Bad Blood: Secret and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

The overall impression was that of an eighth-grade science project.
--John Carryrou, Bad Blood (Knopf, 2018)

Bad Blood is an impressive piece of investigative journalism about Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos, who claimed that they had a marvelous new system to do blood analysis with just a finger prick, freeing us all from big needles.  The problem was that the technology that Holmes (a college dropout with no medical or scientific training) supposedly invented simply did not work.

The amazing part of the story was that Homes raised millions of dollars to start her company, which even included Henry Kissinger on its board.  Carreyrou's book details how she did it, with elements of "fear of missing out," "fake it until you make it," lies, chicanery, greed and intimidation by Holmes's lover and enforcer Sunny Balwani and a high-priced law firm that threatened to sue former employees for revealing so-called trade secrets. The dam finally broke when Adam Clapper, who had a blog called Pathology Blawg, called Carreyrou at The Wall Street Journal with his suspicions based on conversations with former Theranos employees.

Carreyrou was not intimidated; his articles got FDA on the case and that was the beginning of the end for Theranos.  I am certainly sympathetic to the idea of simplified blood tests, as I have health problems that call for my blood to be tested regularly.  Apple, Microsoft, et al. can do whatever they want with their gadgets, but what Holmes was doing was misleading and dangerous for the effect that a botched blood test could have on one's health; Carryrou gives numerous examples of the fear and anxiety caused by Theranos's blood tests.

Turner Classic Movies April 2019

Nothing particularly unusual or rare this month, just a solid line-up of (mostly) classical movies:1961) il buono, il brutto, il cattivo.

April 6 has two superb film noirs, Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950) and Phil Karlson's corrosive 99 River Street (1953).

April 8 has one of Hitchcock's best English films, The Lady Vanishes (1935) and my favorite Astaire/Rogers film, Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance (1937).

April 11 has some excellent Westerns:  John Ford's The Searchers (1956), Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959), Anthony Mann's The Man from Laramie (1955) and Delemer Daves's 3:10 to Yuma (1957).

April 12 has Blake Edwards's marvelous wide-screen comedy The Party (1968)

April 18 has Edgar Ulmer's great film noir Detour (1945) and Carl Dreyer's austerely beautiful Day of Wrath (1943).

On April 28th there are two late masterpieces by Yasujiro Ozu, An Autumn Afternoon (1962) and The End of Summer (1961)

Jean-Pierre Melville's L'aine des Ferchaux (1963)

He had a built-in breathlessness, in fact, an adopted resignation to transience and mutability that is partly an eccentric individualism and partly what Melville inherited from American mobility and obsolescence.
--David Thomson on Jean-Pierre Melville


Melville's film is an example of a European view of America, resembling in its themes such similar works as Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Sergio Leone's C'era una volta il West (1968).  Though there are some location shots of America most of the film was shot in a studio in France, with re-creations of diners, motels and gas stations that resembles those in the U. S.  Jean-Paul Belmondo is a failed boxer who travels as a secretary with "the eldest of the Ferchaux" (Charles Vanel) to America.  Ferchaux is one step ahead of the law, closing in on his family business in France.  It is Melville's first film in color (beautifully filmed by cinematographer Henri Decae).

As usual, women have only small roles in Melville's films; there is the girlfriend Belmondo sneaks out on and the hitchhiker who tries to rob Vanel and Belmondo on their drive from New York to Louisiana. There are numerous low-key references to some of Melville's favorite American directors, including John Huston and Frank Tashlin, and there is even a visit to the house in Hoboken where Frank Sinatra grew up, as Belmondo keeps replacing rock 'n roll with Sinatra on juke boxes;  George Delerue's score has a distinctly American flavor.

Melville's view of America in the sixties is emphasized by the generational clash between Vanel and Belmondo, one near the end of his career, the other still at the beginning.  This film is not my favorite Melville, by any means (that would be Le Samourai, 1967) but it is a fascinating, quirky and very personal film by a French director fascinated by America.

Christian Petzold's Phoenix (2014)

German director Petzold  has been influenced by other German directors, including Fritz Lang and R.W. Fassbinder, as well as American directors such as Hitchcock:  when Nelly (played by Nina Hoss) returns from Auschwitz with her face destroyed her plastic surgeon puts her under anesthesia  and asks her to count backwards from 10, mentioning Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon (1929), which has one of the earliest uses of such a countdown.  Phoenix is about Nelly's attempt to find her husband after the war and his attempt, when he doesn't recognize her, to use her to pull off a scam to get Nelly's own inheritance, as he tries to remake her as herself, a plot reminiscent of Hitchcock's Vertigo as well as the films by Fassbinder of post-war Germany such as Lola (1982).

Petzold and his cinematographer, Hans Fromm, take unusual care with their expressive use of color, as the Phoenix club, where Nelly finds Johnny, uses bright red in its exterior in the middle of bombed-out Berlin, suggesting it is something of an entrance to hell.  And Nelly's husband, Johnny (played by Ronald Zehrfeld, who rather resembles Fassbinder) dresses Nelly in a bright red dress in their grey and seedy apartment. Phoenix raises a lot of questions about ethics and personal responsibility in an oppressive environment but intelligently doesn't try to answer them, as Johnny brings Nelly "home" and they perform an elegant --and possibly meaningful-- performance of "Speak Low," by Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash.

Daryl Duke's The Silent Partner (1978)

The timing of The Silent Partner is notable:  it begins in the weeks before Christmas when the mall is busiest and merchant deposits are high.  It's also the season when the gulf between material desire and actual means is most pronounced.
--Nathalie Atkinson, "Noir City," vol. 12, no.3

Daryl Duke was a talented Canadian director who mostly worked in television but did direct the excellent Payday in 1973 and got a significant tax break for making A Silent Partner in Toronto in 1978.  Its genre is the so-called "neo-noir," a term I don't much care for (perhaps post-noir might be better).  The differences from true film noir include being made in color, more explicit sex and violence and the crooks getting away with the loot and going unpunished.  All these elements are in place in Duke's film.  The true film noir was about disillusion at the end of WWII and the neo-noir is sometimes about disillusion caused by Vietnam, though it is never mentioned in Duke's film, which stars Elliot Goud (in one of the four films he made in 1978) as a bank clerk who keeps some of the money that he claims to have given to robber Christopher Plummer, dressed as Santa Claus.  Plummer is good at math and figures out that he got less money than the newspapers stated and starts to harass Gould for the rest, which Gould has, of course, taken for himself.

There is, of course, a good girl (played by Susannah York) and a bad girl (Celine Lomez) and Gould makes love to them both.  Plummer is something of a psychopath, usually an uninteresting character but given an unusual cleverness by Plummer, in spite of his violence.  Gould, however, matches him in cleverness and even raises him a bit.  Duke and cinematographer Billy Williams give Toronto an effectively  drab look at Christmastime, as Gould's collection of exotic tropical fish makes him yearn for a warmer climate. The script is by Curtis Hanson -- who wrote Samuel Fuller's White Dog (1987) and went on to direct his own neo-noir, L.A. Confidential (1997) -- from a Danish novel by Anders Bodelson.

Jacques Tourneur's They All Come Out (1939)

All in all, Tourneur's career represents a triumph of taste over force.
--Andrew Sarris

I have not written much yet about Jacques Tourneur, a director I much admire, though I have recommended his films when they have been shown on Turner Classic Movies.  Tourneur's career followed a fairly common path in its time:  shorts to B movies to A movies, ending with some strange American International films and, eventually, television.  His masterpiece is Out of the Past (1945), a terrific film noir, but he also did superb horror films (I Walked with a Zombie,1943), Westerns (Wichita, 1955) and even political films (The Fearmakers, 1959).

They All Come Out (a rather strange title, referring not to zombies or gays but to those sentenced to prison) was originally a short but was so liked by MGM boss  Louis B. Mayer that he asked Tourneur to stretch it our to feature length.  Some of the seams show but it a fairly effective piece of apprentice dated didacticism, suggesting that some criminals can be rehabilitated if they are treated well and with understanding. Star Tom Neal is a hobo on his way to California (shades of Neal's great starring role in Edgar Ulmer's Detour, 1945) who is given a ride by Rita Johnson, who introduces him to a criminal gang of bank robbers, for whom Neal becomes the driver.  The first third of the film is mostly kinetic bank jobs, with the final two-thirds about the gang members in prison, some of whom --Neal and Johnson-- respond to rehabilitation and some of whom do not.  There are effective prison locations and even officials at the beginning and the end of the film bragging about the great job they do for those who exhibit good behavior in prison.

One irony is that star Tom Neal spent six years in prison for manslaughter and died in 1972, the year after he was released, so we don't know how successfully rehabilitated he was after more than a decade of violence that led to his blacklisting.

A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell

The evening was decidedly cool, and rain was half-heartedly falling.  I knew now that this parting was one of those final things that happen, recurrently, as time passes:  until at last they may be recognized fairly easily as the close of a period.  This was the last I should see of Stringham for a long time.  The path had suddenly forked. With regret I accepted the inevitability of circumstance.  Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.
--Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing, (University of Chicago Press, 1951).

Some books should be read at least twice --Bleak House, Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Clarissa, Lolita --once when young and again when one is older.  A Question of Upbringing is Powell's initial volume of his 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time, named for the marvelous Poussin painting, and I am reading it for the second time, after reading Powell's memoirs.  Narrator Nicholas Jenkins begins in public school, spends a summer in France and then heads for university in this first volume.  Major events include "Braddock alias Thorne." in which some students call the police and report seeing a wanted criminal who is actually their housemaster ("this rather absurd affair, which did no one great credit"), Jenkins confusing Madame Debuisson with Suzette, the girl he cared about ("It was now too late to retreat") and, in college, crashing a Vauxhall into a ditch when four men were out with two girls they picked up,after hours ("This was an exceedingly inconvenient occurrence from everyone's point of view.").

This novel is more amusing than I remember it, the specificity of the environment and the characters more interesting.  Even Widmerpool, who I thought was poorly treated when I first read these novels, come across both as an effective character and a product of his time (the novel takes place in the 1920's), with memories of the war still vivid and everyone concerned about the future, trying to decide what collar they should wear and worried about whether they should stay at university or "go down."  A Question of Upbringing makes both the present and the memories of the past, when crucial choices were made, come alive.

Baseball Rule Changes

Barely did one have a chance to enjoy the start of Spring training when an article appeared in The New York Times by Victor Mather warning us that baseball was experimenting with rule changes in the independent Atlantic League this year.  These include:  robots to call balls and strikes, bases expanded to 18 inches from the current 15, allowing coaches and managers only to the mound when there is a pitching change, moving the pitching mound two feet back, disallowing infield shifts and requiring relief pitchers to pitch to at least three batters.

These proposed rules are an absurd combination of speeding up the games (fewer visits to the mound, fewer pitching changes) and encouraging more hits (no shifts, moving the pitching mound), which will encourage longer games.  In any case all these changes (including the 20-second pitch clock now being used in Spring training games) strike at the heart of what makes baseball such a beautiful game, a game that is not played against the clock.  One suggested change is reducing the time between innings and half-innings by 15 seconds, which is unlikely to happen because it would reduce income from commercials. As for the designated hitter threatened for the National League I would argue instead that it should be removed from the American League:  it ruins pitchers' arms and violates one of the beauties of baseball, the balance of being at bat and in the field.  Fortunately baseball is such a difficult and complex game and salaries have (justifiably) gotten so high that Roger Angell's suggestion that we might eventually have two sets of players on each team --one for hitting and one for fielding, as in football -- is most unlikely.

I return to my own suggestions (see my earlier posts):
1) enforce current rules, especially the one not allowing the batter to step out of the batter's box (this, combined with more complete games by pitchers, is why games were much shorter 45 years ago).

2) make the spitball legal again; this would take some the pressure off pitchers to throw as hard as they can for as long as they can and allow them to go deeper into games.

3) raise the mound back to 15 inches and expand the strike zone to what it was in the 60's, from the shoulders to the knees; this would cut down on boring home runs and encourage hitters to "put the ball in play" (as Reggie Jackson said from the Yankees booth this spring), as well as learning to "hit 'em where they ain't" to defeat the shift.

The Annotated Big Sleep

It is now a commonplace of Chandler criticism that Marlowe represents a knight errant, or wandering knight, archetypal hero of the medieval Arthurian romances.
--Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, Anthony Dean Rizzuto, The Annotated Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler (Vintage, 2018)

I am something of a sucker for annotations of works I like; I own both the Baring-Gould and Klinger annotations of Sherlock Holmes.  Reading the excessive annotation of Chandler's novel, however, I wondered what the point of these annotations is and for whom are they written.  Are the readers of Sherlock Holmes ignorant of the Victoria and Edwardian eras;  if so, why are they reading Doyle in the first place and, if not, do they gain anything from annotations.  Is someone who reads The Big Sleep today unaware of what was happening in 1939, when Chandler's novel was published?  The Hill/Jackson/Rizzuto annotation finds it necessary to define prizefighter, hot toddy and double-breasted and seems to assume that the reader has little or no idea of the prohibition era.

The annotations contain a great deal of information that tries to relate this work of fiction to so-called reality:  there is a lot about Los Angeles (where the novel takes place) geography, on the order of whether such-and-such a street in LA actually existed where the novel says it existed.  There is also much about Chandler's life, including his drinking, and details of the short stories that Chandler published in Black Mask and used as the basis for The Big Sleep.  I fail to see how any of this, interesting as much of it is, enhances one's experience of reading The Big Sleep.

The annotations include a considerable amount of defensiveness in the rather foolish attempt to elevate The Big Sleep, comparing it to Morte d'Arthur, 1001 Nights and Don Quixote, possibly to raise it from a lowly genre status. The beautifully written The Big Sleep stands on its own.

The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship by Alex Beam

Not thinking of the proud world's pleasure,
But cherishing your friendship's claim
I would have wished a finer treasure
To pledge my token to your name

Alexander Pushkin, dedication of Eugene Onegin (translated by James F. Falen, Oxford, 1990)

My impression is that few people remember Edmund Wilson, one of the foremost critics of the 20th Century, and several more remember Vladimir Nabokov, one of the great novelists (and if they do it's mostly for Lolita, 1955).  Least remembered is the falling out that Wilson and Nabokov, once great friends, had over Nabokov's four-volume translation of Alexander Pushkin's 1825 Eugene Onegin -- the translation was only 257 pages out of a total of 1895, the rest was relentless "commentary," footnotes and the original Russian text.  Wilson wrote a review in The New York Review of Books in 1965 which Alex Beam. in The Feud (Pantheon Books, 2016) says "It remains a classic of its genre, the genre being an overlong, spiteful, stochastically accurate, generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job, the yawning, massive load of boiling pitch that inevitably ends up scalding the grinning fiend pouring the hot oil over the battlement as much as it harms the intended victim."  Wilson thought Nabokov's English pretentious and his Russian not so great.  This feud continued until Wilson died in 1972, already being forgotten, while Nabokov lived in splendor in Switzerland until his death in 1977.

Wilson and Nabokov were opposites in many ways and opposites attract, until they don't:  Wilson the literalist and Nabokov the fantasist; Wilson was fascinated by Freud and Marx while Nabokov had no use for either; Wilson was married four times, Nabokov once. Of those who read Eugene Onegin I doubt many use Nabokov's translation; there are a number of other good translations (I like James Falen's) that are not as literal as Nabokov's and there is ultimately no ideal solution to how a poem, or anything else, should be translated.  If the feud over Pushkin represent Nabokov and Wilson at their worst I think Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) and Wilson's To the Finland Station (1940) represent them as great writers at their best. 

Jacques Demy's Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967)

For the vexing yet unmistakable triumph of this movie is that it somehow manages to be both more artificial and more realistic than we expect our musicals to be.
--Jonathan Rosenbaum on Les demoiselles de Rochefort.

I just missed Jacques Demy's film when it came out in 1967 (Andrew Sarris was one of the few critics who liked it) and then it disappeared for years.  It finally returned about ten years ago at the estimable Film Forum and is now available on DVD in an excellent print from Criterion.  It is a very French film, not only realistic and artificial but both pessimistic and optimistic, light and heavy.  Unlike Demy's glorious Les parapluies de Cherbourg this film includes a great deal of dancing, choreographed by Norman Maen.  There is dancing in the streets of Rochefort, pastel costumes and swooping camera movement, Gene Kelly and Catherine Deneuve, George Chakiris and Francoise Dorleac.  It is a film about hope and loss, missed connections and fate, love and despair. The music by Michel Legrand is lovely and the dancing and choreography expressive of the exuberance of those in small towns who want to go to Paris.

I like musicals with lots of dancing and all the movement in Les demoiselles is choreographed by Maen (who mainly worked in television) and directed by Demy, who also wrote the lyrics for the songs. There is even an appreciation for ballet and classical music, as Deneuve and Dorleac run a ballet school and Gene Kelly plays a classical composer.  There are schoolchildren and older men (one of whom turns out to be an axe murderer) and an older woman who runs a café (played by Danielle Darrieux, the only cast member who does her own singing).  There is much happiness, a great deal of melancholy and considerable optimism about the future.

A Fairly Honorable Defeat by Iris Murdoch (1970)

How can one live properly when the beginning of one's actions seem so inevitable and justified while the ends are so completely unpredictable and unexpected?
--Morgan's thoughts in A Fairly Honorable Defeat by Iris Murdoch (Viking Press, 1970)

Murdoch is something of a moral philosopher underneath her mordantly funny tale of intellectuals and aristocrats --homosexual and heterosexual -- in London.  In its use of a symbolic Christlike character-- Tallis (interesting name with religious significance, including a composer of that name who wrote Anglican liturgical music) Murdoch's novel reminds one of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868) and Balthazar(a donkey) in Robert Bresson's film Au Hasard, Balthazar(1966), Christlike characters who take on the burdens of the suffering of others.  And in her satires of upper class intellectuals Murdoch reminds one of Wodehouse and Waugh.

The devil in A Fairly Honorable Defeat, Julius King, takes great pleasure in interfering in the marriage of Hilda and Rupert Foster by tricking Rupert into thinking that he is loved by Hilda's sister Morgan and tricking Morgan into thinking Rupert loves her.  Meanwhile Julius is subtly breaking up lovers Axel and Simon (Rupert's brother) and Peter, the Foster's son, has dropped out of Cambridge and moved in with Tallis, Morgan's former husband, and Tallis's misanthropic father Leonard, who is dying of cancer.

A complex plot with complex characters and complex dialogue are the pleasures of this, and other Murdoch novels, the amusing contrivances always at the service, beneath the surface, of moral observations, functioning as a Shakespearean comedy of errors (" A Midsummer Night's Dream", for instance) as well as a comedy of human behavior, as in the novels of Tobias Smollett.

Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings 1927

DeMille's movies are barnstormers, rooted in Victorian theatre, shamelessly stereotyped and sentimental, but eagerly courting twentieth-century permissiveness, if only solemnly to condemn it.
--David Thomson

Before Alfred Hitchcock became one of the few directors people knew by name the only other ones people might know were Cecil B. DeMille and, possibly, D,W. Griffith; DeMille was known because of his radio show (Lux Radio Theatre) just as Hitchcock was for his TV show.  Few people today know (or care) about DeMille's films, especially his more than eighty silent films.  Many of these early films capture the moods of their time:  Male and Female, Don't Change Your Husband, For Better For Worse (all from 1919), while others express DeMille's passion for biblical epics:  The Ten Commandments(1923) and King of Kings (1927),

King of Kings was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies and it is a beautiful film, with the opening in Mary Magdalena's boudoir and the ending of Christ rising from the dead in gorgeous two-strip technicolor.  H. B. Warner is a serene, self-assured Jesus, often shown in double-exposure among the people and shot in glowing light by cinematographer J. Peverell Marley.  The title cards are almost exclusively quotes from the King James version of the bible and the images show considerable influence from painters, particularly in the crucifixion scenes (Dore and Rubens, among others).  DeMille adds to our literary and visual knowledge of the Christ story with a passionate devotion to the moving images, full of compositions of light and shadow.