John D.MacDonald's Dead Low Tide

     I guess every state in the country is infected with them--greasy-spoon restaurants on the fringe of town.  Red imitation leather, badly cracked, on the counter stools.  Weary pie behind glass. A stink of frying grease in front, and tired garbage in back.  Sway-backed, heavy-haunched waitresses with metallic hair, puffed ankles, and a perennial snarl. A decent toss of one of the water glasses would fell a steer.  A jukebox and plastic booths and today's special is chicken croquettes, with fr. fr. pot. and st. beans--ninety-fi' cents.  And the coffee is like rancid tar.

I think how one reacts to paragraphs like these will determine if you like Dead Low Tide, published by Fawcett in 1953.  The waitress, Cindy, that Andy McClintock meets at this joint is no cliché but an interesting and complex character. as are most minor characters in MacDonald's pulp novels, of which he wrote many before his Travis McGee novels were discovered by John Leonard.  Dead Low Tide, like all of MacDonald's novels, is full of fascinating characters who made their way to Florida from somewhere else.  It is also full of insight into what the land developers are doing to the state, as they clog up waterways with shoddy construction.

Some might feel that this and other MacDonald novels are only of their time and do not transcend it.  My own thoughts are that the greed, passion and love in MacDonald's novels are always relevant.

Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939

Thomas Doherty's book, Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939(Columbia University Press,2013) is an examination of how little Hollywood was interested in what was going on in Germany at that time. It is not surprising that Hollywood did not want to lose income from abroad not did they want to disturb or upset domestic audiences. There were some exceptions from independent producers, including Alfred Mannon's low-budget and little-distributed I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936).

Doherty does a good job detailing what the newsreels did and (more often) didn't do.  The March of Time was the only one to give a "wide-awake look at Hitler," though it wasn't technically a newsreel since it only came out once a month instead of twice a week.  It's interesting how newsreels are so forgotten now:  the brilliant parody of them at the beginning of Citizen Kane is lost on most younger viewers today.

There is also a fascinating chapter on Leni Riefenstahl's visit to Hollywood to promote Olympia, her brilliant film of the 1936 Olympics in Germany. Doherty writes, accurately, "The Nazi ethos proved disturbingly congenial to the Olympic ideal," which just is more evidence to me that the Olympics should be abolished, since at this point they are more about winning and nationalism than they are about the beauty of sports.

Warner Brothers was one of the first to criticize the Nazis, in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Frank Borzage and MGM came in with the sad, beautiful and romantic The Mortal Storm in 1940.

Latest baseball news

The Yankees obtained three pretty good players in Beltran, McCann and Ellsbury (.283, .277 and .297 batting averages) while the Mets obtained another in a line of aging sluggers in Curtis Granderson (.261); do you remember George Foster and Mo Vaughn?  The emphasis on home runs still rankles me, as though the whole steroid mess never happened.  I would rather see hitters such as Wade Boggs and Rod Carew; they each hit .328 and could even bunt!

Hannah Arendt

Margarethe von Trotta's film is a magnificent example of a movie about someone who thinks, a not-common subject these days.  The subject is of particular interest to me because I was in my first year at Exeter when Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem came out in The New Yorker (1963) and everyone there was talking about it.  This was intellectually exciting to me, coming as I did from a small town where people read little and seldom discussed ethics or history, and led me to start reading The New Yorker when it was still elegantly edited by William Shawn, who is represented sympathetically in the film.  Arendt herself is beautifully played by Barbara Sukowa and the film is in a widescreen format that captures the width and depth of Arendt's thinking.  Not surprisingly this film has once again brought out Arendt's critics.  Sol Stern wrote The Lies of Hannah Arendt in Commentary in which he attacked Arendt for not being sufficiently Zionist and for criticizing "the co-operation of Jewish leaders and organization with the Nazi hierarchy," as Mark Lilla says in his intelligent article about the film in The New York Review of Books.  Von Trotta's films have always been effectively didactic and this one is no exception in the way it includes composite characters and invented confrontations as well as scenes with Martin Heidegger, once Arendt's lover and later a Nazi. For an intelligent perspective on Arendt's fascinating work fifty years after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem  I recommend Deborah Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial (Schocken Books, 2011), where she discusses what Arendt got right and what she got wrong and how "the banality of evil" is a valid concept that can easily be misapplied.

The Secret of the Grain and The Man from London

Both Bela Tarr's The Man from London and Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain are from 2007, obviously a good year for international films. The Hungarian Tarr is a successor of sorts to Miklos Jancso, with long, slow camera movements often lasting many minutes.  The Man from London is in beautiful black-and-white, from a Simenon novel, and is about surface textures and family difficulties in a port city.  Kechiche's film is also about textures and family life in a port city, this one in France, though Kechiche's somewhat frenetic style is very different from the slowness of the Tarr film.   Kechiche was born in Tunis and came to France when he was six and his film is an intense tale about a North African and his French children and their attempt to open a couscous restaurant.  I first heard of couscous in Fassbinder's film of 1974 -- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul-- and had no idea then what the homesick man from Morocco meant when he said "I want couscous."  Fassbinder is an obvious influence on both these filmmakers and one can relate to the family tensions in both these films, especially this time of year.

I watched both these films on DVD's from the Brooklyn Public Library; along with the New York Public Library in Manhattan it is one of the great resources in New York.  I can find almost every DVD or book I am looking for at one or the other and can reserve them online to pick up at my local library, just around the corner.  At one point in a budget crunch it was proposed that libraries charge a nominal fee for videos and I would support this if it comes to that, since the primary purpose of libraries is to make books available.

Turner Classic Movies in December

Some of my favorite movies on Turner this month, some of which I may write more about later.

Fred Astaire. Balanchine said "He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times."  My particular favorite this month is Shall We Dance, with Ginger Rogers as his partner and wonderful songs by George and Ira Gershwin.  Visually "the ideal was perfection within a single shot," as Arlene Croce says in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (Galahad Books,1972), with no cutting away from the full frame of the dancers.

Raoul Walsh's White Heat.  Marilyn Ann Moss, in her 2011 biography of Walsh (The University Press of Kentucky) refers to this 1949 film as "a vortex for post-war American angst that proved anything but comforting."

Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent.  As Chris Fujiwara says in The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (Faber and Faber 2008), this is a film "in constant and exciting movement" and is made in beautiful widescreen black-and-white.

Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running.  One of Minnelli's great dreamlike melodramas, with a powerful score by Elmer Bernstein.  Stephen Harvey, in Directed by Minnelli (Harper & Row, 1989) says (referring to the last scene) that it is "masterfully designed to exploit the horizontal proportions of the wide screen" and once again one can appreciate TCM's showing of the complete image.

Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind.  When I saw this film at MoMA some years ago the audience was so busy laughing at its soap opera plot they missed the irony and garish beauty of what Sirk, in his interview with Jon Halliday in Sirk on Sirk (The Viking Press,1972), said was "a piece of social criticism, of the rich and the spoiled and of the American Family, really."

John Ford's Wagonmaster.  In an art history seminar, in which I wrote a paper about Frederic Remington and John Ford, I was able to show a print of Wagonmaster which William K. Everson was kind enough to let me borrow.  I felt that showing this Western to my class would be more effective than any of Ford's films with the controversial John Wayne and I was right; several members of the class told me they had no idea that "a cowboy movie" could be so poetic.  Andrew Sarris wrote of Ford and Wagonmaster "He strokes boldly across the canvas of the American past as he concentrates on the evocative images of a folk tradition that no other American director has ever been able to render."(The John Ford Movie Mystery, University of Indian Press, 1975)

Robert Bresson's Au Hasard, Balthazar is my favorite of the Bresson films that TCM is showing in December.  It is based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot, only the eponymous hero is a donkey who takes on the sins of a world where "simple love and laughter vanish with childhood but grace is never absent." (Roy Armes, French Cinema, A.S. Barnes & Co.,1966).

I also want to recommend Mitch Leisen's Remember the Night, script by Preston Sturges (and showing in a 35mm. print at Film Forum the last week in December) and Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, two "holiday" movies with healthy doses of cynicism.