Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

1.1.5 Cornell Woolrich
Born in 1903, Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903-1968) was an American
novelist whose many novels and short fiction stories were originally published in the pulp
magazines of the thirties and forties. Children of the Ritz (1928) was his second novel,
bought by First National Pictures, and made into a film one year later, directed by John
Francis Dillon. This was an important step that took him to Hollywood and started him
working on screenplays. Cornell Woolrich’s lonely and tragic life is strongly reflected in
his stories, as an alcoholic and anguished man. By the end of the thirties, Woolrich had
written quite extensively in the crime domain, comprising over a hundred published stories
and books.
His first crime novel was The Bride Wore Black (1940), which became a movie in
1967, in a co-production between France and Italy. Directed by François Truffaut, the film
is a chilling and tragic portrait of fractured psychology and shattered lives, of a woman
who sees her husband being murdered by the church steps on their wedding day. The story
then revolves round the widow’s revenge against the men who killed her husband (many
thought that this movie constitutes a homage to Hitchcock by Truffaut). This was the first
of a series of “black” novels, The Black Curtain, The Black Alibi, The Black Angel, or even
more suggestive, The Black Path of Fear. Most of them resulted in film productions, like
for example, The Black Angel, released by Universal in 1946. With its modest but
ingenious script (Martin Blair (Dan Duryea) is the alcoholic and murderer in the film), the
film depicts this down and out protagonist up against seemingly inexorable dark forces,
and stands as a good example of a top-drawer B-film.
The Black Path of Fear is another Woolrich novel (and in my view, the best of his
four novels) which was also made into a film, called The Chase, released in November
1946 by United Artists. The film is a dreamlike noir made by Arthur Ripley, thanks in a
great measure to the dark and oppressive mood that typifies most of Cornell Woolrich’s
best fiction. With a simple story, the film is also remarkable for:
(...) containing almost equal quantities of those qualities that Borde and
Chaumeton (in Panorama du film noir américain) see as quintessentially noir: its
oneirism, in which a dreamlike atmosphere prevails, especially at the conclusion,
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