Alfred Werker's The Last Posse (1953)

The Last Posse is a beautiful, elegiac film about the demise of morality and the rise of greed in the frontier West.  Director Alfred Werker directed mostly B films but could soar -- as he did with The Last Posse -- with the right collaborators.  The Last Posse is filmed in beautiful black-and-white by cinematographer Burnett Guffey and produced by Harry Joe Brown, who would later produce similarly austere Westerns with director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott, often shot --as The Last Posse was -- in rugged Lone Pine, California.

The cast is headed by Broderick Crawford, playing a dipsomaniac sheriff, and Charles Bickford, as a ruthless and greedy cattle owner. Bickford is robbed by some ranchers he cheated and the posse chases them into the desert.  The film has an unusual structure, with three different narrators taking up the story at different points, as the robbers and Bickford are killed and Crawford injured, and "the good citizens" who make up the posse divide up the stolen money.  "A sheriff has no friends, just a job, " says Crawford, who survives until John Derek, who plays Bickord's adopted son, tells the whole story. The film takes place on the anniversary of Founder's Day in Roswell, New Mexico, a town carved out of the inhospitable desert and as soon as the founders, played by a marvelous collection of grizzled character actors, are outside their artificial civilization they resort to greed and power, with only the sheriff trying to extend civilization beyond the town limits.

Home Runs

An all-or-nothing game becomes a feat of strength, often at the expense of daring baserunning, acrobatic fielding and a faster pace of action.
 --Tyler Kepner, The New York Times

I confess I'm no fan of these home run effusions, whether driven by steroid or technique.  It's a dullard's game, strikeouts, power and little else.
--Michael Powell, The New York Times

This year the number of home runs is the highest ever, already having eclipsed the 2000 record of 5693.  An occasional home run can be exciting, but too many home runs and the strikeouts that go with the constant attempts are tedious.  I know my previous suggestions of making home runs outs or, at least, foul balls, is unlikely to be adopted so I make the following, only slightly more possible, suggestions.

1. Educate the fans to the nuances of the game.  The TV announcers and sportscasters could stop endlessly promoting home runs and emphasize the subtleties and beauties of the game.  The biggest problems with that, of course, is how ignorant many of the sportscasters and announcers are and the retirement of Vin Scully.

2. Help out the pitchers.  Most starters now can barely go five innings and more than 25% of major league pitchers have had Tommy John surgery, ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction. How many of the home runs are fueled by pitchers being pressured to pitch at 100 mph, now that everyone in the line-up is trying to hit a home run?
a. raise the mound to the 15 inches it was until 1969 (it is now 10 inches), after Denny McLain had thirty wins and Bob Gibson an ERA of 1.12.
b. expand the strike zone to what it was in the 60's, from the top of the shoulders to the bottom of the knees, rather than the current top of the knees to the middle of the torso.
c. legalize the spitball.  Leonard Koppett has shown that the spitball was banned in 1920 not because it was somehow "unfair," but rather for sanitary reasons, .i.e., baseballs were not replaced regularly like they are now and infielders had to handle balls loaded with various substances.

3. Do away with the designated hitter in the American League.  The dh was instituted in 1973 because Major League Baseball thought they were losing fans to football and felt they had to have higher scores. Everyone knows that having a dh undermines the balance between hitting and fielding, one of the beauties of baseball.

4. Deaden the ball, ideally going back to a rubber center instead of cork.

5. Move the outfield fences back, if possible, and make the fences higher.

Steroid testing will never be entirely successful; those who are determined will find ways to defeat it.  Other changes are necessary.

The MGM B film: Under Cover of Night; Code Two

Kudos to Turner Classic Movies for showing these two movies this month. MGM, of course, was known for its glossy films with big stars, but they also made B movies, i.e., features running 60 or 70 minutes to show on a double bill.  Most B films were relatively inconsequential time-fillers but there were some good directors who rather specialized in them, particularly Edgar Ulmer and Budd Boetticher, and did not quite succumb to the formula that usually included comic relief and a happy ending.

Under Cover of Night was one of seven (!) films that George B. Seitz made for MGM in 1937.  It's a clever and unusual film about academic life, with an ambitious professor whose wife does all his research and threatens to leave him when he is unfaithful with a student.  He proceeds to throw her dog out the window, causing her to have a fatal heart attack, and then in one night kills all the people he thinks his wife may have given her notes to.  This is rather an extreme example of the cutthroat aspect of the academic life but seems not so crazy for those of us who have been in graduate school.  There is also an effective subplot of the particular difficulties of being a woman professor, condescended to and denied promotion. Seitz uses an impressive array of character actors --Edmund Lowe, Florence Rice, Henry Daniell, Sara Hade, et al.-- for the various members of the academy and uses cinematographer Charles Clarke to minimize the MGM gloss, with most of the film taking place during one long night.

The director of Code Two (1953) was Frank Wilcox, who directed only ten movies in his career, the best-known of which is The Forbidden Planet (1956), a science fiction version of The Tempest. Code Two stars Ralph Meeker, who two years later starred in the corrosive Kiss Me Deadly.  In Code Two Meeker shows the same arrogance that he showed in Robert Aldrich's film but here it is seen as positive rather than destructive.  Meeker and a couple of buddies become cops and there is documentary-like footage of their training.  After being assigned jobs of typing and counting towels they all decide to become motorcycle cops, for the excitement and extra pay, as the Harley-Davidsons become the stars of the picture, with their ability to go anywhere.  But being a motorcycle cop is dangerous and one of Meeker's buddies gets killed when he stops a truck full of stolen cows. "Everything is a Western." Sam Peckinpah once said, and Meeker goes after the cattle rustlers, on a motorcycle rather than a horse.  The truck that Meeker is looking for has tires with a distinctive pattern and at one point Meeker hides in the bushes and every time a truck goes by he splashes water on the road to check the pattern of the tires.  Meeker gets the bad guys after being shot himself and there is indeed a relatively happy ending as Meeker flirts with the nurse in the hospital in an attempt to forget the death of his friend.

Roy Del Ruth's Upperworld, 1934

Roy Del Ruth was an efficient and workmanlike director for Warner Brothers in the thirties. His films are brisk and snappy views of the working classes, at least until 1934.  In 1934 the new Production Code started to be enforced and Upperworld seems to be a film that started before code enforcement but was changed before it was released, with the title gaining a perhaps unintended irony, suggesting that if one is rich and powerful enough one can get away with murder.

Warren William plays a railroad magnate who is lonely when his wife of fourteen years, played by Mary Astor, spends all her time socializing, even sending their young son off to military school to get the "proper" education.  William (much less sleazy than in his pre-code films) falls in love with a lively dancer, played by Ginger Rogers.  Rogers' agent, played by J. Carrol Naish, tries to blackmail William and accidentally kills Rogers while shooting at William, who then kills Naish and covers up the crime, making it look like murder and suicide.  William then bribes the police commissioner who throws in jail a cop who saw William's car at the scene.  William is eventually caught by fingerprints, goes to trial, is acquitted and sails to Europe with his wife, with whom he has reconciled.

I'm giving more detail of the plot than I usually do because it illustrates how the production code, once it went into effect, elevates marriage and wealth over the struggles of the working class, which was once the bread-and-butter of Warner Brothers.  What does come through in the released version of the film is the energy and inventiveness of the working classes:  Ginger Rogers singing "Shake Your Powder Puff" in burlesque, Andy Devine as a chauffeur who hangs out at the public library to read and pick up interesting girls, Robert Greig as the unflappable butler, John Quale as a put-upon janitor, Sidney Toler as an incorruptible beat cop, etc.  Cinematographer Tony Gaudio uses a mobile camera to explore the obsequious world of a railroad magnate's office as well as the cozy world of a chorus girl's apartment.

Tom Perrotta's Mrs. Fletcher

That didn't sound bad to Amanda.  "I like Victorian novels. At least I used to.  I haven't read one since college."
"They can be kind of daunting," said Eve. "I've been meaning to start Middlemarch for the past year or so. Everybody always says how great it is.  But it never seems like the right time to crack it open."
Amanda looked wistful.  "There's so much to read but all I do iis watch Netflix and play Candy Crush.  I feel like I'm wasting my life."
--Tom Perrotta, Mrs. Fletcher, Scribner, 2017

I did like Perrotta's previous book, The Leftovers (2011) --see my blog entry of June 25, 2014 -- but did not care for Mrs. Fletcher, a book that effectively makes fun of everybody in the suburbs:  the old, the young, the LGBT community, college students, blue-collar workers, the married, the divorced, the autistic, etc.  What happened between The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher was Perrotta's stint with Damon Lindelof (of "Lost" notoriety) on the HBO version of The Leftovers, which had an arbitrary structure --let's make it up as we go along--that made no sense and was only redeemed by the presence of the luminous Carrie Coon, also this year in "Fargo."

The attempts at humor in Mrs. Fletcher are unfunny and misanthropic.  When it come to the end, with the divorced Eve marrying a plumber and her college dropout son going to work as the plumber's assistant, it comes across as a parody (and neither plumber is named Lee).  Whether it is parody, a self parody (conscious or unconscious) or something else I will leave to Dwight Macdonald's successors (see his book Parodies, The Modern Library, 1960).  Perhaps it is just too typical of many contemporary novels, with its impoverished vocabulary, gratuitous sex and arbitrary plotting, as though Jane Austen had never lived. 

Val Lewton's Youth Runs Wild (1944)

You are seeing pretty nearly the only writing and acting and directing and photography in Hollywood which is at all concerned with what happens inside real and particular people among real and particular objects.
-- James Agee on Youth Runs Wild

Agee was writing when the film came out, during WWII,  Most movies at that time stressed the heroics of the soldiers and the important sacrifices made by the workers at home.  What Lewton stressed was the impact on the children whose parents were either away or at home fighting the war.  It is an intense psychological portrait of children on their own, trying to find excitement in a time of food and gasoline rationing.  Teenage boys steal tires to make enough money to buy their girlfriends presents while the girls take dubious jobs to buy clothes; there are no scenes in school, which is largely ignored.

Lewton was a master of the subtle horror film (I Walked With a Zombie, 1943, and The Cat People, 1942) and was usually allowed to do what he wanted, as long as the budgets were low and the grosses acceptable.  RKO was concerned, however, about Lewton applying his dark and baroque sensibility to a contemporary story and they not only re-cut the film, taking out the part where a boy kills his sadistic father, but added a fatuous ending where kids become well-behaved by using youth centers (too late for the three boys in the film who were sentenced to "forestry camp").  RKO refused to honor Lewton's request to have his name removed from the film.

Still, what remains are all the contradictions of small-town-life during the war, filmed in a neo-realist style (cinematography by John J. Mescall) with only a few shabby sets and Lewton's stock company of actors, including Jean Brooks and Kent Smith.  Generally I find the director the most important part of the creative team on a movie but Lewton was a producer who worked closely with his writers and directors to produce a vision of his own.  His best films had the best directors, particularly Jacques Tourneur, but Mark Robson, who directed Youth Runs Wild, did a creditable job with it and with Lewton's marvelously eerie The Seventh Victim (1943).

Lois Weber's Where Are My Children?, 1916

Lois Weber was one of the best-known directors of the first decade of the 20th Century, but her didactic, class-conscious and social-issue oriented films fell quickly out of fashion in the jazz age and few of her several hundred films have even survived.  One that was reconstructed and preserved by The Library of Congress, Where Are My Children?, 1916, was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies.

In Where Are My Children? a district attorney is prosecuting a doctor for distributing pamphlets about birth control to the poor, after the doctor has seen starvation and abuse in the slums.  Meanwhile the DA's wife has had two abortions with a Dr. Malfit, feeling that the children her husband wants would only interfere with her life as a "social butterfly."  She regularly refers her society friends to Dr. Malfit and even refers her n'er-do-well brother to Malfit when her brother becomes involved with a maid who becomes pregnant.  Dr. Malfit bungles the maid's abortion and the maid dies, though not before telling her mother about the brother and Dr. Malfit.  The DA does not know about his wife's involvement and prosecutes Malfit for murder, finding out about his wife and her friends from Malfit's subpoenaed records.  The DA's wife cannot now have children and so the couple spends their last years together, sad and lonely, visited by their children that were never born (Weber was fond of double exposures).

Yes, the film seems dated and even a little creepy but is full of passion and vivid portrayals (Tyrone Power Sr. and Helen Rieume play the DA and his wife).  Weber is very careful about the issue of abortion:  the film is not necessarily for it or against it but rather sees it a privilege of the wealthy and the upper classes who deny even rudimentary birth control to the poor. Weber shows the outdoors and "the wind in the trees," with nature compared to the artificial lives of the upper classes.

Norman Taurog's The Stooge (1951)

The Stooge stars Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin and was released in 1953, though made in 1951; producer Hal Wallis thought it was too serious a film.  The film has a title at the beginning that places it in 1930 but there is little effort to made it a serious period piece.  Rather, it gives a version of how Lewis and Martin came together and how they each felt about the team that may be too close to the truth.  Martin and Lewis made 17 movies in 8 years --1948  to 1956 -- and producer Wallis used undistinguished directors who would not monkey with the winning formula of smooth-singing Martin and goofy Lewis, often with a homoerotic undertone:  when Lewis and Martin first travel together in The Stooge Lewis climbs right in bed with Martin in their sleeping compartment on the train. Martin and Lewis both have wives in the film but obviously care more for each other, though each thinks they are the most important member of the team.  Taurog's direction is routine, consisting of mostly bland medium shots, but it does seem to give some idea of what Lewis and Martin did in their act, even if, in this case, it is taking place in a studio version of vaudeville.

Lewis was determined to improve the quality of directors, perhaps being aware that the Marx Brothers made only one consistently good movie, Duck Soup in 1933, because it was their only film directed by a skilled director of comedy, Leo McCarey.  The last two films of Martin and Lewis -- Artists and Models in 1955 and Hollywood or Bust in 1956 -- were directed by Frank Tashlin and are brilliant in their comic style and visual elegance. But by this time Martin wanted off the comedy roller coaster to do some serious acting, as he did most successfully in Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958).  Lewis continued to make effective films with Tashlin before turning to directing, starting with the low-budget The Bellboy in 1960.

The Private Eye Novel: Ross Macdonald and Loren D. Estleman

You are a very pertinacious young man and you are making a nuisance of yourself.
--spoken to Lew Archer in Ross Macdonald's The Barbarous Coast, 1956 (Library of America).

I hadn't worked in a month.  The Internet had swooped in and snatched up all the jobs I used to do, free of charge.  You could track down an old high school sweetheart, a deadbeat dad, your great-great-great-grandfather's crib in the Old Country, complete with a virtual walking tour of his thatched hut.  No phone time, no embarrassing conversation with a stranger, and best of all no bill.
---  Amos Walker in Loren D. Estleman's The Lioness is the Hunter (Tom Doherty Associates, 2017).

Things have changed since the fifties, but  Estleman's Amos Walker and Macdonald's Lew Archer both do most of their work on the phone and in person, putting themselves in dangerous situations.  I prefer detective novels written in the first person (so that we are not aware of anything the narrator is unaware of) and that use very specific locales: Archer working in a burgeoning Los Angeles in the fifties and Walker in the decrepit Detroit of today.  Both detectives are cynical former cops, always hoping to get the best from people and usually getting the worst; both are long-divorced loners who try to cover up their insecurity with snappy banter.

We know more about Walker as a person than we do Archer; Macdonald is more interested how and why people commit crimes and Estleman cares more about survival in a hostile environment; in these two books they are working at the top of their form.  Macdonald is directly descended from Hammett and Chandler, i.e., his plots are often confusing and difficult to follow, though it usually comes around full circle to the place and people with whom he started, while Walker usually follows a fairly direct path from his dusty office to a violent confrontation.  Archer's cases often originate deep in past behavior while Walker's are more immediately dangerous. Walker and Archer are both are on the side of the exploited as they search for the exploiters and bring them to justice, of one kind or another.