Who was David Goodis and why did he write as he did?Īndrew Kevorkian, friend of David Goodis, dies at 90. He crashed and returned to his parents’ home in Philadelphia, where he churned out novels and short stories, depicting the bleakness and darkness of lives in free fall. In the mid-1940’s he was in Hollywood as a screenwriter. After graduating from Temple University in 1938, Goodis moved to New York where he wrote advertising copy, radio scripts and thousands of words for pulp magazines. Noir at its blackest.ĭavid Goodis was Philadelphia’s noir prince. A statement of frustration, introducing a tale of gloom, depression and despair. So began the writing career of David Goodis. As his titles announce–Street of the Lost, Street of No Return, The Wounded and the Slain, Down There (the original title of Shoot the Piano Player)–he was a poet of the losers, transforming swift cut-rate melodramas into traumatic visions of failed lives.”-Geoffrey O’Brien, critic

“He wrote of winos and bar-room piano players and small-time thieves in a vein of tortured lyricism all his own, whose very excesses seemed uniquely appropriate to the subject matter. Retracing the footsteps of the “poet of the losers”, we get a sympathetic feel for the themes and undercurrents found in his writings. In the end, though it's not the disaster the French press cracked it up to be, only the images stay in the memory as the Fabergé egg lies smashed on the floor, a pile of glittering fragments.David Goodis remains the enigmatic mysterious semi-famous pulp noir fiction writer active in Mid-Twentieth Century America. Beineix does manage to charge the affair with a sense of fierce anticipation that aside, the film seems like an exercise in the non-development of narrative. The crux of the story is the relationship between the hulking stevedore (Depardieu) and a rich femme (Kinski) who, far from being fatale, represents the impossible dream at the end of his investigative quest. Based on David Goodis' thriller about a bloodstain on a street and a stevedore obsessed with finding the man who raped his sister and prompted her suicide, the film expands the compressed plot of the novel into a catalogue of glossy images, all of it shot in the studio. Like Beineix's debut feature Diva, this is a film of dazzling surface and equally dazzling superficiality but where Diva was taut and full of action, The Moon in the Gutter is slow and portentous.

The Moon in the Gutter by David Goodis