A.I. Bezzerides: Jan. 1, 2007

Know little about him myself (never realized he was a good friend of Faulkner), but maybe the strongest sense I have of the man would be from the documentarylike first half of They Drive By Night, where Raoul Walsh, taking inspiration from Bezzerides' experiences as a truck driver, perfectly captures the boredom, loneliness, exhaustion and sheer terror of long-distance driving--the sense that a fraction of a second's carelessness could sweep you off the face of this earth, a fraction among the millions of seconds spent on the road.

Then there's Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, from Mickey Spillane's hardboiled--or, rather, vulcanized--gumshoe novel, which Matt Zoller Seitz calls the ultimate film noir (it's not my favorite noir, but I can understand the enthusiasm). Bezzerides makes Spillane's Hammer a cruder, ineloquent brute, who comes face-to-face with (brilliant conceit) the ultimate leveller and all-around crisper, The Atomic Age...

Precious little with which to remember the man--but, then again, just look at the titles of some of the screenplays he's done; it's enough to make one murderous with envy. We can say we mourn his loss or remember his memory, but with people like this his memory needs no mourning or remembering; he lives, truism or not, through his films...