None have been revised for their publication in magazines. I wrote these essays as I imagine many of the Cahiers du Cinema reviews of the 1950s were written, on the café or kitchen table at one in the morning. In an Author’s Note at the end he writes: “Insofar as accuracy is concerned in the following, I guarantee only the veracity of the impression. It occurred to me at times that if Charles Bukowski had written film reviews, they might have been something like these. He’s loose, idiosyncratic, and as far from stuffy as you’re likely to get. I love his use of language, which is very alive, often with surprising and unpredictable word choices. The writing is highly subjective, impressionistic, sarcastic, cynical, sincere, even poetic at times. The pieces are not necessarily descriptive of the films, though sometimes they are. Gifford covers approximately 120 films (mostly noir, but not exclusively) in short, punchy entries of a page or two each. It’s not film criticism in any traditional sense. I’m not even sure what you’d call this book. This is an expanded edition of a collection previously titled The Devil Thumbs a Ride & Other Unforgettable Films, published by Grove Press in 1988.
So far I haven’t read any of Gifford’s fiction or poetry (though I just remembered that I’d read and liked Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac, a book Gifford did with Lawrence Lee that came out in 1978), but I recently read his incredible Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir (University Press of Mississippi, 2001). As far as I can tell, this film was not released theatrically in this country, only on home video.
Gifford also co-wrote a 1997 film called Dance with the Devil, based on his novel 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango. The cast includes Rosie Perez, Javier Bardem, James Gandolfini, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, which is pretty intriguing lineup. In 1997 Gifford co-wrote the screenplay for Lynch’s even stranger film, Lost Highway. I first became aware of his name as the author of the 1989 novel Wild at Heart, which David Lynch made into one of his very strange (as you’d expect) films the following year.
Born in Chicago in 1946, Gifford’s hefty output (over 40 titles to date) includes fiction, non-fiction, biographies, poetry, and screenplays. As a writer, Barry Gifford definitely gets around.
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