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But in a larger sense, I will gladly concede that the movie is indebted to Max for its bleak and seedy atmospherics. When it comes to
film noir,
Max was the unsung master. His role in creating the genre is an unwritten chapter in movie history—perhaps now to be supplied by you? (In this regard, I suggest you look closely at his
Man into Monster
if you can find an uncut print. For my money, it is the best B-movie ever made and the
noirest
of all
noir.)

Best of luck with your study. Do send me a copy upon its completion.
Yours sincerely,
John Huston

P.S. Did Zip Lipsky ever tell you that I asked him to film
Falcon
for me? Unfortunately, he was not available.

P.P.S. Your letter prompted a rapid excavation of my personal archives. Lo! I discovered a memento of my long-ago evenings with Max Castle. The enclosed renderings are by him. Like myself, he was a trained graphic artist and frequently sketched his settings in detail before the shoot. I learned the technique from him and it has served me well over the years. I can no longer identify which scenes these rather lugubrious drawings were meant to be, but I'm sure you can appreciate that mixing the streets of San Francisco with the dungeons of medieval Europe would have been a grievous error. In better days, Max would surely have realized as much. I present the drawings to you for your scholarly use.

I'd hoped a letter from John Huston might mellow Clare's opinion of Castle. Huston was one of her idols; if he was willing to call Castle a great director, that ought to make some difference. Not a chance. Clare had staked out her intellectual ground and was prepared to defend it against all comers. Far from moderating her views on Castle, the letter provided grist for her mill.

“A religious cult,” she sneered. “It figures. There's a twisted mind at work here. Gifted, but twisted. Look at these drawings. How did he expect to work this into
The Maltese Falcon?
Looks like old Zip was right. Toward the end, the man was off his rocker.”

I had to admit she was right on that point. Two of the three sketches showed what might very well have been dungeons: a vast, lightless interior in which two hirsute artisans were shown toiling by firelight over the statue of a bird, apparently smearing its golden surface with a black coating. In the background, three regally dressed figures looked on. The tunic of one was emblazoned with the emblem Sharkey had first called to my attention: the Maltese cross.

The third sketch had even less obvious relevance to any movie Warner Brothers might have been willing to make. It was a voluptuous female form, naked, suspended in space above three kneeling and prayerful men. There was a large dark bird hovering above her with wings spread. The bird was all that even remotely connected the sketch with
The Maltese Falcon
. I was pleased to have the drawings. They were well-executed by a deft hand. But all they seemed to provide was evidence of Castle's increasing instability. I decided, as an act of scholarly mercy, to make no reference to them in my research until I had some clearer way of interpreting what they had to tell me
about Castle's later intellectual development—or degeneration. I wasn't the Sam Spade to do that yet without a lot more clues.

My dissertation,
Max Castle: The Hollywood Years 1925–1941,
was a neatly competent job covering my entire collection of Castle films, except for the
Judas.
I presented a souvenir copy of the bound work to Clare one evening with more ceremonial care than I'd shown my thesis adviser. She brought it to bed that night and, to my surprise, proceeded to read it from cover to cover. I couldn't see why, since she had worked through the whole volume with me chapter by chapter, page by page. I lay beside her, watching for signs of approval, perhaps even praise that I had given her thoughts the prominence and polish they deserved. Her face remained a mask, at times seeming to darken menacingly. When she finished, she lay the thesis on the bedsheets and slowly smoked her cigarette down to a stub, her eyes staring off distantly. It wasn't a look I cared to interrupt with questions.

After a long interval, I saw tears gleam at the corner of her eyes; but her expression remained dead cold. At last she turned to me. She drew down her nightgown revealing her ample left breast. Quite deliberately she offered it to me, extending it toward my lips. It was a familiar invitation. I leaned forward to taste the gift of her nipple, but just as I grazed it with a kiss, she plucked it away leaving me puckered into thin air.

“All right, baby,” she snapped, a sneer of dismissal in her voice. “Consider yourself weaned.”

At that, she ordered me out of the bedroom onto the living-room couch. Bewildered, I sat alone outside her closed door, trying to make sense of my abrupt banishment. After several minutes, the bedroom door opened and Clare stepped forward to fling my dissertation on the rug. “And take this piece of brain-picking plagiarism with you!” she shouted.

The door slammed. It didn't open for the rest of that night. I knew without being told that I mustn't expect it to admit me again as Clare's lover.

The next morning, as brutally as if I were a hotel guest who had used up his credit, I was ordered to pack and leave.

I always had my suspicions about the way Clare cut me out of her life. There was no denying the truth of her accusation. My thesis and for that matter almost everything I was to write about Max Castle for the next few years was borrowed from her. I'd even be willing to admit that it was stolen, if it made any sense to say I stole goods that were forced upon me. But I couldn't really believe Clare was wounded by a result she'd collaborated in bringing about. No, there was something more to the matter.

Looking back now, I realize she'd decided to end our affair months before that final wrenching break. At a certain point, she began rushing my research along at a breakneck pace. It was a symptom of impatience; she was racing to get free of the responsibility she'd assumed for my intellectual development. Her sense of fairness wouldn't permit her to dump me until she was sure I'd been well installed in as promising an academic career as her efforts could gain for me. Nor would she let go of my dissertation until, using my voice, she'd said all she cared to commit to print about Max Castle. But once that was accomplished to her satisfaction, she took the nearest excuse at hand to throw me over, and that turned out to be a trumpedup charge of intellectual larceny. It was Clare's style of doing things. No tear-stained apologies, no lingering fond farewells. Just one well-aimed kick in the teeth, an emotional mercy killing quickly and cleanly executed.

Why? Because all the while I was plodding through my graduate studies, great changes were taking place in Clare's life. It began with the local papers. Thanks to the
Venetian Magenta
episode, Clare had become a name. The
Los Angeles Times
took some of her reviews, then requested the occasional article. Her reputation began to grow, at first on the West Coast, then nationally, as her essays on film broke through into major magazines. Opportunities too enticing to ignore were presenting themselves; she had every good reason for wanting all the freedom of maneuver she could get. And of course that meant
dropping her rather gauche, still vastly dependent, young lover. Within a year of our parting, Clare was in New York lecturing on film at NYU. For a brief period, she became
The New Yorkers
backup critic, playing a discordant second fiddle to Pauline Kael, with whom she saw eye to eye on practically nothing. A year after that,
The New York Times
hired her as its lead movie reviewer, and a volume of her collected essays and reviews was ready for publication, the first in a succession of best-selling books. Clare had arrived.

I was happy for her success; no one deserved it more. But I was also sadly certain that we'd now be parted permanently not only by the miles between us, but more so by the separate paths we'd chosen. I found myself more and more deeply embedded in the world of the university that she still treated with disdain. I'd been hired into the UCLA Film Studies Department. It was a rock-bottom appointment, but lacking Clare's ambition, I was content to creep slowly up the academic ladder, far removed from the high visibility and lively debate of her new career. From time to time, I sent her little notes of congratulations on an article or a review I'd seen. If she responded at all, it was with a quick postcard. I didn't expect more; in her own hard-as-nails way, Clare had been supremely generous to me, sharing her sophistication and sexual favors with someone too unformed to give her anything in return. I was neither hurt nor surprised that she'd outgrown me and The Classic. I frankly didn't expect to see her again for a long, long time. When we did meet again, it was thanks to Max Castle.

Two years after Clare left Los Angeles, I received a letter from the editor of the Sunday
New York Times Magazine.
He was curious about the rising popularity of Max Castle's movies, which were now playing steadily in the art and repertory houses. The films had become staple items of late-night television, though they usually appeared there in their truncated studio versions, sometimes cut even more drastically. Some of Castle's work—the more lurid horror films—were even acquiring a devoted following as midnight movies. Why Castle, and why now? the editor asked. Would I be willing to try an article that answered these questions? He noted in his closing paragraph that Clarissa Swann had put him on to me as “the country's foremost authority” on the subject. I was overjoyed, as much by Clare's recommendation as by the editor's request. I of course accepted the invitation and at once sent off a gushing note of thanks to Clare. She gave no response.

I realized from the outset that this was a great opportunity for me. Accordingly, I slaved over the piece, packing into it all I could of my years of research. There was, however, one problem at the heart of the project which nearly defeated me. I'd been asked especially to account for Castle's remarkable and growing popularity with young audiences. In my dissertation, I'd handled this question by discussing the timeliness of Castle's films. Or rather I should say that
Clare
had handled it, since the critical judgments on this point were hers not mine. Her interpretation fastened primarily on matters of character and mood, the bleakly
noir
aspects of Castle's movie world. But by the time the dissertation was completed, I no longer felt certain she was right about that. Probably wisely, Clare dissuaded me from mentioning anything about Zip Lipsky's sallyrand. She insisted that such a gimmick, even if I could describe it accurately (which I couldn't), was nothing more than a marginal curiosity that had no place in a serious critical work. Yet even the little I'd learned about Castle's films from that strange device convinced me that the man's power lay in some subterranean dimension of the mind that was still waiting to be unearthed. Did I dare bring that conviction out of the closet now?

I decided not. Instead, I took the easy way out and simply fell back on Clare's interpretation. What was it audiences found in Castle's films? It was, I answered, the characteristic protagonist who appeared in almost every one of his movies: “the outsider,” as I called him, using a then-fashionable phrase. A man for our time: isolated, besieged by invincible evil, himself flawed by that evil, fighting against it unsuccessfully in the name of no certain cause. It was an idea my readers would understand. Castle, I suggested (following Clare), had invented an early version of the existentialist hero who had since become so prominent in the films of Bergman, Godard, Antonioni. His central character is invariably an outcast, living in a state of exile or disgrace. In the early silents, he might appear as the traitor Judas or the persecuted heretic. Later, in the B-films, he might be the imprisoned criminal, the hunted spy, or Jack the Ripper hounded through the streets and sewers of the city as much by his own self-loathing as by the fear of punishment. In his fully developed form, he becomes Castle's most popular character, Count Lazarus the vampire. The Count's hunger for blood, always intertwined with a morbid sexuality, is never so much frightening as pathetic, a man driven by his domineering will to survive, even though the price of his survival
is a constant horror to him. Invariably, Castle succeeds in enlisting our sympathies on the side of these outcast monsters, even when their crimes are repulsive. We see them as victims of a cruel fate which has blighted their better nature. We feel their struggle, knowing it is futile, knowing that the wrong they oppose is too great, the evil too formidable.

My editor at the
Times
approved the thesis of the piece, though he insisted on paring away its academic refinements. He also pressed me to make a concluding judgment I was reluctant to offer and finally sidestepped. “A sympathetic vampire … a Ripper who wins our hearts. Granting it takes some skill to pull that off, isn't there something pretty sick about all this? And dangerous? What sort of'heroes' are these for a young audience? Bloodsuckers and mass murderers! Any comments?”

What comment could I offer but worried acquiescence? I'd been aware of the morbidity that infected Castle's work since I saw the
Judas.
But my fascination with that work was more and more mixed with admiration. I couldn't bring myself to make the damning judgment.

My article spent some six months being churned through the
Times's
editorial mill, steadily shedding its scholarly tone with each revision. I balked at many of the changes that were demanded, primarily because, as I soon realized, the farther I moved from academic restraint, the more my writing began to echo Clare's direct and pungent style, which was still there embedded in all I had to say about Castle. With some embarrassment, I was forced to recognize that I really hadn't yet added much more to my teacher's critical views than footnotes and bibliography. This led me at one point to suggest to the
Times
that Clare be asked to take over the assignment. She
had
been asked, I was told; she was their first choice for the piece. She'd recommended me instead. So I saw: I was still functioning as Clare's means of distancing herself from Castle.