Balanchine's The Nutcracker, NYC Ballet, Dec. 28, 2018

Aside from the fact that it requires a number of professionally trained children, which most ballet companies do not possess, The Nutcracker is not suitable for a company built, like the majority, around a few soloists and with a corps de ballet capable of little more than calisthenics.  George Balanchine has always set his face against such a structure.  The ideal he has worked for is a company in which every member is technically capable of dancing a solo role; in his choreography, instead of the conventional corps de ballet acting in unison, everyone has his unique part to play. Balanchine sees The Nutcracker as a festival of joy, a sort of Christmas pantomime, and only those who have lost their sense of joy and for whom, consequently ballet is a meaningless art, will find it juvenile.
---W.H, Auden, 1954 Program Note.

The Nutcracker is still the only ballet that too many parents take their kids to.  And too many people see it for its story and not for its intricate and extraordinary choreography.  But I'm becoming resigned to that.  The Nutcracker, like the best popular entertainment, can be enjoyed on multiple levels, from the spectacle of the costumes and scenery to the incredible dancing.  Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but I think that New York City Ballet has improved immensely since the departure of the autocratic Peter Martins and his replacement by the "interim artistic team" of Jonathan Stafford, Justin Peck, Craig Hall and Rebecca Krohn.  On Friday all the dancers --including sixty-three children from the school, rehearsed and supervised by Dena Abergel and Arch Higgins -- were at the top of their form, especially The Sugarplum Fairy and Her Cavalier, danced by soloists Sara Adams and Sebastian Villarini-Velez, dancing passionately to the energetic conducting of the Tschaikovsky music by music director Andrew Litton.

The Nutcracker is such a holiday staple now that not everyone is aware that when Balanchine choreographed it in 1954 it was mostly a forgotten ballet, the 1892 original choreography by Petipa and Ivanov mostly lost.  Balanchine had danced in The Nutcracker as a teenager at the Maryinski in Russia and felt that there would be an audience for it in the fifties, with spectacle and costumes and a fairytale story for most people and new dances for Tschaikovsky's beautiful music.  What he didn't figure out was how to get the adults who brought their children to this ballet to bring them to his more abstract and austere ballets to the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bach, Bizet, et al.  In some ways, of course, perhaps it didn't matter:  the sold-out crowds for The Nutcracker (48 performances this year) help finance the more abstract ballets and those who are interested manage to find their way to them, at whatever age. Balanchine's Nutcracker has now found its way to other ballet companies, most of whom do not have the resources to do it at the level of New York City Ballet, but it might help keep ballet alive in the 21st century while we wait patiently for new and inspired choreography

Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents (1960)

Ray does have a theme, and a very important one; namely, that every relationship establishes its own moral code and that there is no such thing as abstract morality.
--Andrew Sarris

Nicholas Ray's beautiful The Savage Innocents is another of Ray's poetic films about outsiders to traditional Western culture and mores, including women (Johnny Guitar, 1954), gypsies (Hot Blood, 1956), rebellious youth (Rebel Without a Cause, 1952), outlaws (The True Story of Jesse James, 1957) and others.  The DVD of The Savage Innocents does not begin to compare with the exquisite Technirama 35 mm print that I saw twenty-five years ago at MoMA but it does capture some of the beauty of the Arctic environment shot by Italian cinematographer Aldo Tonti and the geographical and behavioral differences between the West and the Inuit, with Ray obviously influenced by Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922).

There is an effective documentary quality to Ray's film, with seal-hunting, igloo-building and an aging mother left on the ice to be devoured by a polar bear. The film is mostly cool blues and whites as well as earth tones, with Ray's signature garish red only showing up when Inuk (played by Anthony Quinn) makes his way to a distant trading post to trade furs and clashes with Western traders and priests  Ray does not claim that the Inuit are "noble savages" in any sense, rather that they have a unique culture that is gradually being eroded.

The Oxford Murders

In between reading Guillermo Martinez's novel The Oxford Murders (published by Penguin in 2005, translated by Sonia Soto) and watching Alex de la Iglesia's film version (2008) I read John Lancester's essay "The Case of Agatha Christie" in The London Review of Books.  I mention this because the book and the film (which follows the book fairly closely) are rather anti-Christie, i.e., they emphasize randomness rather than logic.  A graduate student narrates the book, as he tries to figure out a series of murders based on codes the murderer left in notes. He is helped by aging philosopher Arthur Seldom, who considers the universe random, suggesting that the clues in the notes do not make an orderly series, in the same way that an SAT question asking for the next in a series could have many possible answers, depending on how complicated one wants to make it.

The film subtly supports the random theory of the universe as cinematographer Kiko de la Rica follows one person and then abruptly shifts to someone else and then someone else again, none of whom seem to be relevant to the plot, the wide-screen image showing Seldom and students randomly intersecting. There is much discussion of Wittgenstein, Fermat, Godel and various other philosophers and mathematicians who have tried to make sense of a seemingly random world in which there is disagreement on whether we have somehow discovered maths (as the British call it) or invented it.  I especially liked the low-key manner in which de la Iglesia (and to a lesser extent Martinez) use Scrabble and squash in the plot, games which involve different ratios of logic and chance.

Turner Classic Movies, Jan. 2019

A pretty good line-up of classic films in January, including several by Anthony Mann (I especially like The Black Book, 1949, a film noir about the French Revolution, with exquisite cinematography by John Alton, on Jan. 8); Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point, 1950, on the 25th; John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939, on the 11th; Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, 1955, on the 20th; Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, 1950, on the 25th; and several films by the great Ernst Lubitsch on the 29th, including Ninotchka, 1939,

Other films include Leo McCarey's elegant comedy The Awful Truth,1937, on January 1 and two off-beat Westerns on Jan. 4:  Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Joseph Mankiewicz's There Was a Crooked Man, both from 1970.

If you have any questions about any other films on Turner in Jan. please feel free to contact me.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

"The most dangerous man in America:  a nigger with a library card."
  Brother Mouzone  (Michael Potts), /"The Wire" season 2, episode 10, written by Ed Burns

Susan Orlean's book (Simon and Schuster, 2018) is a meditation on libraries and the fire in the Los Angeles Public Library of 1986, when 400,000 books were destroyed.  Orlean had been fascinated by libraries since she was a child in Cleveland, when her mother regularly took her to the local library, and some of us share her fascination.  I grew up without books and without a library in Kinderhook, N.Y. and was always desperate for something to read.  Then we moved to Delmar, N.Y. and when I was in third and fourth grade there the elementary school had a pretty decent library and I read several books a day, taking the books out one day and returning them the next; I don't think I was aware at that time that there was a local public library, since neither of my parents were readers and did all they could to prevent me from reading, on the dubious grounds that it was bad for my eyes.   When I was in fourth grade we moved to Hudson, N.Y., at that time an anti-intellectual blue-collar town that regularly voted against funding a public library, with an elementary school "library" that consisted of a few non-fiction "Landmark" books (some may remember them from the 50's and 60's) and some old copies of National Geographic.

I struggled in Hudson to find reading material.  Ironically, my father had worked for a book distributor  before we moved to Hudson so he could work for an auto-parts distributor.  For my father books were just widgets to be sold and we had almost no books in the house except an encyclopedia; my parents did not believe in "reading for pleasure," since reading could give you ideas of your own and books cost money.  When a volunteer library opened in downtown Hudson I gradually read all the books that were donated until my father caught me with a copy of Catcher in the Rye when I was thirteen and made me return it.  When I asked him if he had read it he said no, but that he had formerly worked in the book business and he knew what was in it (I secretly finished reading it before I returned it),  One Christmas I asked for The Scarlet Letter but my parents "investigated" it and found it too racy and subversive!

In my later elementary school years I managed to read whatever books I could borrow from my friends; I was particularly fond of The Hardy Boys.  When I turned 12 my parents said no more allowance; I was told to get a paper route if I wanted any spending money.  In a way this was liberating, as I mostly used my several earned dollars a week buying paperbacks off the racks at the local grocery store, accidentally discovering such gems as Herndon's Life of Lincoln and George Orwell's 1984, a particular favorite. 

After graduating as my elementary school valedictorian I went as a freshman to Hudson High, where the library was rather surprisingly off-limits unless one was doing research using library materials.  In my freshman English class we were given books to read --The Microbe Hunters, Death Be Not Proud and similar middlebrow material.  Parents were outraged, how dare they make students read entire books!  My parents seemed okay with it, as long as there was no sexual or political content.  

I lasted one year at Hudson High before I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where my world totally changed.  I probably would have had a better academic record at Exeter if they didn't have such a wonderful library:  I had a lot of catching up to do, discovering everyone from Dickens to Nabokov, and spent every moment I could reading.  When I graduated from Exeter I went to Columbia in New York City, with its many bookstores and its excellent public library system.

None of this has much to do with Orlean's book, which is focused on the Los Angeles library system and the fire, which was blamed on one Harry Peak, though evidence was lacking.  In fact, as Orlean writes, "As long ago as 1977 forensic scientists warned that the principles of arson investigation were mostly myth."  I recommend reading Orlean's book and watching Frederick Wiseman's documentary Ex Libris:  The New York Public Library to see the importance and necessity of our public libraries. 

Michael Connolly's Dark Sacred Night.

She was simply staring into the pass, the never-ending movement of vehicles down on the freeway like blood through the veins of the city.
--Michael Connolly, Dark Sacred Night (Little, Brown and Company, 2018).

"Night" in Connolly's title seems to suggest two meanings, the night shift on which Rene Ballard works and the "knight" that Harry Bosch is, in his search for killers in cases that have gone cold.  Bosch even rescues a "maiden," a woman who has taken to drink and drugs after her daughter Daisy had been killed nine years ago.  To some extent policeman Bosch, now exiled to San Fernando, is passing the torch to thirty-years-younger Ballard at LAPD; each has much to learn from the other and they even rescue one another from death.  Ballard and Bosch are both dedicated to their jobs, as Bosch's daughter is in college and Ballard is devoted to her dog and the beach.

After thirty-five books (four of which I have mentioned previously) Connolly has the same intense feeling for 21st century Los Angeles that Raymond Chandler had for mid-20th century LA; plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.  Phillip Marlowe operated alone and so do Ballard and Bosch, albeit with some technical help from the police department, while ignoring authority and being driven by a search for truth.

Philip Moeller's Age of Innocence 1934

Edith Wharton was born in 1862 so she had some firsthand knowledge of "the gilded age" when she wrote The Age of Innocence in 1920.  The film was directed by Phillip Moeller who was mainly a stage director, except for one other movie, and used both elements of the book and of Margaret Ayer Barnes's stage adaptation; the script is by Sarah Mason and Victor Heerman.  Moeller's film is much kinder to the upper-class denizens of 1870's New York than Wharton's novel is, emphasizing how trapped they were in the mores and customs of the time (as too many of us often are).  Irene Dunne soars as the complex Ellen Oleska, who tells Newland Archer (scheduled to marry Ellen's cousin) that they can't run away together because when Europeans flee to America and Americans flee to Europe nothing changes (Ellen wants to divorce her Polish aristocratic husband but her family doesn't want the scandal).


The film of The Age of Innocence is an emotional melodrama, sometimes derisively called a "soap opera" because radio versions had soap companies as sponsors, though it is a genre which has appealed to some very talented directors, including John M. Stahl (who made Back Street with Dunne and John Boles, who played Newland Archer, in 1932), Frank Borzage, and Douglas Sirk, directors that are not afraid to appeal to the emotions within layers of irony.  Moeller heightens the emotion and the irony by framing the story as a flashback, with Newland Archer deciding not to see Ellen after twenty-six years, preferring to remember her as she was .

The Big Apple Circus Dec. 8, 2018

Victoria (age 7), Gideon (20) and I all went to the Big Apple Circus yesterday and had a great time.  There were two things that made it better than last year (see my post of Dec 10, 2017):  the absence of the unfunny clown "Grandma" (Barry Lubin was fired for sexual harassment) and the precisely timed performances.  And I do mean "performance," as the Circus is now more in tune with its origins in performance art, a term one does not hear much anymore.  I was particularly entranced by  Victor Moisev's horizontal juggling that was effectively visual (the red balls were on strings).  Jenny Vidbel was back with her domestic animals (including a potbellied pig) and The Flying Tienzianis were back with their impressive trapeze performance.  New this year was Emil Faltyny balancing on a free-standing ladder and kicking a ball into a goal while at the top of the ladder, Duo Fusion --Ihosvanys and Virginia Tuiells -- who did handstands on each other's abdomens -- and Valeriy Dynochev and Eraterina Abakarova, who did a beautiful and sexy aerial ballet.

"Grandma" was replaced by juggler Adam Kushler (who did wonderful things with piles of boxes) and Mark Goudich, who played an aspiring circus performer; they even used elements of Barry Lubin's routines, without the nastiness.  The show was written and directed by Mark Lonergan -- who never let any routine go on too long -- and choreographed by Grady MacLeod Bowman, who made much of performance seem like dance. We all loved the show, for various reasons, and Victoria loved the cotton candy and popcorn.

Lee Child's Past Tense

The bowstring thumped, the arrow hissed, and Shorty screamed and went down like he had fallen through a trap door.
--Lee Child, Past Tense (Delacorte, 2018).

Some of the strengths of Child's past Jack Reacher novels remain in Past Tense, particularly the character of Jack Reacher, always ready to help the downtrodden, and the detailed use of location as Reacher travels about the country.  In this novel Reacher is researching his childhood in New Hampshire when he stumbles across a group that kidnaps tourists and lets other men hunt them, for a price. The plot is more or less borrowed from Richard Connell's 1924 story that was made into the pretty good movie, The Most Dangerous Game, by Irving Pichel and Ernst Schoedsack, in 1932 and remade a number of times.

Kidnap victims Canadian tourists Shorty and Patty are vivid characters, as are some of the denizens of small town New Hampshire, though Child has the annoying habit of keeping information from us until late in the novel, turning suspense into predictable "surprise," something all-too-common among mystery and thriller writers.  I have the feeling that Child is spinning his wheels here, even the relationship with cop Brenda Amos doesn't suggest the possibility of it leading anywhere, as it does in other Reacher novels (see my posts of 12/5/17, 1/9/17, 11/10/15, 10/15/14).

Film Journal

While my wife Susan is recovering from a broken leg we are watching some movies I have taped from Turner Classic Movies.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  The dances are always wonderful in their films -- though there are never enough of them -- because they are choreographed by Astaire and Hermes Pan and the director has little to do with them.  That being said, their best "musical comedies" are directed by Mark Sandrich, who had a knack for comedy.  Top Hat (1935) was directed by Sandrich and has wonderful comedy (with the help of Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick), lovely music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and exquisite dancing, especially to "Cheek to Cheek" and "Isn't It a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?"  Before Top Hat Astaire and Rogers made Roberta (1935), the film that effectively made them a team, as they shared billing with Randolph Scott and Irene Dunne.  The film was directed by the impersonal William Dieterle and Dunne sang Jerome Kern's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," which I loved, though but Susan did not care for Dunne's warbling.  Astaire and Rogers become a couple in that film with the delightful "I Won't Dance."

Run of the Arrow (1957) was written, produced and directed by Samuel Fuller; it is a story about a Southerner (played by Rod Steiger) who is bitter at the end of the Civil War and goes to live with Native Americans in the West which is not yet officially part of the United States.  The cinematography is by Joseph Biroc (who often worked with Fuller and Robert Aldrich, among many others), who beautifully captures the isolated beauty of the West. Fuller's film works as an effective genre film --soldiers versus Indians -- but also as a parable about loyalty and country and where one belongs; at one point soldier Brian Keith tells Steiger about Phillip Nolan, the "man without a country." itself a parable by Edward Everett Hale. Fuller ends his film with a title card "the end of this film will be written by you," more true now, in our divided country, than ever. 

I admire Dean Martin, especially in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) and Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958), but he was often his own worst enemy, being remembered as the dipsomaniac host of various roasts and a member of the Rat Pack.  Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) shows Martin brilliantly making fun of his own image, being stranded in Climax, Nevada on the way from Las Vegas to Hollywood and becoming desperate because if he goes a night without sex he gets a headache.  Kiss Me, Stupid is beautifully filmed in the unusual format of widescreen black-and-white, capturing the claustrophobia of small-town America as well as its obsession with celebrities and success.  Whether one finds Wilder's film funny or not (I do) it is an intelligent observation by a foreigner (Wilder is Austrian) of America's hypocrisies and celebrity obsession and is even more relevant today than it was in 1964.

Frank Tashlin's Hollywood or Bust (1956) was the last film Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made together:  Lewis wanted to direct himself and Martin wanted more serious roles (though as the straight man he was funnier than the clown).  Unfortunately Martin and Lewis had finally found their best director, Frank Tashlin, and they had just made their best movie with him, Artists and Models (1955); Hollywood or Bust showed the strain of their increasing hostility to each other. Tashlin did use this tension somewhat effectively as Martin and Lewis traveled across country in a motorcar they had won in a raffle, Martin to a job and Lewis to meet Anita Ekberg.  There are many of Tashlin's cartoonish elements and satires of consumerism in Hollywood or Bust (at one point Lewis's dog drives the car), the title referring to the portion of the female anatomy that Tashlin saw some American men obsessed with, including Malcolm Smith, played by Lewis.  As Martin and Lewis drive across the country they see mostly young and lissome young women in scanty outfits waving at them as they go by; the one older woman they give a ride to pulls a gun on them and steals their car.  Tashlin's use of eye-popping primary colors is enhanced by VistaVision, which produces a fairly high-definition image.


King Vidor's Street Scene (1931) is an effective adaptation of Elmer Rice's play.  Vidor does not make the mistake of many film adaptations of "opening up" things and instead sticks to the one set of the exterior of a New York apartment house in a struggling neighborhood.  People come and go and stick their heads out the windows but Vidor never goes into any apartments:  when a husband comes home to shoot his wife and lover we only see the window as the lover attempts to escape.  Vidor was an innovator with early sound films -- particularly Hallelujah in 1928 (see my post of July 23, 2014) -- and worked closely with cinematographer George Barnes to move the camera and vary the shots to capture the dynamics of the streets and people moving in and out of the apartment building.