Among the gorillas, the clever thief became the king of the tribe. The basic and primary moves in life amounted to nothing more than this business of taking, to take it and get away with it. The main thing to realize, says Gladden, is thatĮvery animal, including the human being, is a criminal, and every move in life is a part of the vast process of crime…. Unlike many of Goodis’s miserable souls, Gladden actually believes that life has meaning. Gladden is a career thief, and a venerated presence in The Burglar, the most stunning of the five novels collected by Robert Polito, the editor of this new edition. The speaker of this line, a man named Gerald Gladden, happens to be one of Goodis’s most cheerful characters. There is gloomy, melancholy, and bleak, and then, several leagues below despondent, there is Goodis:Īs matters stood, life offered very little aside from an occasional plunge into luxurious sensation, which never lasted for long and even while it happened it was accompanied by the dismal knowledge that it would soon be over. But it’s not quite accurate to describe these novels as gloomy.

The loss reportedly still haunts Beneix today.Lauren Bacall, David Goodis, and Humphrey Bogart on the set of Dark Passage, 1947ĭark Passage, Nightfall, Black Friday, The Moon in the Gutter, Street of the Lost, Street of No Return: judging by titles alone, a reader might not expect much sunshine from the novels of David Goodis. Beneix added that the film had originally been cut into a 4 hour version and a 3 hour version as well and that both lost versions expanded on the main characters and more fully exposed and explained the story's main premise. Such an action is said to be extremely rare in the film industry since the cost of storing film footage is rather minimal after production has ended. The excuse was that accountants had reasoned that the film was a financial liability with little future value that had severely damaged Gaumont's reputation. It was revealed that Gaumont had felt the film was so poorly received initially that all of the extra footage and doubles were destroyed to make space in the film vaults.

A studio executive later notified him sadly that such an extended release recut was not possible in this case. In the American DVD release director Jean-Jacques Beineix reveals that after the expanded 3 hour DVD version director's cut of Betty Blue was released he approached Gaumont, the studio that produced the film, about doing the same with The Moon in the Gutter.

The Moon in the Gutter by David Goodis