(1903-1979)
A pulp Emile Zola, a noir Frank Norris, P J. Wolf-son wrote tough, pitiless melodramas of human corruption in the bleak urban jungle of depression-era America. Wolfson’s brief career as a novelist, before Hollywood lured him away forever, produced four works, at least two of them—Bodies Are Dust (1931) and Is My Flesh of Brass? (1934)— classic.
The first is a remarkably sordid study of a corrupt cop. Anticipating such bold, corrosive character studies as the 1992 Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant, Bodies Are Dust’s Detective Safiotte is a venal, violent, rapacious figure, a man so tough he demands to watch his own topic being removed. The narrative follows Safiotte on the rounds through various drug deals, fixed boxing matches, sex scenes (including an affair with a woman who dies from making love to him), and shootouts. Soured on love after the woman in his life becomes a prostitute, the detective finds his passion reignited by a comrade’s wife. He manages to get the other cop killed, marries the woman, and has a child with her, but the baby dies and Safiotte achieves what, in Wolfson’s grubby world-view, passes for a transcendent moment.
Relentlessly provocative, Wolfson’s second memorable topic, Is My Flesh of Brass?, dealt with the dissolute life of a young Manhattan gynecologist whose specialty is illegal abortions (his partner in their Riverside Drive clinic handles the venereal disease clients). The doctor/narrator, once a compassionate idealist, sinks into alienation and cynicism as he sees a world filled with corruption, lust, and fear. Wolfson perpetuates the sordid atmosphere with constant “shocking” scenes and characters, syphilitics, hookers, naked women, dirty cops, adulterous married ladies “in trouble,” and a mystery death in the middle of an abortion. The protagonist expires in a sudden, last-paragraph leap to third-person (“He lived about a month after the accident, then died”).
Wolfson wrote two other works of fiction in this period, Summer Hotel (1932), a racy romance, and All Women Die (1933), the story of a brawny construction worker’s lust for his brother’s wife.
According to his Hollywood writing partner Allen Rivkin, the New York-born Wolfson had been a pharmacist at the old Madison Square Garden while he was working on his novels. One of the Hollywood studios brought him west in 1932 or 1933 and he began writing movies. He teamed up with Rivkin for several years, during which time they wrote several distinctly raucous, tough crime melodramas, including Night World (1932) with Boris Karloff and Picture Snatcher (1933) starring James Cagney, and the fairly hard-boiled musical Dancing Lady (1933) starring Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. Wolfson is remembered as a colorful, tough, hard-drinking character in this period, a man who came to work at MGM and Universal with a loaded .25-caliber pistol under his belt. After a certain amount of liquid refreshment, he would fire at random targets, including other screenwriters.
Wolfson rose steadily in the Hollywood hierarchy, becoming a producer and producer-writer for one film—the unusual Boy Slaves (1939), supposedly based on a real story about kids held prisoner on turpentine farms in the South—as writer-producer-director). Later Wolfson productions included the exotic film noir Saigon (1948), with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. In the ’50s Wolfson went into television and was the producer of the hit sitcom I Married Joan, with Joan Davis and Jim Backus.
Wolfson’s fiction remains almost entirely unsung, except for a persistent cult following in France, where his Bodies Are Dust has been reprinted several times and became the source for an acclaimed film noir, Police (1985), directed by Maurice Pialat and starring Gerard Depardieu and Sophie Marceau.
Works
- All Women Die (1933), also published as This Woman Is Mine;
- Bodies Are Dust (1931), also published as Hell Cop;
- Is My Flesh of Brass? (1934), also published as Flesh Baron;
- Summer Hotel (1932)
