothers.
FRITZ LANG'S SCARLET STREET (1945) is well acted and well photographed but I find it a most unappealing movie.
I have watched it three times now over the course of many years. After the first time, I promised myself to never watch it again. But I had forgotten how it progressed so I watched it the second time, only to promise myself not to give it a third viewing.
Watching for this review produced a similar result and I again had forgotten the details. That’s it, no more Scarlet Street for me.
The film is unrelentingly misogynist and misanthropic. The excellent acting from Edward G Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea cannot redeem such an unpleasant movie.
I am mindful film enjoyment is a subjective experience. Some may consider Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) difficult to watch but I find it in engrossing, poetic even. Similarly, some noiristas will wax lyrical about Scarlet Street.
As I have mentioned before, many of the best villains/ femmes fatale in noir have redeeming features. In Scarlet Street, Kitty March (Bennett) and Johnny Prince (Duryea) have none as they relentlessly steal the cash, possessions, and dignity of Chris Cross (Robinson). Cross is a sympathetic character but that only makes it harder to watch him stumble to his inevitable doom.
For a noir to be successful there should be light and shade in central personalities as well as in photography. A minor character can be unabashedly evil and that device can work wonders.
Censorship
SCARLET STREET WAS THE FIRST Hollywood movie where a murderer was not brought to justice. While that noteworthy plot twist escaped the Hays Office, other censors pounced. The film was banned in New York State, and in the cities of Milwaukee, and Atlanta. One of the three censors described the film as “licentious” and “profane”. You are going to watch it now aren’t you? I have always thought censors doubled as publicity officers for the products they ban.
Scarlet Street is a remake of a 1931 French movie La Chiennedirected by Jean Renoir. In English, the French title translates into “the bitch” which gives some idea of the hard-core misogyny which will follow the opening credits. Renoir, who himself relocated to Hollywood after Hitler conquered France, was said to dislike Lang’s remake.
Lang was born in Austria and became a filmmaker in the Weimar Republic, a designation of Germany between the end of World War I in 1918 and 1933, the year Adolf Hitler rose to power. Lang made three sorts of films in the Weimar Republic: art-house movies, popular thrillers, and a combination of the two as with the expressionist classic M, starring Peter Lorre as a serial child killer. Lang also made the Doctor Mabuse trilogy horror films about a megalomaniac and Metropolis one of the most amazing films of all time. These films combined the 1920s art and theatre aesthetic of expressionism with the photographic and composition tricks which would become central to film noir.
Discussion of art and focus on the amateur paintings of Christopher Cross were innovative for a popular movie and worked well or at least held my interest and I am sure the interest of a lot of other viewers. We see Cross painting what we expect to be a still life of a fragile flower and it turns out to be an expressionist flat splat of colors. Lang’s theme of industrial capitalism throttling creativity was explored in Metropolis and here in Scarlet Street, time-bound white-collar jobs imprison the spirit.
Expressionism projects psychological disturbances into the outside world, hence noir’s obsession with askew places and objects, shadows, misunderstandings and manipulation. As expressionism grew from the horrors of World War I, inner feelings are often of dread, anger, and seeking relief through desperate desire for physical pleasure and happiness.
There are a lot of themes explored in Scarlet Street, probably too many, and too many plot twists as well. The movie does seem to wander about the bush after the climactic murder.
It is a good-looking film and the print I have chosen for viewing is excellent. There are some short ads but I doubt you will find them too intrusive,
You will notice in my noir reviews, I rarely disclose much of the plots. Some people reading this will not have seen the films and some readers will have forgotten them. It surprises me that so many reviews of noir extensively discuss details of the plot. I don't see why noir should be excluded from general warnings against spoilers.
The director
FRITZ LANG WAS A RESPECTED FILMMAKER in Germany when Hitler rose to power in 1933. The Nazis were suspicious of Lang because of his films which they correctly judged as being critical of their authoritarianism, Paradoxically, as a director, Lang was authoritarian though his films such as Metropolis and the Mabuse series warned against it at a political level. Somewhat bizarrely Lang was also under threat because his mother was Jewish though she had converted to Catholicism soon after her marriage to a staunch Catholic,
Even more bizarrely Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda, invited Lang to head the new Nazi Film Board. Lang left Germany in 1933 for Paris while his Nazi-sympathetic wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou, who had written the script for Metropolis stayed in Germany. There is some doubt how sympathetic to Nazism Harbou was and Lang was unfaithful to his wife during their marriage. The couple divorced.
In 1935 Lang moved to Hollywood clutching an MGM contract.
Lang’s first Hollywood noir was Moonstruck (1942) sort of. Lang walked off the set because leading man Frenchman Jean Gabin had started an affair with Lang’s mistress Marlene Dietrich. Archie Mayo took over the direction of Moonstruck which also starred Ida Lupino and Claude Rains. Moonstruck is an under-rated noir which, like Algiers (1938), with French lead Charles Boyer, has dashes of poetic realism.
Lang’s first completed noirs were the anti-Nazi Hangmen Also Die!(1943)Ministry of Fear(1944), based on the Graham Greene novel, andThe Woman in the Window(1944). The Woman in the Window was essentially the same film as next year’s Scarlet Street. Robinson, Bennett and Duryea were in both and they had the same cinematographer Milton R. Krasner.
Noirs which followed Scarlet Street included Cloak and Dagger (1946) Secret Beyond the Door (1948) House by the River (1950) and Clash by Night (1952)
In 1953 Lang directed two of his most famous noirs, The Blue Gardenia and The Big Heat which included the infamous scene of Lee Marvin disfiguring Gloria Grahame with scalding coffee over her face.
Lang’s last noirs were Human Desire(1954) Moonfleet (1955) While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)..
The photographer
MILTON KRASNER WAS A PROLIFIC cinematographer of more than 150 films between 1933 and 1970. (In 1942 alone, he shot seven films.) Depending on the assessment of classics, he may have shot more classic noirs than any other shooter. As well as the Fritz Lang two-in-one, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, Krasner shot The Dark Mirror (1946) A Double Life (1947) The Accused (1949) The Set-Up (1949) House of Strangers (1949) All About Eve (1950) No Way Out (1950) and Deadline – U.S.A. (1952) He also shot the brilliant Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) which I would suggest is neo-noir.
Krasner won the Academy Award for best color cinematography for Three Coins in the Fountain (1954). (From 1939 to 1967, there were separateawards for color and for black-and-white cinematography.) He also won best cinematography at the Cannes Film Festival forThe Set-Up, a boxing noir.
Krasner worked in black-and-white and color, standard format and widescreen, in a variety of genres, for a multitude of directors, at all the major studios. He also served an apprenticeship as a camera assistant from 1919 to 1932. Little wonder he was so good at his craft.
The finances
Backed by Universal Pictures, Scarlet Street had a quite substantial budget of $1.2m, enough to finance a dozen or more Poverty-Row films, and $16.75m in today’s values. (Again I will repeat my lament that modern Hollywood has lost its way with films with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars choking out diversity.)
Scarlet Street grossed $2.95m or $41.2m, today, making it a success in any accountant’s maths.
The Players
EDWARD G ROBINSON MADE A NAME for himself in gangster movies which became popular among the first talkies of the 1930s. This was also the era of the Great Depression. These three events produced gangster films which in style and storytelling were America's contribution to the future aesthetics of film noir when combined with European expressionism.
Little Caesar
Three of Romanian-born Robinson's early gangster films were Outside the Law (1930) directed by Todd Browning, Little Caesar (1931) directed by Mervyn Leroy, and Smart Money (1931( directed by Alfred E. Green. Smart Money was the only time Robinson play beside another gangster most wanted James Cagney.
Robinson did appear beside Humphrey Bogart in five films: Bullets or Ballots (1936) Kid Galahad (1937) The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) Brother Orchid (1940) and Key Largo (1948).
Robinson's portrayal of sadistic gangster, Johnny Rocco, is superb in Key Largo, undoubtedly one of the best noirs ever made. Robinson also had a pivotal role in another celebrated noir Double Indemnity (1944) directed by Billy Wilder with a script by Wilder and Raymond Chandler.
LIKE ROBINSON JOAN BENNETT was an anti-fascist campaigner and benefactor.
She appeared in the noir The Woman on the Beach (1947) directed by Jean Renoir. Obviously Lang’s Woman in the Window had relocated. Her other Fritz Lang noir was Secret Beyond the Door (1948). Also in 1948 was Hollow Triumph directed by Steve Sekely. The Reckless Moment (1949) was directed by Max Ophuis.
Bennett’s husband Walter Wanger (pronounced as in danger) produced Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, and The Reckless Moment.
In 1951, Wanger shot Bennett’s agent Jennings Lang in the groin because he thought they were having an affair which Bennett denied.
Wanger served four months on a prison farm. They dispensed just sparingly to Hollywood celebrities in those days. The agent recovered.
FOR A MAN WHO PLAYED loathsome villains, Dan Duryea was quite the cheery type. “It pays well and you last,” Duryea said.
In real life, Duryea raised his family outside Hollywood. He led his son’s boy scout troop. In the movies, he would have stolen their lunch money and made them rob strangers.
The year 1944 was a good one in Hollywood for former filmmakers of the Weimar Republic. Lang directed The Woman in the Window. Otto Preminger, born in Austria-Hungary, directed the noir classic Laura. Billy Wilder, born in Poland of Austrian Jewish parents, directed another noir classic Double Indemnity. (Wilder had been a scriptwriter in Germany and took up directing in Paris.)
The verdict
The full movie
Second feature
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE, some critics decided Edgar G. Ulmer’s low-budget tale Strange Illusion was a re-telling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This was something we might go with except it is only true at a most superficial level and only if we believe Freud’s interpretation that Hamlet was in love with his Mom and wanted to kill his Dad and got guilty when his uncle killed his Dad instead.
Not much of that happened in Strange Illusion though Paul Cartwright (James “Jimmy” Lydon) does see his dead dad in a dream which begins the movie and foretells the plot, making it the only flash forward I can recall in noir.
They did love their Sigmund Freud in noir and in other Hollywood movies from 1930-1960. My favorite Freudian film, the sci-fi Forbidden Planet (1956) constructed the whole movie around Freudian theory, not just dabbling with it here and there as in Strange Illusion.
As a movie, Strange Illusion is all over the shop with Freud, Hamlet, the generation gap, and noir scenes involving shadows, mirrors, angled photography, shots of reflections, and themes of lust and greed,
The film cries out, “we have no money” but honestly it should have been better.
Scriptwriter Adele Comandini was nominated for an Academy Award for Three Smart Girls (1936) and wrote the hit rom-com Christmas in Connecticut (1945). Maybe she just did not connect with noir. She had created a crooked psychiatrist, and a crooked businessman, always good foils in noir but fun-loving teenagers speaking teen slang was an unwelcome intrusion. I did like the warning about sexual predators preying on teenage girls. Ms Comandini probably saw a bit of that in Hollywood.
The cast included veteran actors such as Warren William as Brett Curtis, Sally Eilers as Virginia Cartwright, Regis Toomey as Dr. Martin Vincent, Charles Arnt as Professor Muhlbach and African-American George Reed as Benjamin, the butler. The lead Jimmy Lydon was stretching his acting wings after playing the teen lead in the Henry Aldrichmovie series, 1941-44. Maybe that was wgy we had teen biz in this one too.
I suspect lack ofbudget and putting too many ingredients in the stew detracted from the finished product. Still, with an Edgar G. Ulmer movie, something attractive is always going to grab your attention.
Strange line
Are ya missin' ma kissin'?
Paul delivers this over the phone to his teen sweetheart and it seems out of character for the straight-laced Paul, his latent sexual attraction for his Mom, notwithstanding. The patter fools an eavesdropping Professor Muhlbach who wonders whether it is a coded message. Yes, it’s code for “we teens really need to come up with better slang”.
Trivia
I HAVE THREE ITEMS of trivia, one of which is personal.
1.1. The first cigarette is at 14: 20 which is really late for noir.
2. 2. At 19.25 we meet bank manager Bill Allen played by John Hamilton, also editor Perry White on the television series Adventures of Superman (1952-58).
3. 3. At 54.1o, Paul places a sheet of newspaper under a door and retrieves a large metal key from the other side of the door. In my neo-noir novel Iraqi Icicle, my amateur gumshoe Steele Hill retrieves a metal key in a similar manner. I had actually done this when I was locked out of an old house I was living in. For some time now, doors have been sealed underneath, and electronic keys open many doors. But rest assured, Paul retrieval of the key is realistic, though, as I explain in my novel a bit of a fiddly exercise and a lot harder than Paul makes it look.
If you have somewhere to post a review and you would like a free review copy of Iraqi Icicleemail me.
The verdict
The full movie
mpvieardew o is realsut exewrcuse and a lot hardewr than Pail males it look.wasa an unwelcome intrusion.
n Strange Ullu
Our song
Next noirs: Quicksand (1950) starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Lorre and The mystery movie, my favorite noir of all time. See you then.
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN a sucker for narration in noir, especially if it is done in a deep bass voice like Reed Hadley’s in T-Men (1947). A Hollywood actor since 1938, Hadley had an uncredited role as narrator of Buffalo Bill (1944) followed with a credit for narration of the financially rewarding House on 92nd Street (1945), a documentary-style fictionalisation of the FBI cracking a major spy ring. A wit once said the only “ism” Hollywood believed in was plagiarism and, in 1947, we had Hadley narrating, T-Men about Treasury agents cracking a major counterfeiting ring.
TONIGHT’S (from 8.30pm Friday, Hollywood time) double feature of film noir presents The Strange Woman (1946) and D.O.A.(1949) Both are good-quality prints and ad-free during their running times. In the tradition of cinemas past, the main feature D.O.A. will run second. Links to the films follow the reviews.
Grab your popcorn as I, your humble projectionist, crank up the projector for the first reel of The Strange Woman.
WELCOME to our first of 15 evenings of FREE double-feature film noir.
Entry is free, but first a little housekeeping. All the films are in the public domain which means they are free to watch. But they must have been uploaded for internet viewing. I have chosen good-quality prints. In some cases, that unfortunately means intrusive ads. If you find an ad-free print of equal quality of any of the films, please let me know. The film link will be at the end of the review.
The main feature – tonight Algiers 1938 – will be reviewed first and without further ado.
LET's venture back in time to the suburban cinema of 70 and 80 years ago.
The seats are long rows of canvas industrially stapled to wooden supports. Your bottom finds the seats comfortable though they are unappealing to your eye.
The projectionist, perched above in his booth, shines the reels of film onto the screen. For one silver coin, you will be treated to a newsreel of drama and comedy, a serial with a cliff-hanging ending, and two feature films. Black and white films, of course. Both noir.
In 15 screenings, I will discuss 30 noir films, all in the public domain. All free to view.
I recently joined the social-media Q&A site, Quora. This adds to my list of sites where I am a member but I don't really know what the site is all about. It's like I am in the middle of a film noir and I know I will leave the cinema without having figured it out. Luckily Film Noir is one of the topics they ask questions on and that is a topic I do know lots about. Here is one of my answers:
Like Oliver Twist, we are asking the question, only we will not be turned away with a clip across the ear.
Today we will go to the land of Charles Dickens to continue our feast of noir.
As we now know, classic noir refers to Hollywood films from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. But that is just an easy definition to cover many noirs because Gaslight is a British film made in 1940.
If Hollywood had had its way, we would not be watching Gaslight later today.
Gaslight started life as the 1938 play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton. Theatre buffs can imagine how astounding the play would have been with the central gaslight icon and the glorious role-reversal scene towards the end.
The play made it to Broadway with a strange name change to Angel Street. If anyone knows the story behind the name change I would love to hear it.
Anyway, the British movie and the Broadway play, both called Angel Street were successful and the Hollywood studio MGM paid its respects. It bought the remake rights. But - and some like big buts in Hollywood – MGM demanded all existing prints of the British version be destroyed. The studio further demanded the negatives be obliterated as well. Luckily this outrageous caveat was not met.
ONE name won’t spring to the lips of critics
naming the most accomplished classic noir actors. As you may recall, classic
noir usually refers to stylised Hollywood crime films made from the early 1940s
to the late 1950s. Robert Mitchum who is universally recognised as an essential
noir anti-hero, or maybe ant-hero, responded to the exotic title of film noir
in laconic noirish fashion. “We used to call them B-pictures,” he said.
Humphrey
Bogart is the other icon of male leads in noir acting. After this duo, the
picture gets a little fuzzy with the names Sterling Hayden and Dick Powell
likely to rise from the mist. Maybe Kirk Douglas. James Cagney, George Raft and
Edward G. Robinson if you want to stretch it to the gangster guys. No Edmond O’Brien.
Oh, yair, Edmond O’Brien. Eddie
O’Brien. Forgot about him. O’Brien starred in maybe a dozen or more noirs, including four
of the most famous, The Killers
(1946) White Heat (1949) The Hitch Hiker (1953) and the movie we will
enjoy later D.O.A. (1950). He also
played Winston Smith in the first cinematic
adaptation of George Orwell’s novel 1984.
Do you have to hand in your hipster card if you love
film noir? This is the serious love affair my protagonist Steele Hill confesses
to in the short story Lady Madonna Meets
the Martians. http://amzn.to/1H0fPdf
In the 1990s, 20-something Hill
scours video shops for noir classics and when caught watching the vids at home
has to explain his abnormal behaviour.
Twenty years on, are we noir
lovers to be even more pitied or have the hipsters caught up with the joys of
black and white crime films?
The large print version from GALE CENGAGE Learning which has
a better cover than the other version is not listed on the publisher’s current
catalogue.
MANY of those familiar with the title The Maltese Falcon may be acquainted with the 1941 film noir rather
than Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel published by Alfred A. Knopf.
There is a remarkable synergy
between novel and film, perhaps without parallel in such translations.
Writer/ director John Huston
wrote the script to closely follow the order of the novel, retained much of the
dialogue and then filmed it in sequence.
He even persuaded the censors to
let him keep the recurring motif of hard liquor. No objection was raised to the
continual prop of hand-rolled cigarettes.
Huston self-censored to remove
most of the key homosexual references in the novel but the character of Joel
Cairo (played by Peter Lorre) would have left sophisticated viewers to clearly
see the elephant in the room.
Many readers are disconsolate
when a favourite novel is translated onto the screen.
In this case, seeing the film
enhances the novel as the reader can have the authentic dialogue being voiced
in their mind by actors Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, Lorre, Mary Astor,
Gladys George and Elisha Cook Jnr.
Although neither was a prolific
writer, Hammett and Raymond Chandler, after him, were the fathers of the hard-boiled
detective novels translated into 1940 film noir.
It may surprise some that both
authors have been recognised as great writers, not just as doyens of their
genre. I do not believe any of the current crop of superstars of the detective thriller
will garner such recognition in the future. In1998, theModern LibraryrankedThe Maltese Falcon 56th
on its list of the100 best English-language novels of the 20th
century.
Hammett and Chandler had similar
histories which could partly explain their emergence as writers of edgy
fiction. As young men in World War 1, both suffered debilitating injuries, the
effects of which remained with them for the rest of their lives. They reached
the peaks of their writing careers during the Great Depression of the 1930s which
followed the decade of post-war licence hailed as the Roaring 20s.
The plot of The Maltese Falcon evolves from the murder of private detective
Miles Archer, the business partner of the novel’s protagonist Samuel Spade. The
story is written in the third person with virtually no interior monologues yet
the reader identifies with the subjectivity of the flawed character of Sam
Spade.
What makes this novel good are
the spare style and the clipped dialogue – tougher than Chandler’s though not
as funny.
What makes the novel great is the
extraordinary way the author uses detailed character descriptions and dialogue
to render the story without any back-up of interior reflection or
self-justification. Spade’s moral ambiguity is a magnificent theme and device
upon which to pin suspense.
The reader learns early on that
Spade has been having an emotionless sexual affair with his dead partner’s
wife, Iva. The shamus grumbles to his loyal secretary, Effie Perine, ‘I never
know what to do or say to women except that way.’
Don’t go retro-reading that as
some kind of prescient observation by Hammett on the male inability to commit. The
author is merely laying the ground to prove Gutman’s assessment of Spade that
we never know what he is going to do or say next.
Homosexuality is central to the
novel though it does not have as many echoes of homophobia as it often does
with Chandler.
Let’s start with the least
clear-cut example of secretary, Effie Perine, who lives at home with her
mother. Effie appears to have a woman crush on femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy,
who, in the manner of the genre, has to be Spade’s love interest. As I say, the
hint at lesbianism is subtle and possibly unintended, but look for the
fascinating reactions of Perine in the last pages of the novel.
Joel Cairo is obviously
homosexual as delightfully rendered in an exchange with the perhaps promiscuous
O’Shaughnessy. (Cairo) ’Exactly, and shall we add the boy outside?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed and laughed. ‘Yes,
unless he’s the one you had in Constantinople.’
Sudden blood mottled Cairo’s
face. In a shrill enraged voice he cried: ’The one you couldn’t make.’…
The sinister urbane Casper Gutman
has a daughter but he appears to be bi-sexual.
In the lengthy and wonderful denouement,
at midnight, Spade unwillingly hosts Gutman, Cairo, O’Shaughnessy and the
seemingly psychotic young gunman, Wilmer Cook, mostly referred to in the novel
as “the boy”..
…’That daughter of yours (Gutman’s)
has a nice belly,’ he (Spade) said, ‘too nice to be scratched up with pins.’
Gutman’s smile was affable if a bit oily
The boy in the doorway took a
short step forward, raising his pistol as far as his hip. Everybody in the room
looked at him. In the dissimilar eyes with which Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Joel
Cairo there was, oddly, something identically reproving. The boy blushed…
Hammett tells us, purely though
actions and facial expressions, that O’Shaughnessy, Cairo and probably Gutman
are jealous of the boy’s infatuation with Gutman’s daughter Rhea.
Besides killing people, that boy
has been busy and mental derangement has not impaired his youthful sexual
attractiveness.
If there is one flaw in this
almost faultless novel it is the characterysation of Brigid O’Shaughnessy.
While this has much to do with the structural imperative of mystery and
suspense, O’Shaughnessy lacks the sensuality of Vivian Sternwood in Chandler’s The Big Sleep.
That quibble aside, The Maltese
Falcon dispels the ignorant snobbish and vicious myth that a genre novel cannot
be counted as great literature.
-Review by Bernie Dowling
Gooseberry Lays and Gunzels
CENSORS and censorship are often good for a laugh.
The Maltese Falcon
first appeared serialised in the pulp fiction mag Black Mask.
Magazine editor Joseph Shaw was offended by vulgarity and he took exception to the term “goose-berry
lay’’ in The Maltese Falcon.
…Then Spade asked
(the boy) pleasantly: ‘How long have you been off the goose-berry lay, son?’
You could hardly
blame puritanical editor Shaw; the phrase sounds scatological. However, it was
a slang term for stealing clothes from a line to sell them with the culprit perhaps
lying among gooseberry bushes before the theft.
One word Shaw had
no objection to was gunzel. In fact the editor loved its use in the novel.
…’Keep that gunzel
(the boy, again) away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him.
I don’t like him. He makes me nervous.’
Shaw thought gunzel
meant hired gun and a host of Hammett imitators used it in that sense.
Gunzel actually meant
a boy or young man paid or kept for sex, a rent boy.
Both expressions gunzel
and goose-berry lay survive in the latest editions of The Maltese Falcon.
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