James M. Cain

James M. Cain
Born	James Mallahan Cain (1892-07-01)July 1, 1892 Annapolis, Maryland, United States
Died	University Park, Maryland, United States
Occupation	Novelist, journalist
Nationality	American
Genre	Crime

James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892 – October 27, 1977) was an American author and journalist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hardboiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the roman noir. Several of his crime novels inspired highly successful movies.

Early life

Cain was born into an Irish Catholic family in Annapolis, Maryland. The son of a prominent educator and an opera singer, he had inherited a love for music from his mother, but his hopes of starting a career as a singer himself were thwarted when she told him that his voice was not good enough. The family moved to Chestertown, Maryland, in 1903. In 1910, Cain graduated from Washington College where his father, James W. Cain, served as president. By 1914 Cain had decided to become a writer. He began working as a journalist for the Baltimore American and then the Baltimore Sun.

Cain was drafted into the United States Army and spent the final year of World War I in France writing for an army magazine.

Career

Upon returning to the United States, he continued working as a journalist, writing editorials for the New York World and a play, a short story, and satirical pieces for American Mercury. He briefly served as the managing editor of The New Yorker, but later worked mainly on screenplays and novels.

Cain's first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934. Two years later Double Indemnity was serialized in Liberty magazine.

Cain made use of his love of music and of the opera in particular in at least three of his novels: Serenade (about an American opera singer who loses his voice and who, after spending part of his life south of the border, re-enters the States illegally with a Mexican prostitute); Mildred Pierce (in which, as part of the subplot, the surviving daughter of a successful businesswoman trains as an opera singer); and Career in C Major (a short semi-comic novel about the unhappy husband of an aspiring opera singer who unexpectedly discovers that he has a better voice than she does). In the novel The Moth, music is important in the life of the main character. In addition, Cain's fourth wife, Florence Macbeth, was a retired opera singer.

Although Cain spent many years in Hollywood working on screenplays, his name appears as a screenwriter in the credits of only two films: Stand Up and Fight (1939) and Gypsy Wildcat (1944), for which he is one of three credited screenwriters. For Algiers (1938) Cain received an "additional dialogue" credit, and he got story credits for other films.

American Authors' Authority

In 1946, Cain wrote four articles for Screen Writer magazine in which he proposed the creation of an American Authors' Authority to hold writers' copyrights and represent the writers in contract negotiations and court disputes. This idea was dubbed the "Cain plan" in the media. The plan was denounced as Communist by some writers, who formed the American Writers Association to oppose it. James T. Farrell was the foremost of these writers. The Saturday Review carried a debate between Cain and Farrell in November 1946. Farrell argued that the commercial Hollywood writers would control the market and keep out independents. "This idea is stamped in the crude conceptions of the artist which Mr. Cain holds, the notion that the artist is a kind of idiot who thinks that he is a God, but who has only the defects and none of the virtues of a God.” In his reply, Cain argued that his opponents understood the issue incorrectly as freedom versus control. It is fear of reprisals from publishers, Cain said, that is the real cause of opposition from well-to-do writers.

Although Cain worked vigorously to promote the Authority, it did not gain widespread support and the idea died.

Personal life

Cain was married to Mary Clough in 1919. When that marriage ended in divorce, he promptly married Elina Sjösted Tyszecka. Cain never had any children of his own, but he was close to Elina's two children from a prior marriage. In 1944 Cain married film actress Aileen Pringle, but the marriage was a tempestuous union and dissolved in a bitter divorce two years later. Cain married for the fourth time to Florence Macbeth. Their marriage lasted until her death in 1966.

Cain continued writing up to his death at the age of 85. However, the many novels he published from the late 1940s onward never rivaled his earlier financial and popular successes.

Bibliography

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.

Preface to Double Indemnity

Novels and novellas

(with the dates of the first book publication)

• The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
• Serenade (1937)
• Mildred Pierce (1941)
• Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942)
• Double Indemnity (1943) (first published in Liberty Magazine, 1936)
• The Embezzler (1944) (first published as Money and the Woman, Liberty Magazine, 1938)
• Past All Dishonor (1946)
• The Butterfly (1947)
• The Moth (1948)
• Sinful Woman (1948)
• Jealous Woman (1950)
• The Root of His Evil (1951) (also published as Shameless)
• Galatea (1953)
• Mignon (1962)
• The Magician's Wife (1965)
• Rainbow's End (1975)
• The Institute (1976)
• Cloud Nine (1984)
• The Enchanted Isle (1985)
• The Cocktail Waitress (edited by Charles Ardai, 2012)

Short story collections

• Our Government (1930)
• Career in C Major and Other Stories (1943)
• The Baby in the Icebox (1981)

Films

The following films were adapted from Cain's novels, screenplays and stories.

• Hot Saturday (1932), uncredited contribution to the script
• She Made Her Bed (U.S., 1934), directed by Ralph Murphy, based on the story "The Baby in the Icebox"
• Dr. Socrates (1935), uncredited contribution to the script
• Algiers (1938), screenplay
• Stand Up and Fight (1939), screenplay
• Wife, Husband and Friend (U.S., 1939), directed by Gregory Ratoff, based on the story "Two Can Sing" (also known as "Career in C Major")
• Le Dernier tournant (France, 1939), directed by Pierre Chenal, based on the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice
• When Tomorrow Comes (The Modern Cinderella in some publicity material) (U.S., 1939), directed by John M. Stahl, based on the novel The Root of His Evil
• Money and the Woman (1940), based on his magazine serial "The Embezzler", published in Three of a Kind
• The Shanghai Gesture (1941), uncredited contribution to the script
• Ossessione (Italy, 1943), directed by Luchino Visconti, based on the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (uncredited)
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1943), uncredited contribution to the script
• Double Indemnity (U.S., 1944), directed by Billy Wilder, based on the magazine serial included in Three of a Kind
• Gypsy Wildcat (U.S., 1944), an original script
• Mildred Pierce (U.S., 1945), directed by Michael Curtiz
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (U.S., 1946), directed by Tay Garnett
• Out of the Past (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur, based on Build My Gallows High
• Everybody Does It (U.S., 1949), directed by Edmund Goulding, based on the story "Two Can Sing" (also known as "Career in C Major"), remake of Wife, Husband and Friend
• Slightly Scarlet (U.S., 1956), directed by Allan Dwan, based on the novel Love's Lovely Counterfeit
• Serenade (U.S,, 1956), directed by Anthony Mann
• Interlude (U.S., 1957), directed by Douglas Sirk
• Interlude (U.S., 1968), directed by Kevin Billington
• Double Indemnity (1973), TV film based on the novel
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (U.S., 1981), directed by Bob Rafelson
• Butterfly (U.S., 1982), directed by Matt Cimber
• Girl in the Cadillac (U.S., 1995), directed by Lucas Platt, based on the novel The Enchanted Isle
• Szenvedély (Hungary, 1997), directed by Fehér György, based on the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Jerichow (Germany, 2008), directed by Christian Petzold, based on the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Mildred Pierce (U.S., 2011), directed by Todd Haynes

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Madden, David & Mecholsky, Kristopher (2011). James M. Cain: Hard-Boiled Mythmaker, Scarecrow Press, Inc. ISBN 0-8108-8118-7

External links

• Bibliography and reviews
• Two essays on Cain by William Marling
• James M. Cain at the Internet Movie Database