Algren movie review & film summary (2021)

Alas, Algren’s literary reputation has faded somewhat in recent years. He is probably best known to most people, at least outside of Chicago, as the author of The Man with the Golden Arm, his harrowing 1949 novel about heroin addiction that was adapted into a 1955 film starring Frank Sinatra that, although strong for its day, he hated for what he felt was the bowdlerization of his work. (He also did not get along with director Otto Preminger, whom he felt had contempt for the characters instead of the sympathy he tried to demonstrate, and eventually filed a soon-withdrawn lawsuit against him after claiming ownership of his story with his “An Otto Preminger Film” credit.) Now comes “Algren,” a new documentary from Michael Caplan that hopes to resurrect his legacy for a new generation and to remind older readers of the still-considerable impact of his work.

As the film shows, Algren's life was singular enough to inspire a book of its own. Although his writings might suggest a hardscrabble upbringing, he grew up on the city’s South Side in a middle-class neighborhood, graduated from the University of Illinois in 1931, and planned on a career in journalism. Alas, no one was hiring and after bumming around, he was busted in Texas for stealing a typewriter and spent several months in jail, a stay that allowed him to better understand and identify with those considered to be lower-class—bums, immigrants, junkies, criminals and other outsiders from polite society—that would become the focus of his writing when he returned to Chicago.

After publishing some award-winning short stories and the 1935 debut novel Somebody in Boots, he first courted controversy when his second novel, 1942’s Never Come Morning, so outraged Chicago’s large Polish-American community that Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly had the book banned from the Chicago Public Library. (In 1981, following his death, famed columnist Mike Royko convinced the city to name a street after Algren but the response from the Polish community was still so virulent that it was soon rescinded.) After serving in WWII, he returned to the city, published the short story collection The Neon Wilderness (1947) and began a romance with, of all people, French intellectual and feminist Simone de Beauvoir (who was still at the time with Jean-Paul Sartre) that would last for several years, end badly, and later be immortalized in de Beauvoir’s 1954 novel The Mandarins. (As the film reveals, he was then hired to review the book and, shockingly, it turned out that he was somewhat cool towards it.)

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46ao6CqlaN6rrvVopxmqpWrtqbDjGtna2k%3D