Yannis Maris and Film Noir

The fate of crime film in Greece would be different without Yannis Maris (1916–79), whose novels and scripts defined the genesis of the Greek film noir. Combining qualities of Hammett, Chandler and Simenon, Maris is considered the patriarch of the Greek crime novel, and the principal representative of an entire ‘indigenous’ school of ‘light’ crime fiction (Apostolidis 2009: 286). He was a pioneer writer who participated in the public discourse of the Athenian swinging 1960s by integrating elements of pulp fiction and pop culture into his work (Kalfopoulos 2016). Maris was a prominent newspaper journalist and editor-in-chief, as well as an avid cinephile and, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, a professional film reviewer for the left-wing newspaper I Machi (Rangos 2016: 134–5). In this chapter I will focus on Eglima sta paraskinia/Murder Backstage (dir. Katsouridis, 1960), the film adaptation of Maris's eponymous novel, the screenplay of which was penned by the author himself. My aim is to provide a systematic comparison between the novel and the resulting film, which is a remarkably accomplished cinematic work and a seminal example of Greek film noir. By doing so, I will examine the narrative and representational strategies used by both the director and the (screen)writer in order to adapt the source material for the screen.

The first two noir films of Greek cinema, accepted today as the two emblematic examples of Greek film noir, were screened in 1960, five years after French critics Borde and Chaumeton (1955) defined the genre. These were Eglima sto Kolonaki/Murder in Kolonaki by Tzanis Aliferis and Murder Backstage, which were based on Maris's first two novels (published in 1953 and 1954 respectively), while notably their scripts were written by Maris (Figure 4.1). Two years earlier, in 1958, Dinos Dimopoulos had directed O anthropos tou trainou/The Man on the Train, based on Maris's third book, O anthropos me to gkri kostoumi/The Man in the Grey Suit (1955), a film that is considered by Dermentzoglou (2007: 13) as ‘[a] devastating allegory using the structures of film noir’. Nevertheless, as I have argued elsewhere (Agathos 2018: 108–9), this film is mainly a romantic melodrama with elements of mystery and psychoanalytic implications.