On Dangerous Ground: Film Noir Poems by Woody Haut – Review

Before I begin my review of Woody Haut’s excellent On Dangerous Ground: Film Noir Poems, I should confess to experiencing a twinge of jealousy when I read it. I’ve always loved film noir, and several years ago I tried to write a book about it. After doing months of research, I reluctantly concluded that the task was impossible. Almost everything that could be said about film noir has been covered in numerous books on the genre, and I couldn’t find an original angle. In despair, I started to write about James Ellroy’s life story. If I could just write a few pages about Ellroy it might inspire me to write about film noir, I thought. A few feverish months later and I had a contract with Bloomsbury to write James Ellroy’s biography. You have to listen to these signs the universe is sending you as a writer.

But upon reading Haut’s On Dangerous Ground, I couldn’t help feeling a tad mournful for my aborted book on film noir and what could have been…

Haut has a simple and ingenious approach. He has taken fifty classic film noirs and written a poem for each one. Some of the titles are canonical (The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown) and others are a little more obscure (Pushover and Try and Get Me). Haut’s poetry mirrors the hardboiled style of noir, whilst also embodying the fatalism, the dark romanticism and frustrated machismo as that elusive score or femme fatale is always just a little bit out of reach of our protagonist. He brilliantly distils the plots and winks at the reader when this is impossible. Perhaps that’s the enduring appeal of noir. It doesn’t matter that The Big Sleep is narratively incoherent or that Gilda isn’t even a very good movie. It’s the style, setting, ambience, sexual desire, even the ethos, or lack of one, that keeps drawing us back.

I read On Dangerous Ground in one glorious sitting. I advise you to do the same. But first pour yourself a scotch on the rocks, light a Chesterfield, and think of that lover from your past who was worth going to hell for.