Sunday with Barbara Stanwyck

Walk on the Wild Side

On February 21, 1962, Columbia Pictures released Walk on the Wild Side, based on Nelson Algren’s novel A Walk on the Wild Side about a Texan named Dove Linkhorn who goes looking for the woman he loves and lost. He finds her in a New Orleans whorehouse called the Doll House Cafe. This after Elmer Bernstein’s jazzy score meets Saul Bass’s sizzling opening credits and title.

The screenplay by John Fante and Edmund Morris is straightforward. Producer Charles Feldman, who apparently sought to add an element of lesbianism, hired Edward Dmytryk to direct the film. Dmytryk, who’d been accused of abetting Soviet Russia in his Communist sympathy and gone to jail, named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. He’d returned to Hollywood to make movies.

By the early Sixties, Hollywood had escalated a descent into grittier naturalism. Dmytryk, who’d directed stylized thrillers, adds value to Walk on the Wild Side, which, despite being regarded as lurid and salacious, is too timid…