Although he authored relatively few screenplays for someone who had a 20-year career as a screenwriter, Martin Goldsmith made a serious mark with the scripts he did write and the original stories that he sold to the Hollywood studios, most notably in the field of film noir. His route to Hollywood was frought with as many unexpected turns as the lives of some of the characters in his books. For much of his life from the age of 15 onward, Goldsmith seldom stayed put in one place for more than a couple of years at a time and sometimes no more than days, but his early experiences hitchhiking across the country also led him to a career in Hollywood.
Goldsmith was born and raised in New York City. He quit school at the age of 15, in the 1920s, and spent the next months hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across the United States. He developed an interest in writing while still in his teens and by his early 20s was selling stories to various magazines. Goldsmith moved to Mexico during the mid-'30s, where he wrote his first novel, Double Jeopardy, which was published by Macauley Publishers at the end of the decade, after he returned to New York. His second novel, Detour, followed in short order and was published by Macauley in 1939, receiving excellent reviews and earning comparisons between Goldsmith and James M. Cain.
By that time, he had moved to Los Angeles and was trying to break into the movie business; he learned from the ground up, taking a job as a stage hand to watch the process of filmmaking and learn what it was about. He published a third novel, Shadows at Noon, in 1943, while still waiting for his break in movies. It was at the suggestion of film executive Martin Mooney, in 1944, that Goldsmith sold the rights to Detour to Producers Releasing Corporation, on the condition that he be allowed to write the screenplay. It was a modest beginning financially -- PRC was one of Hollywood's Poverty Row studios -- but it opened up new vistas for Goldsmith's work, and in fine style. There had been movies built on the notion of protagonists thumbing their way across country before, but Detour's screenplay seemed to capture a realistic mindset and texture to the setting and the characters better than any of them, helped by Goldsmith's real-life experiences; he had written characters that seemed alive on the page of both the novel and the script. The script also showed some of the characteristics that would mark much of Goldsmith's subsequent work: heroes on the edge, unsure of their well-being or even their judgement and sanity, adrift in a world that seems to be shifting under their feet, seemingly at the mercy of forces larger than themselves. The B-movie auteur Edgar G. Ulmer was hired to direct Detour and in his hands the movie became perhaps the best film that PRC ever issued. Much more important, it is thought of today as the quintessential film noir, studied and critiqued in countless film classes and cinema history forums, and included on the Library of Congress' list of 100 American movies deserving of special preservation, alongside the likes of Citizen Kane.
In 1945, Goldsmith also worked with Mooney on the PRC film Dangerous Intruder, another film whose plot hinged on a chance meeting between a hitchhiker and a driver. Goldsmith and his wife Estella were not the typical Hollywood couple, even among the fraternity of screenwriters, rather than make their home in the film mecca, they did their best to travel on the money that he earned from his writing. Both were licensed pilots and they were apt to take off for some corner of the globe, on any of four continents, for days, months or even years at a time, which explains some of the large gaps between Goldsmith's screen credits. Over the next 20 years, Goldsmith used his screenwriting to finance their nomadic existence, which even had them living in a cave in Mexico at one point. He wrote only one more novel, The Miraculous Fish of Domingo Gonzales in 1950, but his screenplays for such movies as the crime thriller The Lone Wolf in Mexico, the film noir classics Blind Spot and Shakedown, and the Western Overland Pacific kept him busy and able to travel as he wished. He reached the peak of recognition in 1952, with his work on The Narrow Margin, directed by Richard Fleischer. It was one of the last truly good movies made at RKO, based on Goldsmith's original story (which earned him an Oscar nomination) and was a huge hit in its time; equally important, it proved as enduring as Detour, reshown constantly and later studied in film schools, and remade in 1990 on a big budget with a cast of major acting names. Detour was also remade duirng this period, and along with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it is certainly the film for which Fleischer is best known.
Initially, the Oscar nomination didn't lead to better projects for Goldsmith, his next film was the generic war movie drama Mission Over Korea, although the latter did have an interesting psychological edge. Ironically, its central theme of personal revenge in wartime was re-used by Goldsmith in his 1958 screenplay for Fort Massacre, a somewhat higher profile film, made for United Artists by producer Walter Mirisch. Goldsmith's last major film credit was on Cast a Long Shadow, an interesting psychological Western starring Audie Murphy. Goldsmith also wrote for numerous television anthology shows, including The Twilight Zone, and series such as Gunsmoke, until the mid-'60s, when he gave up on the small-screen medium. Returning to fiction and branching out into theater, he got one play, Night Shift, produced off-Broadway in 1977, with Rip Torn in the lead. His health began to fail in the 1980s, but he lived long enough to see his work acknowledged, in the form of remakes of The Narrow Margin and Detour. Goldsmith passed away in 1994 after a long illness, leaving behind at least one unfinished novel, entitled Mirror Image.
