The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)

Editor's note: Film writer Chris Fujiwara makes a controversial choice for this week's film noir by picking a film that most would probably agree isn't a noir. However, as Chris notes, Preminger's film does certainly has a lot of affinities with it.

Hooked: Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm

by Chris Fujiwara

Excerpted and adapted from The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger,published in 2008 by Faber and Faber.

Nelson Algren’s searing 1949 novelThe Man with the Golden Arm took a long, circuitous road to the screen. John Garfield was interested in playing the drug-addicted hero, Frankie Machine, and his company, Roberts Productions, bought the movie rights, despite Algren’s reservations—not about Garfield, whom he liked, but about the actor’s partner, Bob Roberts, whom he suspected of being a “con guy.” Algren wrote a complete script in collaboration with Paul Trivers (who would be the associate producer of Garfield’s final film, He Ran All the Way [1951]).

Garfield’s death in 1952 halted the project, but its chances of making it to the screen had always been in doubt because of the MPAA's opposition to films about drugs. The Production Code was adamant: “The illegal drug traffic, and drug addiction, must never be presented.” A window was opened in 1946 when this provision was amended to: “The illegal drug traffic must not be portrayed in such a way as to stimulate curiosity concerning the use of, or traffic in, such drugs; nor shall scenes be approved which show the use of illegal drugs, or their effects, in detail.” In 1951, the amendment was rescinded, and the earlier prohibition reinstated.

The Man with the Golden Arm came to Otto Preminger’s attention by way of his brother, Ingo, who represented Lewis Meltzer, a writer who, independently of Algren and Trivers, had done another version of the screenplay. Ingo sent the script and the book to his brother. At first Otto was unenthusiastic, but then he saw the possibility of using the film as a vehicle for breaking the Code restriction on drugs and bought the Man with the Golden Arm rights. In late 1954, Preminger approached United Artists with the project, which the studio agreed to fund - knowing that, as it had done in 1953 with Preminger's The Moon Is Blue, it would have to defy the MPAA in order to distribute the film.

Preminger brought Nelson Algren from Gary, Indiana, to Hollywood to work on the script. Algren’s unsuccessful association with the film was a personal catastrophe that, according to his biographer, Bettina Drew, “marked a turning point in Algren’s life.” For Algren, Preminger would become an obsession, a symbol of the crass arrogance of power, an enemy with whom he would grapple again and again in his writing and his reminiscences. Oblivious to Algren's enmity, Preminger merely said, “He was an amusing, intelligent man but he couldn’t write dialogue or visualize scenes.” Algren countered: "The book dealt with life at the bottom. Otto has never, not for so much as a single day, had any experience except that of life at the top."

The writer Preminger eventually chose to adapt The Man with the Golden Arm was Walter Newman, a former radio writer who got his start in films working with Billy Wilder on the script of Ace in the Hole (1951). When Newman first met Preminger, the director told him he saw Golden Arm “as a murder mystery about a jazz trumpeter.” This concept, had it been carried through, would have brought the film closer to Preminger's previous films with mystery elements, such as Margin for Error (1943), Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends (both 1950), and The 13th Letter (1951), at the cost of a drastic restructuring of the source material. Apart from the fact that the Frankie of the novel is an aspiring drummer, not a trumpeter (Preminger's film would retain the original choice of instrument), for the reader of Algren’s novel, there is no mystery in the story's single, unintentional killing: Frankie’s breaking the neck of the drug dealer Louie.

Preminger’s remark suggests that he already had in mind some version of a plot twist introduced by the film. In both the novel and the film, Frankie’s wife, Zosh, was injured in a car driven by Frankie and became wheelchair-bound. In the film, it’s Zosh, not Frankie, who kills Louie—to prevent him from exposing her secret: that she has been feigning paraplegia in order to exploit Frankie’s guilt to keep him from leaving her.

The crucial change Preminger and Newman made to Algren's novel, however, was to make Frankie Machine (who, in Algren’s book, ends up hanging himself while on the run from the police) a protagonist who struggles to change his life and wins. “This provided the necessary conflict and I think made it workable as a film,” said Newman, who said, “I worked very hard to use as much of the book as I could, as many of the people, as much of the dialogue, as many of the incidents as I could—except that I turned them upside down.”

In the novel, Frankie is first exposed to morphine in an army field hospital in France while recuperating from a battle wound. Eliminating the war wound and the medication as excuses for Frankie’s drug use, Preminger and Newman emphasized the psychological, rather than physical, aspects of addiction. "Statistics show," Preminger pointed out, "that people fall back into the habit in alarmingly high numbers, because of mental unhappiness. Maybe it starts with the pace of the life we live, with mature people taking sleeping pills and Benzedrine. Then they go to more harmful poison."


As these comments make clear, Preminger sought to make Frankie Machine into a character whom middle-class audiences could identify with. In doing so, the film eliminates an important dimension of the novel, the radical critique of American society that Algren announces in the first chapter of the book, which describes Frankie and his fellow jail-cell occupants as sharing “the great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one.” By slightly elevating Frankie in class (and by removing Algren’s important insistence that the police manhunt for Frankie is driven by ward politics), Preminger makes Frankie a hero responsible for his fate, instead of a hopeless victim of specific social and political forces. Preminger’s Frankie is victimized, to be sure, but by perverse and vicious individuals—Zosh and Louie—rather than by a social system. Nevertheless, one could argue, with Preminger, that these changes to the story make its social criticism stronger by implying that anyone, not just the poor and wounded, can become an addict—challenging U.S. drug czar Harry J. Anslinger’s attempts to portray drug use as largely confined to a criminal underclass.

Newman enjoyed working with Preminger: “I found him to be endlessly patient, always courteous.” After about a month of research and another month of writing, Newman gave Preminger his first 50 pages of script. After reading them, Preminger called Newman and said, “I’m delighted,” which Newman considered “extraordinary behavior for a director or a producer. Almost all of them, at this point, would have begun the conversation by saying, without even a hello, ‘On page eleven there’s a misplaced comma—on page fourteen I don’t understand the motivation’—and so on and so on. This is Standard Operating Procedure and it’s meant to put the screenplay writer in his place—in other words, to put him down.” Preminger sent Newman’s first 50 pages to Frank Sinatra’s agent, who called the director back two days later, saying that his client would sign a contract without waiting for the rest of the script.

It would be a stretch to call The Man with the Golden Arm a film noir; indeed, the film shows why Preminger cannot be considered a prototypical "noir" director. (Had John Garfield realized his ambition to make the film in 1950 or 1951, the result would likely have been a less problematic entry in the genre.) A central situation of the story is the same as that depicted in several film noirs: the hero, released from prison, vows to go straight, only to fall back into the underworld. Zosh can be seen as a variation on the manipulative "femme fatale" of numerous thrillers (Preminger had already demolished the stereotype of the fatal woman with Carmen Jones [1954]). Yet, as he had already done in Fallen Angel and Where the Sidewalk Ends, Preminger chooses to concentrate not on the "noir" motifs of doom and entrapment (elements which Algren's book emphasized), but on the hero's moral regeneration. The clearest parallels are with Fallen Angel. Like the earlier film, The Man with the Golden Arm (Preminger's, not Algren's) is a fable of redemption. In both films, the hero's triumph over his demons is signalled by morning sunlight streaming through the window of a transient dwelling (transience is another theme the two films share, as their opening bus scenes indicate). Like Eric (Dana Andrews) in Fallen Angel, Frankie in The Man with the Golden Arm is the victim of both unfavorable circumstances and his own moral failings, and each man eventually finds, with the help of a woman, the inner strength he needs to solve his problems.

The Man with the Golden Arm is largely a film of faces. Interiorized, psychological, the drama plays itself out among the mental images of beings and things, in repetitive, driving, elastic movements. The second shot in the film, a closeup from inside a bar of Frankie peering in through the window, already alerts us to the emphasis that the character's subjective experience will receive. Drawn toward ever smaller spaces, the film seals itself off (as local gangster Schwiefka's marathon poker game seals itself from the sunlight), locks itself in (as Frankie has himself locked in a room in the famous sequence of his attempt to kick his habit). Instead of (as in other Preminger films) exploring the contours and surfaces of the outer world, camera movement in The Man with the Golden Arm defines subjective mental states, creating a suffocating atmosphere, as in the repeated track-ins on huge closeups of Frankie's eyes.

The fluidity of The Man with the Golden Arm, evident as early as the impressive opening crane shot, reflects the control over the visible universe that studio shooting affords (a domination that Preminger would renounce altogether, or as much as possible, in Anatomy of a Murder [1959] and subsequent films). The sets delineate Algren's Skid Row as an isolated, self-contained world with no past and no future, ready for the bulldozers. The stylization of certain performances - notably Robert Strauss's as Schwiefka and Arnold Stang's as Frankie's loyal sidekick - suits this artificial quality well. Although the drug-addiction theme, Sinatra's naturalistic performance, and Elmer Bernstein's brilliant, aggressive score ensured that, in its time, The Man with the Golden Arm was seen as advancing the cause of "realism" in Hollywood, Preminger's setbound, stylized treatment of the story now seems an excursion into romanticism and a return to the moral universe of his 1940s films.