Gordon Douglas's Mara Maru (1952)

 I have written previously about Gordon Douglas (Nov 7 2014, Apr 4 2016, May 11 2019), a protean director who worked his way up from short films to well-crafted B genre films;  Westerns, science fiction, melodramas, etc.  He also has shown skill directing low-level actors -- as in Mara Maru -- on their way up (Ruth Roman) and on their way down (Errol Flynn).  Mara Maru (the name of a ship) has a story (by N. Richard Nash and Philip Yordan) that is derivative of a number of other Warner Brothers films, particularly John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950), about a search for a missing treasure.  Errol Flynn, whose dissipated appearance works well for his exhausted character, and Ruth Roman, the ambiguous femme fatale, sail with villain Raymond Burr in the Philippines, looking for lost diamonds.  It's a rather rousing film, the diamonds being found at the bottom of the ocean in a typhoon, turning out to be on a cross missing from a cathedral.  

The dark and beautiful black-and-white cinematography is by Robert Burks, who had done Strangers on a Train for Hitchcock the previous year and would go to do Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958).  The intense score, with its hornpipes and other nautical motifs, is by the prolific Max Steiner.  

Turner Classic Movies Jan. 2021

 Some solid classics in January and quite a number of B movies; nothing particularly new or unusual.

Jan, 1 is McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), a serious comedy.

Jan. 2 has Chaplin's brilliant City Lights (1936) and Hitchcock's hypnotic Vertigo (1958)

Jan. 7 there are three brilliant Lubitsch films:  The Smiling Lieutenant(1931), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Design for Living (1933)

Jan. 9 has Fritz Lang's corrosive The Big Heat (1953)

Jan. 12 has Welles's great Citizen Kane (1941) and McCarey's lovely Love Affair (1939)

Jan. 13 has Preminger's widescreen black-and-white Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)

Jan. 16:  Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956)

Jan. 23: Howard Hawks's Red River (1948)

Jan. 26: Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor (1963)

Jan. 27: Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930)

Jan. 31: Don Siegel's The Killers (1964)

On Pointe, directed by Larissa Bills

 Veteran producer of documentaries Larissa Bills does an impressive job with this six-part documentary about the School of American Ballet, the school Balanchine started when he first came to America in 1934 and had difficulty finding dancers with the speed and attack he needed for his choreography.  There is something of the style of Frederick Wiseman -- the fly on the wall -- but there is identification of everyone: teachers, parents and students.  The darker sides are somewhat downplayed: those who are not promoted, those who have career-ending injuries, etc.  The students who are interviewed are very articulate about their passion for ballet and the parents are very supportive, even though the students may come from far away and not get home often.  I would have put more emphasis on the costs and the salaries (a check a student gets for a performance is displayed but the actual amounts are blurred), as well as the students who are dismissed or drop out.  At one point in the school's history boys were admitted free, but that is not discussed and does not currently seem to be the case.

The teachers, headed by Chairman of Faculty Kay Mazzo, a former NYC Ballet dancer, are firm but gentle with the students, though as an amateur dancer myself I would like to have seen more than just snippets of actual classes.  The series leads up to Balanchine's The Nutcracker, performed every December since 1954 and uses lots of students from the school in various supportive roles.  The students in The Nutcracker are chosen by teachers Dena Abergel and Arch Higgins, who try to de-emphasize competition, i.e., some who don't get cast are too tall for some parts, others too short.  After the triumphs of The Nutcracker in 2019 On Pointe ends on a melancholic note, as the annual older student workshop performance is canceled and the students head home, with classes continuing virtually. 

Frames by Loren Estleman

 Broadhead chuckled. "Thalberg called Von Stroheim a 'footage fetishist' before he ordered the editors to cut it to two hours' maximum running time.  After months of shooting on location in San Francisco and Death Valley, and part of the cast still in the hospital, the studio scrapped seventy-five percent of the feature."

-- Loren Estleman, Frames (Tom Doherty Associates, 2008)

I've read most of Estleman's excellent series about Detroit private detective Amos Walker; Frames is the first of his series about a film archivist in Los Angeles.  In some ways it reminds me of Nicholas Ray's film In a Lonely Place (1950) in that it deals with those on the fringes of Hollywood films:  extras, costumers, etc.  Valentino is a UCLA film student who buys a very run-down theatre to restore to its former glory, which goes back to the days of silent films.  In the theatre he finds an uncut version of Erich Von Stroheim's Greed (1924), originally eight hours of which only the two-hour cut version has survived, a great missing treasure of the silent film era. Unfortunately there is also a skeleton with the cans of film and the police won't release the film until they can find out who was murdered and aren't interested in Valentino's complaints of how valuable and fragile the nitrate film is and how it needs to be immediately transferred to safety stock.  There is considerable suspense as Valentino gets help from the younger student Fanta, an internet expert, and the older professor of film history Kyle Broadhead as they try to solve a decades-old murder before the complete print of Greed deteriorates.

One who doesn't know who Erich von Stroheim was might feel somewhat adrift in this book, but Estleman helpfully includes a useful bibliography and filmography about von Stroheim, Greed and silent film.

On the Move by Oliver Sacks

I had yearned for a house of my own, such as I had rented in Topanga Canyon back in my UCLA days.  And I wanted a house by the water so I could put on swim trunks and sandals and walk straight down to the sea.  So the little red clapboard house on Horton Street, half a block from the beach, was ideal.

--Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (Knopf, 2015)

Sacks's autobiography is both annoying and charming, as autobiographies tend to be.  He is rather full of himself, always lived alone, had no sex for thirty-five years (apparently from 1973, when he was forty, to 2008) and was slow to come to terms with his own homosexuality.  Meanwhile, he published a number of books that effectively combined populism with technical neurology, investigating again and again how the mind works and helping all those he could, while at the same time suffering from shyness and an inability to recognize faces.

Sacks (1933-2015) was a solitary person who nonetheless worked closely with a number of good editors, especially Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, where many of his best essays appeared.  At various points in his life Sacks took lots of drugs, including LSD, which he felt helped him to understand the mind and how to use drugs to help his patients, especially the use of L-dopa to open up the imprisoned minds of of those for whom consciousness had been suspended for many years, something he explored in the book Awakenings, published in 1973.

Sacks was always intellectually curious, which helped overcome his shyness and his risk-taking adventures on motorcycles and hiking.  But what especially comes through in this autobiography is his compassion for his patients and his relentless attempts to understand what is going on in their minds. 

Paul Wendkos and David Goodis's The Burglar (1957)

 I give credit here to writer David Goodis, who adapted his own novel for The Burglar.  The film was made in Philadelphia and Atlantic City by producer Louis Kellman in the hopes of turning the area into a major film production location.  Paul Wendkos, who had worked with Kellman on documentaries, was given his first chance to direct and made an intense film noir on a very low budget.  The films stars Dan Duryea, as the weary leader of a gang of burglars, Martha Vickers, and Jayne Mansfield in her first film.  Wendkos knew Goodis lived in Philadelphia and commissioned him to write the script, which reflects Goodis's sympathy for those down and out and those on the fringes of society.

Nat (Duryea) escaped from an orphanage and got taken in by a burglar who taught Nat his trade and when the burglar died Nat promised to take care of his mentor's daughter, Gladden, played by Mansfield.  Gladden cased the joints that Nat's gang robbed and is eventually sent to Atlantic City to avoid the lurid looks of the other members of the gang; Gladden of course is in love with Nat ("I tore apart my pillow with my teeth thinking of you").  Gladden is seduced by a crooked cop who hooks up with Della (Vickers), who in turn seduces Nat in an attempt to find a valuable necklace that Nat's gang stole. This story of shifting loyalties and betrayals, combined with Wendkos's brash style (considerably influenced by Orson Welles, with its elements of The Lady from Shanghai as well as an opening newsreel like that in Citizen Kane), makes for an effective and fatalistic film noir at a time, more that ten years after the end of World War II, when the film noir was sputtering out.  Credit also goes to cinematographer Don Malkames, a veteran of B films, including Edgar Ulmer's St. Benny the Dip (1951).

Wendkos made several more good genre films (The Case Against Brooklyn, 1958, and the Fred MacMurray Western Face of a Fugitive, 1959) before switching to Gidget movies and television.

Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity, directed by Roger Memos (2015)

This film was made when Marsha Hunt was 98 (she's still around) and most of it consists of her talking about her career and what happened after she was blacklisted in 1950, with supporting comments from Victor Navasky, Norman Lloyd, Valterie Harper and others.  She started making B pictures for Paramount in the thirties -- she made seven films in 1936 -- and then went on the character parts for MGM, with an impressive ability to disappear into her character.  Just before she was blacklisted in 1950 she made some of her best films, some of the few of hers I have seen. working on relatively low-budget independent films with excellent directors:  Anthony Mann's 1948 Raw Deal (a terrific film noir), Edgar Ulmer's Carnegie Hall (1947) and Andre de Toth's  None Shall Escape,1944, a brilliant film that foresaw the Nuremberg trials).

Hunt is impressively vibrant and reflective, describing in non-bitter detail how some of the blacklisted behaved while she stuck to her guns that she had done nothing wrong other than supporting the first amendment and donating to political causes that had nothing to do with the communist party.  She was able to continue working in theatre and television and eventually, when she retired, devoting herself to the United Nations and combatting world hunger. 

Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen (2002)

I'm gradually catching up with Ken Loach's films, sometimes referred to as social realism, sometimes as neo-realism (see my posts of July 16 2017, March 26 2018, Sept. 3 2020).  I tend to see them as influenced by De Sica in their sympathy for those on the fringes of society and by Bresson in the use of non-professional actors.  Sweet Sixteen takes place in Greenrock, Scotland, where Liam (Martin Compston) and his friend Pinball (William Ruane) are trying to make money any way they can, including selling stolen cigarettes.  Liam wants to have a place to live with his single-mother sister and his own mother, currently in prison on a drug charge.  When Liam steals drugs to sell from his abusive grandfather he attracts attention from the local syndicate boss, who recruits him to sell drugs in his large organization.  But everything soon goes wrong and his mother, when she gets out of prison, doesn't want to stay in the flat provided for Liam by the drug czar and leaves to live with a fellow addict.  As Liam turns sixteen his whole world has fallen apart and he doesn't know where to turn.

Loach, writer Paul Laverty and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd paint an intelligent and sympathetic portrait of young people in Scotland who have nowhere to go and have to struggle on their own with the often grim reality of the world, constantly stymied by authorities and bureaucracies. 

David Fincher's Mank (2020)

 I enjoyed David Fincher's Mank as something of a take on 1930's Hollywood, though one would be mistaken if one took it too literally.  For one thing, it seems to suggest that Herman Mankiewicz was solely responsible for the script of Citizen Kane, even though this theory of Pauline Kael's has been thoroughly debunked numerous times (see my posts of Feb.5, 2018 and Nov. 13, 2019 as well as Joseph McBride's posts at wellesnet.com).  And even if this theory were true it wouldn't make any difference, since most of the great Hollywood directors -- John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, et al. -- did not write their own scripts but collaborated quite closely with those who did.  And, for that matter, how different is David Fincher's film from his father Jack's script (Jack died in 2003)?

Mank is beautifully filmed in black-and-white by cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt and has quite an interest in the 1934 race for governor of California, when Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, insisted that his employees donate to the campaign of Frank Merriam, the Republican candidate, and even produced fake newsreels and radio ads undermining socialist candidate Upton Sinclair.  Herman Mankiewicz was a regular gambler and lost his bet to Mayer that Sinclair would win, later denouncing Mayer during dinner at San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, the alcoholic Mankiewicz never afraid to burn his bridges, especially when inebriated.

Many characters come and go in Mank, though Orson Welles's appearances are few, as  are producer John Houseman's, but Gary Oldman as a shambling Herman is at the center of everything as he works on the script of Citizen Kane, eventually sharing an Oscar with Welles for screenwriting in 1941 and dying in 1953.

Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1965)

 Martin Beck took the night train and arrived in Vaxjo at 6:30 a.m.  It was still dark and the air was mild and hazy. He walked through the streets and watched the city awaken.  At a quarter of eight he was back at the railroad station.  He had forgotten his galoshes and the dampness had begun to penetrate the thin soles of his shoes.  He bought a newspaper at the kiosk and read it, sitting on a bench in the waiting room with his feet up against a radiator.  After a while he went out, looked for a cafe which was open, drank some coffee and waited.

--Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo. Roseanna, translated from the Swedish by Lois Roth (Random House, 1967)

Every six or seven years I reread Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald and Dashiell Hammett.  This year I've been inspired by Wendy Lesser (see my post of Oct. 16 this year) to reread the ten detective novels of Sjowall and Wahloo, that I have not read since they originally were published from 1965 to 1975.  Part of their appeal, like the other four writers I mentioned, is that the detective work was done before cell phones and computers but, also, Wahloo and Sjowall are engaged politically, their work includes details about the good and bad in Swedish society.

Roseanna is the first in this series, with Inspector Martin Beck the lead detective.  He is an interesting and flawed character, stuck in a marriage "that had slipped into a fairly dull routine" and constantly nauseated by crowds, subways and coffee.  A girl has turned up dead in a canal and it takes many weeks before they can find out who she is.  Sjowall and Wahloo follow Beck's investigation in fascinating detail until they finally find out who she is and what she was doing on a canal boat.  When they find out who she was -- a tourist from America -- they have to track down what boat she was on, who else was on it and if any of the other passengers have photographs or film.  They only find a lead suspect by accident, as a  policeman sees a customer in a cafe whose photograph with Roseanna was widely distributed by Beck and his staff.  They then track the suspect for weeks and finally bait a trap with an undercover policewoman.

Solving the mystery only makes Beck feel melancholic, for both the policewoman they put in danger and for Roseanna herself:  "They had all sat in their offices in Motala and Stockholm and Lincoln, Nebraska, and solved this case by means that could never be made public.  They would always remember it, but hardly with pride."

La tete d'un homme: novel by Geroges Simenon, film by Julian Duvivier

"Don't forget that Radek had nothing to expect from life.  He was not even sure he could hold out until his sickness swept him away.  Perhaps he would be reduced to jumping in the Seine one night when he no longer had enough small change to pay for his cafe au lait."

Maigret speaking in Georges Simenon's La tete d'un homme (1931)

 La tete d'un homme was one of ten novels about Inspector Jules Maigret that Simenon wrote in 1931 and the third to be made into a film (see my post of June 8, 2016 about La nuit du carrefour).  Director Duvivier took Simenon's novel and reassembled it into a more linear form, with Maigret's role somewhat diminished, though the story remained unchanged.  Simenon's novel starts with Maigret engineering Joseph Heurtin's escape from jail, with Maigret convinced that Heurtin did not do the murder for which he was convicted -- no motive -- and that Heurtin would lead him to the real murderer.  The film begins with the murder, for which a man named Radek has cleverly framed Heurtin.  Heurtin does lead Maigret to Radek and a cat-and-mouse game, reminiscent of Dostoevsky, begins.

Duviver uses wipes and tilted camera angles to achieve the disorienting effects of Simenon's prose, where nothing is quite what it seems.  Maigret is played by Harry Baur, an actor in a number of Duvivier's films, and the murderer Radek is effectively played by Valery Inkijinoff.  The cinematography is by French veteran Armand Thirard. The film is one of dozens made from Simenon's novels.

Cory Finley's Bad Education (2020)

 This is the time of year when movie ten-best lists are emerging.  I do look at these lists to see what I may have missed during the year and try. to some extent, to fill in the gaps.  In most cases the contemporary films I haven't seen aren't any better than the ones I have, most of them looking as though D.W. Griffith had never lived.  I did find an exception this year, however, on Richard Lawson's (of Vanity Fair) list:  Bad Education.  This is film is playwright Cory Finley's second film (his first was Thoroughbreds in 2017, which I haven't seen); it's a beautifully structured film successful both as a human drama and as implied criticism of many of our questionable educational practices.  It takes place on Long Island in 2004 when school superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) and accountant Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) stole more than eleven million dollars from the school's budget, mostly to buy luxury houses and cars and take exotic vacations.  

The film was written by Mike Makowsky, who had been in middle school in Roslyn when the scandal broke, and photographed by Lyle Vincent, whose garish color cinematography captures Long Island as effectively as Janney's accent.  The real heroine of the story is school newspaper reporter Rachel Bhargava (Geraldine Viswanathan), who exposes Tassone's embezzlement even after he threatens her when she inadvertently knocks on the door of his Park Avenue apartment, an address where a supposed supplier had received money.  The key to Tassone's success as an embezzler was his ability to recruit good teachers that helped get students into Ivy League colleges which, in turn, made the school district popular and helped hike the cost of houses, the head of the school board being a real estate wheeler-dealer.  That high SAT scores and admission to an Ivy League school are positive symbols of an education is what leads to scandals such as the recent briberies in California and this film is an example of where such distorted views can lead and the damage that results. 

The Crooked Hinge by John Dickson Carr

"And do you think I like what I am doing?" asked Dr. Fell.  "Do you think I like one word I've said or one move I've had to make?  Everything I've told you about the woman and her private witch-cult and her relations with Farnleigh was true.  Everything.  She inspired the murderer and directed the murder.  The only difference is that she did not kill her husband.  She did not make the automaton work and she was not the person in the garden."

John Dickson Carr, The Crooked Hinge, Penzler Publishers (originally published in 1938)

Kudos to Otto Penzler for publishing The Crooked Hinge, part of his estimable publishing effort to bring back out-of-print mysteries.  John Dickson Carr, an American who lived mostly in England, published seventy-five novels between 1930 and his death in 1977.  Many of these novels are "impossible" or "locked room" mysteries which strain plausibility, something that adds to one's pleasure reading them today.  Unfortunately most of Carr's work remains out-of-print currently, never having the readership of Agatha Cristie or other contemporaries, possibly because his "detectives," such as Gideon Fell, didn't interest Carr as much as the details of the puzzles and the personalities involved.  The Crooked Hinge is wonderfully detailed and complex, proceeding from an incident during the sinking of the Titantic to an imposter posing as Sir John Fairleigh and an automaton two hundred years old.  

Turner Classic Movies Dec. 2020

Plenty of Christmas films, Hitchcock and Laurel and Hardy this month.

Dec. 3 is Rudolph Mate's corrosive film noir D.O.A. (1950)

Dec. 4 is Fritz Lang's beautiful period piece Moonfleet (1955)

Dec. 5 is Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) with downbeat Christmas elements.

Dec. 6 is Howard Hawks's musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe

Dec. 8 is John Ford's Mogambo (1953)

Dec. 10 is Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940)

Dec. 12 is Ford's The Three Godfathers (1949).

Dec. 13 is Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Judy Garland sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas") and Leo McCarey's moving Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

Dec. 16  is Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)

Dec. 17 Otto Preminger's film noir Angel Face (1953) and Leo McCarey's Going My Way (1944)

Dec. 18 Mitch Leisen's Remember the Night (1940, written by Preston Sturges)

Dec. 20 is Lubitsch's lovely The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Dec. 23 is Douglas Sirk's ironic Christmas card All That Heaven Allows (1955). 

Frank Tuttle's Suspense

 Frank Tuttle was a journeyman director who could make good movies when he had good material (see my post on 1942's This Gun for Hire).  For Suspense he had a good bunch of actors, including ice skater Belita and Barry Sullivan as leads and Eugene Pallette (this is his last film; he had started in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation in 1915), Bonita Granville and Albert Dekker in supporting roles.  The script was an original by Philip Yordan and the cinematographer was Karl Struss, who had photographed Murnau's Sunrise in 1927 and later, in 1952, did Chaplin's Limelight.

Unfortunately this film was produced by the notoriously stingy King Brothers for the even more stingy Monogram studio, although they did make it one of their most prestigious pictures. Belita had a number of skating numbers which were beautifully choregraphed by Nick Castle, though they had little to do with the plot,  Barry Sullivan effectively plays a bum who works his way up from a peanut vendor to ice palace owner Dekker's assistant and falls in love with Belita,  who is married to Dekker.  Dekker disappears and comes after Sullivan, who kills Dekker and then is shot by his former lover Granville, who has the goods on him from his time in New York.

This should have made a pretty good film noir but director Tuttle loses focus and directs rather slackly, probably caught between the demands of the producers and those of the studio.  Thanks to Karl Struss the film is appropriately dark and shadowy, though lacking in fatalism; there is also little suspense, except when Belita skates through a circle of knives. 

Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark

 In the annals of literary Wagnerism, Willa Cather occupies a category all her own.

--Alex Ross. Wagnerism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)  

The summer went well beyond her hopes, however.  She told herself it was the best summer of her life, so far.  Nobody was sick at home, and her lessons were uninterrupted.  Now that she had four pupils of her own and made a dollar a week, her practising was regarded more seriously by her household.  Her mother had always arranged things so that she could have the parlour four hours a day in the summer.

Thea's life at the Ottenberg ranch was simple and full of life, like the days themselves.  She awoke every morning when the first fierce shafts of sunlight darted through the curtainless windows of the room at her ranch-house.  After breakfast she took her lunch-basket and went down to the canyon.  Usually she did not return until sunset.

--Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915)

The Song of the Lark is a beautifully told story of Thea Kronborg's travel from a small town in Colorado to a successful life as an opera singer, especially of Wagner.  She has some good teachers in Moonstone, where she grew up in a Swedish family, and loves the plains as well as the music in the small Mexican community in the town.  From there she is able to go to Chicago to study, then spends time with her boyfriend in Arizona, exploring the cliff dwellings of Native Americans, and eventually to Germany to study before returning to America.  

Cather suggests parallels between the beauty of the American landscape and the power and beauty of Wagner's music, among other important influences on Kronberg's life, with its many sacrifices for her art.  She almost marries, until she discovers that her lover, Fred Ottenberg, is already married and can't escape (though an epilogue suggests that they eventually do marry).  At the end of the novel Kronborg sings Sieglinde in Wagner's Die Walkure and all the important influential figures in her life are there. 

Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (1987)

 Near Dark is the best example of a new approach to the vampire film since George Romero's Martin (1977):  there are no fangs, stakes through the heart, garlic, crosses or empty mirrors in this film of a band of vampires traveling through Oklahoma and Texas, sometime using sexy Mae (Jenny Wright) to "recruit" new members by seducing them and biting them in the neck.  The one thing these vampires, led by Jeese Hooker (the always-creepy Lance Henriksen), are afraid of is the sunlight.  Mae bites young rancher Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) and he joins the group, but never makes his first kill and is rescued by his father when the vampires try to take Caleb's sister Sarah (Marcie Leeds); Caleb's father (Tim Thomerson) transfuses Caleb's blood (a new method of rescuing a vampire, by screenwriters Bigelow and Eric Red) and the Coltons destroy the vampire band by exposing them to sunlight.

Most of Near Dark takes place at night (of course) and the scenes of violence in truck stops and bars are effectively choreographed by Bigelow and slickly shot by cinematographer Adam Greenberg to the sounds of country music and a modern score by Tangerine Dream.  

Alfred Ziesler's Fear (1946)

 Fear is a victim of its own ambitions; director Alfred Ziesler tries to do too much with too little in this low-budget programmer for Poverty Row studio Monogram.  To some extent Ziesler succeeds, with the help of art director Frank Sylvos, who did Phil Karlson's noir 99 River Street, and cinematographer Jackson Rose, who photographed Edward L. Cahn's Destination Murder in 1950 (see my posts on both the Cahn and Karlson films).  The limited sets are simple and gritty, even if everything looks as if it were taking place in a corner somewhere, while the camera often moves effectively to close-ups rather than cutting and Ziesler directs "stars" Peter Cookson, Anne Gwynne and Warren William appropriately in this world of hash houses and rooming houses, students and pawn brokers, based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Cookson is out of money for food, room and student tuition in his last year of medical school.  He robs and kills a professor who is also a pawnbroker and receives the next day a check for $1000 from "The Periodical Review" for a Nietzschean article about how some people are above the law.  The article is read by detective Warren Willian and a cat-and-mouse game begins, with Cookson so tormented he considers suicide before confessing to his girlfriend Anne Gwynne and then getting killed as he crosses a street against the light; then he wakes up and it's all been a bad dream.  Perhaps Monogram felt it was still too close to the end of the war for a downbeat ending and perhaps Ziesler was influenced by the similar ending of Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window from 1944; American Ziesler had known Lang when Ziesler had worked in Germany, before they both fled the Nazis.

John P. Marquand's Your Turn, Mr. Moto (1935)

 "Yes," Mr. Moto nodded, "yes, I think you do, so I may be correspondingly frank.  A paper, a plan, to be exact, has been abstracted from our naval archives.  It is probably now in the hands of some power.  My government is simply anxious to learn what power.  If you can find out for me that the United States navy is familiar with the plans of a certain new type of Japanese battleship, that is all I wish of you.  Do you understand?"

John P. Marquand, Your Turn, Mr. Moto (1935, republished by Penzler Publishers 2020)

When the author of the Charlie Chan novels, Earl Derr Biggers, died in 1933 The Saturday Evening Post was looking for someone to write similar stories about another Asian and Marquand, known as the author of popular middlebrow novels (his The Late George Apley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938), took the job.  Your Turn, Mr. Moto was serialized first and then published in 1935.  Mr. Moto was a somewhat inscrutable Asian but was not much like Charlie Chan; Moto was a spy for Imperial Japan. His appearances in the novel are rather brief, as he tries to get American aviator Casey Lee to help him by promising him a plane to fly from Japan to the U.S., after the cigarette company who was the original sponsor of the flight canceled it when Casey gave a drunken press conference. Aiding first Moto then Casey is the exotic Russian Sonya Karaloff, who is trying to retrieve a secret formula her late father has hidden in China, something the Chinese wheeler-dealer Wu Lai-fu is also interested in. The story moves swiftly and sometimes violently through Japan and China, as Casey flees for his life though the portholes of ships and the windows of nightclubs.

Mr. Moto, played by Peter Lorre, was in a number of movies after the Charlie Chan movies petered out at poverty row studio Monogram; the best of the Mr. Moto movies were directed by Norman Foster, later an associate of Orson Welles.  The movies were not closely related to the books, with Moto becoming more like Charlie Chan.  The last Mr. Moto movie with Peter Lorre was in 1939; a final one starring Henry Silva was made in 1965.

Ray Milland's A Man Alone 1955

 Ray Milland's first directing effort was an iconic and intelligent Western.  Its title could have been used by many of the great directors of Westerns from whom Milland learned: Hawks, Ford, Anthony Mann, Boetticher, etc.  And the theme of an innocent man accused of murder was something Milland learned from Hitchcock, for whom he worked in both film and television; the sense of fatalism was perhaps learned from Fritz Lang, for whom he also worked.  Milland plays a gunfighter lost in the desert and when he finally gets to a town he is accused of murdering the passengers on a stagecoach, a job actually done by Lee Van Cleef on orders from crooked banker Raymond Burr.  Milland hides out in the cellar of a house where the sheriff (Ward Bond, from John Ford's stock company) is quarantined for yellow fever and nursed by his daughter (Mary Murphy).

A Man Alone was made for ailing Republic Pictures in their color process Trucolor, a process used effectively by Milland, with the help of veteran cinematographer Lionel Linden and art director Walter Keller, with its palette of mostly blue and brown. (John Ford, who made The Quiet Man for Republic in 1952, refused to use Trucolor for that film, possibly because it didn't accurately record green).  The poignant music is by Victor Young and used movingly in private moments, as when Bond explains to Murphy how he had been corrupted by Burr in order to have enough money to raise her after her mother died and their ranch went bust. 

Ward Bond recovers enough to help Milland escape but Milland comes back to town to rescue Bond from a lynching and to prove who was responsible for the stagecoach murders.  Murphy and Milland are in love and decide to stay in the "rotten" town because, as Milland says, "Who knows if this town is any worse than the next one."

Rob Garver's What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2019)

 Rob Garver's film tries to salvage what he can of Pauline Kael's writing career, from her mocking of Chaplin's Limelight in 1953 to her comparison of Last Tango in Paris in 1972 to the premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and her book Raising Kane, which was full of factual errors and uncredited research from UCLA's Howard Suber.  In 1980 Renata Adler skewered Kael's book When the Lights Go Down in the New York Review of Books as "worthless," pointing out her bullying and the use of the totalitarian "we." 

The film is full of talking heads: directors she championed loved her while those she criticized hated her.  She gathered around her a number of acolytes who were called "Paulettes" and if they agreed with her views she would promote them for jobs as film critics.  Her prose style is as dated as the films of the directors she praised when she was a critic at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991: DePalma, Peckinpah, Scorsese and Coppola. Her knowledge of film history was sketchy at best and she preferred violence and sex to intelligence and perception, though she did occasionally praise Godard, without apparently realizing how indebted he was to directors she intensely disliked, including Hawks, Hitchcock and John Ford.

Brian Kellow's biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (2011; I'm not sure if the irony of the title was intended) captures Kael's life in all its contradictions and conflicts of interest, including her brief, short-lived and disastrous detour to work at filmmaking with Warren Beatty.  If I had to guess why so many people seemed to like her "criticism" I would say it was because she posited herself as the most articulate member of the audience, therefore those who agreed with her had a ready answer if they were asked why they liked a particular film. This is not everyone's idea of what a "critic" should be; my own view is that good criticism enables one to learn and think for oneself.

Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt (2013)

 The furor over Arendt's  Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil has largely diminished, though it is still mentioned occasionally in Commentary and other publications.  The book first appeared in The New Yorker in early 1963 when I was in my first year at Exeter and everyone there was discussing it; it was my initial encounter with The New Yorker and with passionate intellectual arguments after leaving my anti-intellectual town of Hudson, N.Y. and the arid atmosphere of Hudson High. If philosophical arguments interest you at all I would strongly recommend reading Hannah Arendt's book before seeing von Trotta's film.

Barbara Sukowa as Hannah captures all the complex and intricate details of Arendt's life and personality, from her infatuation and affair with her teacher Martin Heidegger -- who became a Nazi sympathizer -- to her escape from Nazi-occupied France and her teaching and writing career in New York.  When her articles about the Eichmann trial first appeared Arendt was accused of attacking "her own people" and her rejection of this accusation (because she pointed out the complicity of some Jewish leaders) emphasized that she didn't love some abstract idea of "people," she loved her friends. Editor William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson) courageously defends Arendt from attacks by Norman Podhoretz and Lionel Trilling, among others.

Von Trotta's film (cinematography by Caroline Champetier) effectively captures the turmoil of the New York intelligentsia in the 60's, where Arendt and her friend Mary McCarthy fought to establish their intellectual independence. 

Joseph Losey's The Finger of Guilt (1956)

 Losey made The Finger of Guilt (British title: The Intimate Stranger), along with screenwriter Howard Koch, in England after they were both blacklisted in America.  Losey's film is something of an allegory about his own experiences, though like the best allegories it works effectively in a strictly narrative sense.  Reggie Wilson (Richard Basehart) leaves America to make a film in England after a scandal involving a studio head's wife.  Shortly after Wilson starts a new film under producer Ben Case (Roger Livesey, who appeared in films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) he marries Case's daughter Lesley (Faith Brook).  Wilson starts getting harassing letters from Evelyn Stewart (Mary Murphy); she claims they were lovers and that he convinced her to come to England;  Reggie and Lesley track her down in Newcastle.  Reggie can't remember her at all -- he thinks he is going crazy -- while Lesley is convinced enough to leave Reggie as Ben Case cancels his film, ostensibly for budgetary reason.

A relatively low-budget movie, The Finger of Guilt is shot on location in London and Newcastle in black-and-white by cinematographer Gerald Gibbs and written by Koch (one of the writers for Casablanca in 1942) and reflects their own confusion about having to leave America to work in England, as well as Losey's continued discontents about society reflected in such films as The Prowler (1951) and The Boy with the Green Hair (1948) in America and his later films written by Harold Pinter.

My Friend Maigret by Georges Simenon

 There was such a Sunday atmosphere that it was almost nauseating.  Maigret liked to claim, half serious, half joking, that he always had the ability to sniff out Sundays from the depths of his bed, without even having to open his eyes.

--Georges Simenon, Mon ami Maigret (Penguin, 1949, translated by Shaun Whiteside)

In one of the longer Maigret novels he travels to the island Porquerolles, off the southern coast of France where a man named Marcellin had mentioned Maigret's name shortly before he was killed.  Maigret is accompanied by Inspector Pyke of Scotland Yard, who has come to France to study Maigret's method.  Of course Maigret has no special "method; " he just digs everywhere until he eventually comes up with an answer.  Porquerolles is full of suspects, those who have come by boat from other countries and have ended up staying indefinitely, struck by "polquerollitis," an affliction of the quiet and slow pace of the island.

There is much drinking of wine and beer as Maigret gradually interrogates all of Marcellin's friends and is fortunate enough to talk to Algae, the woman who runs the post office where everyone on the island goes to make phone calls.  Algae listens to most of the phone calls and is able to give Maigret enough information about them to help him track down the killers. Maigret even rediscovers Ginette, who was Marcellin's girlfriend whom Maigret had helped get into rehab, and they become friends.  

Maigret and Mr. Pyke took the Comoran at five o'clock and Ginette was on it, as well as Charlot and his dancer, and all the tourists who had spent the day on the beaches of the island.

Hollywood Double Agent: The True Tale of Boris Morros, Film Producer Turned Cold War Spy by Jonathan Gill

 As a classical musician, Boris had wanted to get to Carnegie Hall since childhood, and if practice wouldn't take him there, the movies now would.

--Jonathan Gill, Hollywood Double Agent (Abrams, 2020).

We may consider Carnegie Hall a happy-ending sequel to Detour.

--Noah Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California Press, 2014) 

Reading Jonathan Gill's account of Morros's production of Carnegie Hall (1947) I noticed something missing, namely, the director Edward G. Ulmer.  I wrote about Isenberg's book on Ulmer back on Oct. 1, 2014, in which he puts Carnegie Hall in the center of Ulmer's career, one of his more personal and larger-budget films, in which Ulmer shows his knowledge and love of both classical music and jazz, with performers from Arthur Rubinstein to Harry James. Isenberg mentions Morros as producer but otherwise gives him no credit for the film.  This difference of approaches to the film demonstrates a continuing gap in film writing as to who gets credit for a film, the director ("when William Wyler made Wuthering Heights ...") to the producer (Samuel Goldwyn:  "William Wyler didn't make Wuthering Heights, I did.  Wyler only directed it") and attempts to determine who gets credit for what in such a collaborative medium continues.

Morros produced five movies after he left his job as music director at Paramount in 1940.  He had left Russia after the revolution, made his way to Turkey and then in 1922 to America.  He was a trained classical musician and gradually found work in Hollywood, where the studios were run by people like him, emigre Jews. Morros struggled as an independent producer and then ran a successful record business, all the time working for the Soviet Union.  Morros became a spy unwillingly, in order to protect his parents and his siblings still in Russia.  Mostly he hired Soviet operatives to work for his companies as cover; whether he actually gave the Soviet Union anything of value is questionable.  When his Soviet handlers refused to finance his record company and his attempts to establish himself in television he went to the FBI in 1947 and became a double agent, receiving significant payments from the FBI for his work.  By 1957 the Soviet Union knew what he was doing and he just barely escaped a kidnapping that would have brought him to trial in Russia.  From then until his death in 1962 Morros testified before Congressional committees and helped the FBI track down spies.

Gill's book is full of details about Hollywood during WWII and the Cold War.  Morros was often homesick for Russia but subscribed to no ideology other than making money and living well under capitalism. 

Turner Classic Movies Nov. 2020

 A pretty good month for Hitchcock and Hawks, as well as leftovers from Halloween and some pre-code gems.

Nov. 4th has Margarette Von Trotta's fascinating film Hannah Arendt (2013) and Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), a gangster movie that made Bogart a star.

Nov. 5 has Joseph Losey's Finger of Guilt (1956) and two movies with superb Bernard Herrmann scores:  Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and Joseph Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947).

Nov. 6:  Chaplin's The Circus (1928)

Nov. 7:  John Ford's Civil War film The Horse Soldiers (1959)

Nov. 9:  Frank Borzage's romantic The Circle (1925) and two rare films from Julien Duvivier: La Tette d'un Home (1933) and Un Carnet du Bal (1937)

Nov. 12:  Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (1952)

Nov. 14:     Nicholas Ray's film noir In a Lonely Place (1952) and Howard Hawks's Ball of Fire (1942)

Nov. 16:  Andrei Tarkovsky's mysterious and beautiful Solaris (1972) and Robert Wise's downbeat Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

Nov. 18: Otto Preminger's beautiful musical Carmen Jones (1954)

Nov. 22: Robert Aldrich's corrosive Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Mark Sandrich's Rogers/Astaire musical The Gay Divorcee (1934)

Nov. 23: Howard Hawks's Western Red River

Nov. 30: Raoul Walsh's intense gangster film White Heat (1949)

Edward L. Cahn's Destination Murder (1950).

 I've written a great deal about Edward L. Cahn on this blog  (Nov 21 2014, Mar. 26 2016, Oct. 31 2016, Feb. 5 2017, Jan 13 2019, Apr. 22 2019, Sept. 27 2019); not only do I enjoy his films but he made so many of them, 127, from Law and Order in 1932 to Beauty and the Beast in 1962, most of them low-budget and obscure, that I still continue to seek them out.  Destination Murder recently showed up on the film noir series on Turner Classic Movies, hosted by the knowledgeable Eddie Muller.

Destination Murder is a dark and disturbing film, with cinematography by B veteran Jackson Rose and an original screenplay by Don Martin, who wrote Gerd Oswald's excellent B Western The Brass Legend (1956). It is an impressive variation on the film noir genre with a good girl (Joyce Mackenzie), a bad girl (Myrna Dell) and two bad guys (Albert Dekker and Hurd Hatfield).  It starts out with Jackie Wales (Stanley Clements) leaving a film during intermission to get his date some popcorn and having Armitage (Dekker) drive him to a house where he shoots a man and then gets back in five minutes to bring his girl popcorn!  The murdered man's daughter, Laura Mansfield (Mackenzie) recognizes Wales in a line-up but he has an alibi, so Laura dates him to try to get evidence.  When Wales goes to get more money from Dekker he is beaten up to the loud music of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a tinkly player piano.  And then the plot gets even more complicated, as Stretch Norton convinces Armitage to kill Wales and Alice Winterworth (Dell), who are trying to blackmail him.  After Wales's death Laura falls for Stretch, not realizing that he is actually Armitage's boss and was the mastermind behind the death of Laura's father.

Each character is double-crossing somebody else, as Armitage lives in luxury while always referring to himself in the third person, Stretch Norton talks about his hatred of women (suggesting that something is going on between Armitage and him), while Laura gets a job as a cigarette girl at the Vogue, Armitage and Norton's nightclub, which has a young African-American woman in charge of employees and an excellent Black jazz band, Steve Gibson and the Redcaps, which performs "I'm All Alone," something that describes each of the film's protagonists. This film is a good example of what Manny Farber called "termite art," as opposed to the more pretentious "white elephant art," a film not trying to win any Oscars.  Although the film is a low-budget B film Cahn and cinematographer Rose bring to it a precise eye for lighting and composition and Cahn's direction moves swiftly in this seventy-two minute film. 

John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

When Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) says at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, "wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there" it makes clear what a radically populous film this is, especially today.  It looks back to the landowners who drove people out of their homes during the Great Famine in Ireland and forward to today's Mexican migrant workers. The film, written by Nunnally Johnson, is fairly faithful to John Steinbeck's novel about Okies traveling to California from the Dust Bowl, exemplified by the sprawling Joad family, and represented by John Ford's stock company, including everyone from John Qualen and Ward Bond to Jack Pennick.  It is beautifully photographed in black-and-white by Gregg Toland (who was the cinematographer for Citizen Kane the following year), with its subtly lit deep-focus shots of an American journey from Oklahoma to California that evoke the work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

The film is sometimes maudlin and sentimental and has a certain ponderousness common to Ford's more political films, e.g., The Informer (1935), and there is too much emphasis on Tom and his mother (Jane Darwell) to the exclusion of the rest of the family, to the extent one loses track of them.  John Carradine is the other standout character, a minister who has lost his faith and is trying to find meaning in the randomness of life.  The one place of refuge the Joads find on their journey is a camp run by the government, where there is a dance on Saturday nights and no cops are allowed without a warrant, and Tom wonders why there aren't more such camps.

Family-Friendly New York City Ballet, steaming Oct. 24, 2020.

 It's not just children who sometimes want a story at the ballet, many adults say the same when I recommend Balanchine's "abstract" ballets (most of which do have a story of sorts, just not always accessible or on the surface) so I understand the reasons for the short program of "stories."  First up was the opening of Jerome Robbins Fanfare, from 1953, with music from Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (based on a theme from Purcell), an unusually didactic piece with multiple dancers costumed as strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion, all verbally introduced before brief and amusing short pieces; in the remainder of the ballet (which we did not see) the way they are integrated into the orchestra is illustrated.

This was followed by Balanchine's funny and moving The Steadfast Tin Soldier, with Erica Pereira and Daniel Ullbricht.  The awkwardness of an evolving relationship is effectively evoked -- to the music of Bizet's Jeux d'Enfants -- until the doll is swept into the fire by the wind, only the heart that the soldier had given her survives. This performance does not quite convey the humor that I remember from when I saw Patricia McBride and Baryshnikov dance it in the late 70's but it does have the poignancy of the original Hans Christian Andersen story.

The last two pieces are excerpts from Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, with music by Mendelssohn, from 1962.  First is the donkey pas de deux, where Puck causes Titania to fall in love with a donkey; this was both amusing and touching, danced by Sara Mearns and Preston Chamblee.  The second excerpt is the scherzo, led by Anthony Huxley as Oberon and Claire Von Enck as a butterfly.  This allegro piece builds and builds, helped beautifully by multiple pirouettes and energetic performances by all the kids from the school, as butterflies and fireflies.  The complete ballet is one of my (now nine years old) daughter's favorites and I have written about it several times on this blog.

The Carter of La Providence by Georges Simenon

"That's it!  I can feel it!" said Maigret, the words now coming faster, as if he were being rushed along by them.  Face to face with the woman who had been his wife, Jean the carter, who had virtually forgotten Doctor Darchambeux, had begun to remember, and mists of the past rose to meet him.  And a strange plan had started to take shape.  Was it vengeance?  Not really.  More an obscure desire to bring down to his level the woman who had promised to be his for the rest of their lives.

 -- Georges Simenon, The Carter of La Providence (1931, Penguin, translated by David Coward)

The Carter of La Providence was one of ten novels about Inspector Maigret that Simenon published in 1931, when Maigret first appeared.  A carter is one in charge of the horses that pull a boat through the canals of France; La Providence is the name of a boat on a canal near the Marne in northwestern France.  A murder takes place near the town of Dizy and Inspector Maigret of the Flying Squad is sent to investigate, as the violence increases.  Maigret is obdurate, following ships on the canal by bicycle for many kilometers, usually in the rain, staying at working class cafes and sleeping in rooms with "a slightly nauseating smell."  Maigret's attention to detailed is matched by Simenon's detailed descriptions of life on the boats and the lives of those who work on and near the locks. The killer turns out to be similar to some of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes characters, someone who was betrayed by a woman when he was incarcerated and moved from the upper classes to the lower, class usually playing a significant role in Simenon's novels. 

 

New York City Ballet Virtual Fall Season: Oct. 13, 2020

 Balanchine first heard the 1932 Duo Concertant, composed immediately after Stravinsky's 1931 Concerto in D for violin and orchestra, in France shortly after it was written.  The two instruments contribute equally to the interchange, for this is not merely a violin piece accompanied by piano.  And in this ballet more than any other, Balanchine affirms the music's primacy in a stunning way.

Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky and Balanchine: a journey of invention (Yale University Press, 2002).

Duo Concertant was the most successful piece of Oct. 13, if for no other reason than that it was the only complete piece among excerpts.  The ballet starts with dancers Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley standing by violinist Arturo Delmoni and pianist Elaine Chelton in the opening Cantilene, the first of five movements, because Balanchine wanted the audience to listen, "to really listen," and the two dancers come back to the musicians after each movement, as they explore the music and each other, with some unusual spotlights at the end. For those of us who like Stravinsky this is one of Balanchine's loveliest ballets to his music; it was originally done for the Stravinsky festival of 1972,  a year after Stravinsky's death.

The excerpts included on Oct. 13 suffered somewhat from being excerpts, since each movement of a Balanchine ballet is closely related to the other movements. The first movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet (choreographed by Balanchine in 1966 to a Brahms piano quartet orchestrated by Schoenberg in 1937) was beautifully danced by Ashley Bouder and Russell Janzen, especially the part where Janzen did an elegant series of tour jetes in a circle around Bouder,  and the final movement of Symphony in C, choreographed in 1947 by Balanchine, was as exciting as ever, with fifty-two dancers on stage, led by Erica Pereira and Troy Schumacher.  As for Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering, the less said about this exercise in misanthropy and misogyny the better. 

Murder By the Numbers by Max Allan Collins

Past midnight, on a Thursday night, in a black business district on Carnegie, not far from the east side market, Angelo Scarlise exited the alley next to the Elite Cabaret, wiping the blood off his hands with a hanky.  The night was dark and cold and not a soul was on the street, but the Elite was open, and so was the restaurant next door, Pig Foot Heaven, out of which came smells so foul Angelo thought he might puke.  A few other storefronts were open on these couple of blocks; several bars, a barbecue stand, and a barbershop-numbers drop, where the "hep cats" paid to get their kinky hair straightened ("conked") by a mixture of Vaseline and potash lye.

--Max Allen Collins, Murder By the Numbers (St. Martin's Press, 1993). 

Murder By the Numbers was the last of four books Collins has written about Eliot Ness's time as safety director of Cleveland. The research Collins and associates put into this work eventually resulted in a work of nonfiction that I wrote about on Sept. 20th of this year and I must say I prefer Collins's pulp poetry to his rather dry nonfiction.  Murder By the Numbers takes place in Cleveland in the thirties as Ness tries to undo the white takeover of the Black numbers game (also called "policy" because money was used for gambling instead of insurance).  Cleveland was a very segregated city at the time and Ness had recruited and promoted Black policemen to work in the Negro neighborhoods.  Ness was not interested in destroying the numbers business but was interested in stopping the violence caused by the whites who tried to take it over.

Collins does a terrific job in the genre of "true crime fiction," -- using real people and names in a detective story -- and vividly captures the details of the denizens, streets, criminals and police in 1930's Cleveland.

Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery by Wendy Lesser

 What matters to me is how persuasively these mystery writers manage to create a world that one can imaginatively inhabit -- for the duration of a first reading, initially, but also long after.

--- Wendy Lesser, Scandinavian Noir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020)

If one is at all interested in Scandinavian crime novels and found the recent report by Tina Jordan and Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times Book review (July 26, 2020) somewhat useful but superficial I recommend Lesser's intelligent, authoritative and very personal account of her reading.  If I have one slight quibble it's about limiting her account to Sweden, Denmark and Norway; she doesn't include Iceland and Finland because they too often take place in "the frozen countryside" (she doesn't care for American mysteries set in the backwoods either).  She also has recommendations for films and television shows from these countries.

Lesser, the editor of the excellent Threepenny Review, was initially drawn to the excellent series of ten novels with policeman Martin Beck that was written by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, which ended in 1975 with Wahloo's death.  These novels were brilliant mysteries that are filled with observations and criticisms of Swedish society. This tradition continued with the Kurt Wallender series written by Henning Mankell, which I have also read and enjoyed.  She also analyzes numerous other series from these countries, evaluating the good and the bad in each series. The last half of the book chronicles her visits to the three countries, investigating the towns where some of the books took place and talking to the law officers in each country, most of whom have read the books and are willing to discuss the realities of crime solving.

NYC Ballet Virtual Fall "family friendly" Oct. 10, 2020

 This short program give a range of Balanchine's genius, from the rigor of Stravinsky to the energy of Gottshalk to the vigor of American folk music.

Tarantella (1964) is a energetic and sharply danced pas de deux with Megan Fairchild and Joaquin De Luz emphasizing -- as many Balanchine's pas de deux do -- the alternating competition and cooperation between a male and a female. Fairchild and De Luz do a bravura job to the music of Gottshalk (orchestrated by Hershy Kay), each dancing at times while holding tambourines and encouraging each other in their solo pirouettes, tours en l'air, piquet turns and cabrioles. This ballet is slightly slower now than when Balanchine did it originally on Patricia McBride and Edward Villella; there is a grainy black-and-white recording of that version on YouTube.

Scherzo a la Russe is a short ballet done to the music of Stravinsky for the Stravinsky Festival, NYC Ballet 1972,  In some ways this dance is barely a "ballet," at all, making clear the range of Balanchine's choreography, because the ten women, led by Olivia Boisson and Claire Von Enck, in the dance are not en pointe, there is little use of turnout and the port de bras is not strictly classical.  This all-female dance is clearly based on Russian folk dance ensembles, a common motif in Balanchine's work (and in Stravinsky's) and done here with precision and elegance.

The final piece in this program is the first movement of Western Symphony (1954), one of a number of Balanchine's tributes to his adopted country.  I laugh with delight when I see this wonderful ballet, with classical steps for cowboys and dance hall girls in the West.  Hershy Kay brought together a selection of American folk songs -- from Red River Valley to Golden Slippers -- and Balanchine demonstrated his passion for American culture, which goes back at least to his work on Broadway before NYC Ballet was founded.  This first movement was led by Abi Stafford and Taylor Stanley.  The costumes are by Karinska and Balanchine's genius is clear in the vivid classical ballet steps to go with them.

NYC Ballet Virtual Fall: Oct. 6, 2020

The second week of NYC Ballet's virtual Fall season was entitled "Modern Innovation," two words that could mean just about anything; in this case it probably referred to relatively recent ballets using relatively new music.  

Two of the pieces were by Jerome Robbins and looked to me like longer and floppier versions of his West Side Story:  Opus 19: The Dreamer (the first movement), from 1979, and Glass Pieces(the final movement) from 1983,  Opus 19: The Dreamer, done to Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 and originally done on Mikhail Baryshnikov and Patricia McBride, was pleasantly and somewhat lugubriously danced here by Unity Phelan and Gonzalo Garcia.  Glass Pieces used parts of various Philip Glass works and at least exhibited some energetic dancing by the corps, with some of the pounding minimalist and honking score making the ballet stage look and sound like a crowded city sidewalk.

Balanchine's Kammermusik No. 2 was choreographed in 1978 to music by Hindemith written in 1924.  It is a very "modern" piece, with -- in this first movement -- eight men moving in exquisite counterpoint to the two female leads, in this case Sara Mearns and Teresa Reichlen.  Movements for Piano and Orchestra was choregraphed by Balanchine in 1963 to a piece of music from Stravinsky's serial period. The Stravinsky piece is divided up into sections, with dancers -- led by Maria Kowrowski and Ask la Cour -- walking to new positions between sections.  It's a complex and austere piece and, like Kammermusik No. 2, is both very classical and extremely modern.

I found less felicitous the remaining ballets in this group: Red Angels by Ulysses Dove with electronic violin music by Richard Einhorn, from 1994, and Chiaroscuro by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, with music by Baroque composer Francesco Geminiani, also from 1994.  They both were impressively danced and artistically lit by Mark Stanley.  They were funded by the Diamond Project, from the Fund of Irene Diamond, which lasted from 1992 to 2006 and produced new choreography, little of which continued in the NYC Ballet repertory.

NYC Ballet Fall Virtual Season Sept. 29, 2020

 I was happy that NYC Ballet finally started their (virtual) Fall season; the first week of performances was mostly excerpts, though it was mostly complete movements and at least it was all-Balanchine.

The first movement of Symphony in C (music by Bizet)was as beautiful as ever, though just showing the first movement left one feeling a bit cut-off, though Ashley Bouder and Joseph Gordon showed impressive attack throughout.

Ivesiana was represented by The Unanswered Question (music by Charles Ives), where Janie Taylor was held aloft and never touched the ground, though her long hair at times did touch the stage. She was partnered by Andrew Huxley, as men brought them closer and further apart.  To me this represents, among other things, the importance of women dancers in Balanchine's choreography.

Episodes. the finale here to Webern's transcription of Bach is a powerful, ritualistic and soaring piece, with the corps, Teresa Reichlen and Adrian Danchig-Waring, though the power is somewhat diluted by not showing the movements preceding the finale.

Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux was danced with speed and intensity by Tiler Peck and Joaquin De Luz and is one of those ballets by Balanchine that show how powerful equals can dance separately but also enhance their relationship and trust in each other by dancing together.

Balanchine's Liebeslieder Walzer (music by Brahms), a long and complex ballet, was represented by two pas de deux, one with the woman in regular low-heeled shoes (Maria Kowroski, dancing with Jonathan Stafford) and the other with the woman on point (Lauren Lovett, with Jared Angle), representing the time period when the music was composed (1868) as well as a ballet fantasy of the time.

Stravinsky Violin Concerto was shown in its final movement.  This very modern but also very classical ballet was premiered at the NYC Ballet's Stravinsky Festival in 1972, though Balanchine had used the same music for a completely different ballet thirty years earlier.  The ballet is both playful and serious, one of quite a number of Stravinsky-Balanchine collaborations, here danced intensely  by Sterling Hyltin, Ask la Cour, Sara Mearns, Taylor Stanley and the corps.

At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell

 I passed through empty streets thinking that I, too, should be married soon, a change that presented itself in terms of action rather than reflection, the mood in which even the most prudent often marry: a crisis of delight and anxiety, excitement and oppression.

--Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's (1957)

At Lady Molly's is the fourth volume of the twelve volumes of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time.  Narrator Nicholas Jenkins is in his twenties, this volume taking place around 1934 (Powell seldom mentions dates in these volumes), and working as a scriptwriter for "quota quickies" (low-budget British films).  Jenkins briefly meets the woman, Isobel Tolland, who at first sight he decides he will marry.  Meanwhile he is enjoying nightclubs and jazz joints, though not drinking as much as many of his colleagues, including other members of the Tolland family as well as contemporaries such as Quiggin and of course Widmerpool, whose plan to marry Mildred Haycock goes disastrously wrong.  The novel centers around Lady Molly Jeavons, who knows everyone from the friends of Jenkins's parents to the extended families of the Lovells and the Tollands.

This volume is a beautifully and ironically described detailed scenario about the lives and loves of some member of the British upper and middle classes in the 1930's (Powell was born in 1905), the places where they live and the things that they do.

Turner Classic Movies October 2020

 Octobers on TCM are always the time for horror movies.  Instead of listing all my favorite horror movies showing this month I will just mention the directors Roger Corman, Terence Fisher, Tod Browning and Jack Arnold as four of the best makers of horror films.  If anyone wants to know about a particular film please send me an e-mail and I will share my thoughts with you.  

As for other films this October I recommend everything by the following directors, all of whom have one or more films on TCM this month:  Otto Preminger, Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey, Don Siegel, George Cukor, Michael Curtiz, Billy Wilder, Michael Powell, Edgar Ulmer, John Ford and Buster Keaton (who was the creative force on all his silent films, regardless of who is credited as director). Again, I will be happy to express my feelings about any particular films from these directors, many of which I have written about on this blog.  I will return to more detailed film listings after Halloween.

Sang-soo Hong's The Day After (2017)

The Day After is one of three films that Sang-soo Hong made in 2017.  It's in beautiful black-and-white and like most of Sang-soo Hong's films it's about the communication or lack of it between men and women.  Bong-wan (Kwan Hae-kyo) has an early breakfast with his wife Hae-joo (Jo Yoon-he) where she questions him about his fidelity and he responds with passive-aggressiveness.  As Bong-wan walks to work in the quiet early morning there are flashbacks to his affair with Chang-sook (Kim Sae-byuk) and when he arrives at the publishing house he owns he greets the new employee Areum (Kim Min-hee), who has replaced the departed Chang-sook, and starts right in flirting with her.  Then Bong-wan's wife storms in and attacks Areum whom she thinks is Chang-sook.  After Hae-joo departs Chang-sook suddenly returns from abroad and Bong-wan fires Areum on her first day there.  Areum returns months later for a visit and Bong-wan does not even remember her, shades of Max Ophul's Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948).

The film is a series of two or three people in conversation, with Hong either keeping the camera still or moving it from person to person, depending on who is talking or what they are talking about.  Bong-wan, who feels sorry for himself and drinks too much, tries to negotiate with the three women by manipulating them but claims at the end he only cares for his daughter (whom we never see).   

Yasujiro Ozu's Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth 1932

 Japanese filmmakers were slow to switch to sound and Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth is a silent film; Ozu, like the elegant Chaplin, did not make a film with sound until 1936.  Where Now ... was Ozu's twenty-sixth film and something of a transition in both style and content:  he was still moving the camera fairly frequently but also starting to use the low-angle shots that became standard in his later films.  The film started out as a "student comedy," a popular genre in Japan at that time, but also embodied the class-consciousness, melancholy and family drama of later Ozu films.

The story is simple:  Tetsuo (Ureo Egawa) has to leave school  to take over the family business when his father dies; three of his friends eventually join his firm after he helps them cheat at a company test, just as he had helped them cheat in school.  Tetsuo meets his old love Shigeto (Kinuyo Tanaken) when he sees her moving to a cheaper place after the bakery where they met is closed.  They rekindle their romance until Tetsuo discovers that Shigeto has promised to marry Tetsuo's friend Saiki (Tatsuo Seito), who had already given his approval to Tetsuo's affair with Shigeto in gratitude to Tetsuo's hiring him and in obeisance to Tetsuo's authority. Tetsuo slaps Saiki around for so easily giving up Shigeto, another Ozu criticism of the Japanese hierarchical system.

The screenplay for Where Are Now Dreams of Youth is by frequent Ozu collaborator Kogo Noda and the cinematography by Hideo Shigehara, who photographed many of Ozu's silent films. 

For my previous posts about Ozu films see March 31 2015, Nov. 30 2015, May 15 2019.

T.A.M.I. Show, directed by Steve Binder

 The strange T.A.M.I. show (Teenage Awards Music International), filmed in California in 1964, is a snapshot of popular music of the time, going back with Chuck Berry and forward with The Rolling Stones, at the time basically a blues band, just prior to the release of "Satisfaction" and "Get Off of My Cloud."  It was a period when one listened mostly to AM radio (in my case WBZ when I was in prep school in New Hampshire and New York's WABC when I was home in Hudson, N.Y.); I was 17 in 1964 and listened mostly to pop music that, by that time, transcended the issue of race.  Included in T.A.M.I. are rhythm and blues (James Brown), Motown (The Supremes, The Miracles, Marvin Gaye), surf music (The Beach Boys as well as Jan and Dean, who were the hosts). English imports (Jerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, The Rolling Stones), teen-age angst (Leslie Gore) and a garage band (The Barbarians).  Each performed one, two, three or four songs (the movie, filmed on the high definition video of the time, did not necessarily include the complete sets of the performers), usually backed by energetically dancing go-go girls and boys. Leslie Gore, mostly forgotten now and a teenager then, sang "You Don't Own Me," a relatively early anthem of women's freedom.

The performers were raw and emotional, just as the filming was chaotic, with lots of running around to preserve continuous performing.  Before bands began playing Madison Square Garden and baseball stadiums it was common for rock shows to include multiple performers. At the time of the T.A.M.I. show Murray the K was doing regular shows of multiple bands at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre, including The Who.  But soon hit singles and AM radio were replaced by albums and FM rock, the music became more pretentious and we started to get single acts (sometimes with an opening act) in venues where we could hardly see them.  The audience of the T.A.M.I. show, incidentally,  was mostly young women who never stopped screaming and applauding.

Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz

 Ness's sense of humor didn't always play well in buttoned-down Cleveland, where people might approve of the Safety Director's on-the-job exploits but not his extracurricular activities.  One reporter called him "too handsome and self-centered to be popular with with the great bulk of hard-working conservative Clevelanders."

--Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher:  Hunting Down America's Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology (William Morrow, 2020)

Do people remember Eliot Ness, played by Robert Stack in the TV series The Untouchables (1959-63) and by Kevin Costner in Brian De Palma's film of the same name in 1987?  Max Allan Collins wrote four novels about him in the 1980's, mostly covering his time in Cleveland, now the subject of a book co-written by Collins and historian A. Brad Schwartz.  After leaving Chicago when Prohibition ended Ness became Cleveland's Safety Director; the book is about his successes and failures in finding a serial killer while modernizing the police force in Cleveland.  He found the serial killer, he thought, but never produced enough evidence to arrest him, but he did succeed in adopting advanced techniques of ballistics and identification, fighting the police union to add African-American officers and requiring cops to be high school graduates. 

Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher is well documented, as it follows Ness from Cleveland to the office of Social Protection (protecting soldiers from venereal disease, mostly) in Washington during WWII.  After the war Ness returned to Cleveland, ran unsuccessfully for mayor and turned to alcohol and a number of dubious business positions, marrying three times and dying of a heart attack in 1957.  There is some obvious tension between novelist Collins wanting to tell a story and historian Schwartz not wanting to deviate from the known facts and details, but the result is fairly seamless in its accuracy about a particular person in a particular place at a particular time.

Robert Parrish's Saddle the Wind 1956

 Saddle the Wind is an okay, fairly routine Western, starring Robert Taylor as the retired gunfighter running his ranch with his trigger-happy younger brother, played by John Cassavetes, with an iconic screenplay by Rod Serling, beautiful widescreen cinematography by veteran George Folsey and music by Elmer Bernstein.  One of the film's themes is similar to King Vidor's Man Without a Star (1955):  barbed wire versus the open range.  Julie London has a relatively insignificant role as Cassavetes's intended wife but she does sing the title song beautifully.  Parrish's direction is passionate but fairly impersonal, though he had originally worked as an editor for John Ford, among other directors. The film is populated by an impressive group of character actors who span the history of Hollywood, from Donald Crisp (who goes back to silent films, appearing in movies by D.W. Griffith) to the more modern Royal Dano and Charles McGraw. The Cassavetes/Taylor struggle of the two brothers is the major theme, but the film also includes references to the Civil War and the benefits and deficits of the beginning of civilizing the West. Stolid Robert Taylor, near the end of his career, represents the past while Cassavetes, near the beginning of his career, represents the rebellious youth of the future.  For those who who enjoy London's singing I recommend her role in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956), where the distraught and inebriated Tom Ewell puts on a record of "Cry Me a River" and sees the image of London, his former lover, singing it wherever he turns. 

B Movies: Henry Levin's Night Editor (1946), Frank Strayer's Blondie Goes to College (1942), Robert Wise's Mystery in Mexico (1948)

 Night Editor shows some of the strength and weakness of the film noir genre, especially when it's adapted to the B movie.  The screenplay, by Hal Smith, is strong -- at one point married detective William Gargan says to his married lover Janis Carter, "You are pure, no-good, first rate, high grade A number one rotten," expressing his own self-loathing for his infidelity to his loyal wife Jeff Donnell after Gargan and Carter see a murder take place while they are on lovers lane. Cinematographer Burnett Guffey, who worked with directors Phil Karlson and Fritz Lang, captures Gargan's shadowy life as the cop assigned to the murder.  Director Henry Levin (he had a long and generally routine career) did a workmanlike job with the downbeat story, marred only by a "happy" ending, Gargan surviving after he tries to get Carter to confess what they had seen (the wrong person has been arrested for the crime) and she stabs him in the back with an ice pick.

The story is told in flashbacks by a newspaper editor and includes a significant class-conscious element, with Gargan slogging along on a cop's pay while Carter is married to a wealthy businessman.  Carter is neurotically attracted to violence and is excited about seeing the murdered girl in lovers lane, a view that is withheld from her but also from the audience. 

Blondie Goes to College was one of the twelve Blondie films directed by Frank S. Strayer, the earliest ones in the series that ran from 1938 to 1950, a total of 28 films.  Blondie and Dagwood were effectively portrayed by Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton, who became closely identified with comic artist Chic Young's creations.  As usual Dagwood can't stay out of trouble --co-eds find him strangely attractive -- while Blondie is romanced by sports star Larry Parks, as apparently married students were not allowed to matriculate. As usual Dagwood gets in a great deal of trouble and has to be rescued from his arrest for kidnapping his own child, whom Blondie and Dagwood had put in military school so they can go to college; WW II is never mentioned, however.  College is effectively satirised as a place where only parties and sports matter; Blondie and Dagwood are only shown in one classroom scene, where a professor of English makes little sense.  Dagwood goes out for crew and wrecks the championship race, as several jokes are made about "catching a crab." Whether this film represents "the male gaze" or "the castration of the American male" I will leave for others to decide.

Mystery in Mexico is one of those B movies that has something for everyone: a bit of mystery, a bit of noir, some romance and suspense, even an important role for a child.  It is directed by Robert Wise, who started out as an editor for Orson Wells, directed for Val Lewton (The Body Snatcher 1945), made an excellent film noir (Odds Against Tomorrow 1959) and ended up doing bloated musicals (The Sound of Music 1959).  William Lundigan plays an insurance investigator looking for some stolen diamonds in Mexico, where the movie was filmed (cinematography by Jack Draper, an American who worked mostly in the Mexican film industry), chasing Jacqueline White to Mexico, falling for Jacqueline Dalya and being set up by sleazy nightclub owner Ricardo Cortez.

These three movies each run just a little more than an hour, are breezy and intense and were meant to be enjoyed on double bills as an antidote to the more slowly paced, star-heavy main feature.  

Robert Mulligan's The Summer of '42 (1971)

 The Summer of '42 is a film about memory and memories are often different than what actually happened and in the film it is purposely not clear what did, in fact, happen.  Herman Raucher's story is supposedly based on his own experience but who knows if that is true or accurate.  16-year-old Hermie (Gary Grimes) has sex with twenty-something Dorothy (Jennifer O'Neill) after her husband dies in the war, but perhaps this is only a fantasy.  There is some humor about losing one's virginity, buying a rubber, caressing a girl's arm in the movies thinking it's her breast, etc.  Hermie and his friends roam an island during the summer; their parents never appear and the teen-agers appear to have complete freedom to basically horse around.  Robert Surtees's glossy cinematography and Michel Legrand's romantic music add to the adolescent fantasy of the plot.

Mulligan plays down the period stuff in the film (there aren't many cars on the island) and the fumbling teen-agers could be from any period, at least any period before the rise of social media, as Hermie goes to buy his first rubber at a local pharmacy, futilely trying to distract the pharmacist by purchasing a strawberry ice cream cone. Yes, it's a coming-of-age story, directed with the same sensitive feeling director Robert Mulligan has shown for children and teen-agers from his first film, Fear Strikes Out (1957) to his last, The Man in the Moon (1991).

Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman (2020)

 Elizabeth Carlyle sat at her desk and considered the calls she could make.  For starters she could try Edwin Kerins, the most reasonable of Calcott Corporation's in-house counsel.  She'd explain to him that one of her junior associates had taken a copy of the documents out of the office. He had them on his phone, she'd say.  Yes, the phone was stolen.

--Patrick Hoffman. Clean Hands (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020)

I do admit to reading a fair amount of genre books, so-called "thrillers" that usually aren't very thrilling (which is okay, since I don't particularly care for cheap thrills) though they might (and sometimes do) shed interesting light on human behavior.  Clean Hands is well-written and very modern in a way, with its Russian mobsters, cell phones, corporate lawyers and shadowy government conspiracies.  The two major characters are lawyer Elizabeth Carlyle and "fixer" Valencia Walker, whose attempts to find missing documents in a very important case take them all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, where surveillance cameras are everywhere and where people can be as carefully traced as the criminals in the tv drama "24."  Things move along so quickly, violently and illegally, that there is little time for Carlyle and Walker to emerge as characters; they are more like chess players with their associates and subordinates as the pieces to be moved around the city and Clean Hands, rather like The Brothers Karamazov, is a series of shaggy dog stories that never ends. 

Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle (1974)

Thanks to Turner Classic Movies I have begun seeing  Chantal Akerman's work before and beyond Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080, Bruxelles (see my post of July 7 2014), including Je Tu Il Elle, made the year before Jeanne Dielman, when Akerman was 24.  It's a film in three parts:  Akerman alone in her bare apartment eating sugar and writing letters; Akerman hitching a ride with a truck driver and listening to him recount the woes of working-class married life; Akerman with her girlfriend, eating and making love. The first and third parts are shot in high contrast black-and-white; the middle part takes place on the truck and rest -stops and is in grainy black-and-white.

The film is effectively downbeat, with Akerman finding life alone or with another woman or a man to be unsatisfying and at the end just walks out on her girlfriend, presumably to look elsewhere.  There is little dialogue and Akerman's narration in the first part is disorienting, as she describes in the present tense things that have already happened or are yet to happen.  In the second part the truck driver does all the talking while in the third part Akerman only speaks when she wants another sandwich and her lover hardly speaks at all, the implication being that we are all alone in this world, a common theme in Akerman's films, made with static shots and little camera movement. Je seems to mean Akerman, Tu is the viewer, Il is the truck driver and Elle is the girlfriend.

Dorothy Arzner's Merrily We Go to Hell 1932

 Merrily We Go to Hell is a comedy, with March and Sylvia Sidney, in which humor barely conceals the desperation of the brittle rich.

--David Thomson

Is there much that is gay or feminist about Merrily We Go to Hell, directed by lesbian Dorothy Arzner?  Of course one can always find a subtext if one looks hard enough; at one point dipsomaniac Frederic March says, "I prefer the company of men, especially if they are bartenders."  Sylvia Sidney decides to marry journalist and playwright March as a rebellion against her wealthy father, even though March when inebriated thinks she is his previous love, Adrianne Allen, whose picture he keeps on his bureau. March goes on the wagon and finishes his play, with Sidney's help and support, but starts drinking again when the lead in the play is given to Ms. Allen.  March asserts his freedom, causing Sidney to assert hers (this is a pre-code film!) and while March carries on with Allen, Sidney carries on with Cary Grant (in his fourth movie) until she finds she is pregnant and leaves March.  When March reads in his own newspaper that Sidney has given birth he rushes back to her in Chicago, where his father-in-law tells him the baby has died.  March forces his way into Sidney's room --she has been crying for him -- and finally tells her he loves her, though it is clear by now he loves liquor more.

This is a downbeat and depressing film about alcoholism during Prohibition, which did not end until 1933.  Arzner's camera (cinematography by David Abel) focuses on the mostly idle rich and their attempts to drown their sorrows during the Depression. Arzner even uses subjective shots to show how blurry the world looks to those who are drunk. Arzner was the only woman director in Hollywood during the early sound era and made 20 films before retiring, for unexplained reasons that probably had to do with the sexism of the studios.   In 1949 Ida Lupino became a director, the only female director in Hollywood during the fifties.  Gradually things are changing and Merrily We Go to Hell was screened on Turner Classic Movies as part of their tribute to women directors. 

Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You 2019

 Since he made Kes in 1969 Ken Loach has made more than fifty films, mostly about the working class in England, generally in a neo-realist style influenced by De Sica and Rossellini; he is one of the few directors currently working, now 84, whose movies I look forward to.  Sorry We Missed You is the best film I've seen about workers in the "gig economy," where businesses convince workers they are self-employed before they screw them and their families. 

Ricky (Kris Hitchen) starts to work for a delivery company and has to sell his wife Abbie's  (Debbie Honeywood) car to buy the necessary van (otherwise he would have to "rent" a company one at a high rate).  This means that Abbie now has to take the bus to her elderly clients that she takes care of in her own gig job as a home health aide.  Abbie and Ricky have to work ridiculous hours in order to stay afloat and when they have to take time off to deal with their kids, one a teen-ager in constant trouble, they are docked for the time.  When Ricky is assaulted and robbed on the job he can't even afford to take time off to mend.

Sorry We Missed You was filmed in Newcastle and captures the difficulties and dilemmas of the working class and the gig economy in England.  Loach, as usual, mostly avoids didacticism and lets his observations speak for themselves.

Robert Mulligan's The Stalking Moon 1968

 I doubt that many of those who saw and loved the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) could tell you who directed it, so self-effacing was director Robert Mulligan.  Mulligan was a low-key and humanistic director who, intentionally, had little sense of personal style and was always in service to the story and the screenplay.  I have a certain amount of affection for Mulligan because his first film, Fear Strikes Out (1957), is not only one of the best films about baseball and the people who play it professionally -- in this case Jimmy Piersall, the eccentric outfielder for the Boston Red Sox -- but also a compassionate study of bipolar disorder and a father/son relationship. 

The Stalking Moon is Mulligan's only Western and could be seen as an imagined alternate ending to John Ford's The Searchers (1956).  In Mulligan's film retiring scout Gregory Peck takes home Eva Marie Saint and her son by an Apache (Nathaniel Narcisco) with whom she had been living for ten years after the Apache massacre of her family.  Her son's father pursues them, killing everyone they come in contact with as Peck brings home Saint and her son, leading to a showdown at Peck's ranch, where Peck's friend (Robert Forster) and older employee (Russell Thorson) are killed before the final showdown.

The Stalking Moon is a chaste and fairly routine Western, something I mean as a compliment, considering the conflicts going on in the world when it was made. Peck is stolid throughout, while Saint has little to do or say (she has mostly forgotten the English language) except for cooking and protecting her son. The beautiful widescreen color images are courtesy of cinematographer Charles Lang, a master of black-and- white (Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, 1953) as well as color.  The low-key script is by Alvin Sargent and Wendell Mayes.

 

Cornell Woolrich's Waltz into Darkness 1947

 There wasn't a glint of pity in the stars over him as he came out into the open night and his face dimmed to its secretive shade.  There wasn't a breath of tenderness in the human salt breeze that came in from the Gulf.  He'd have her alone , and no one should save her.  He'd have her death and nothing else would do.

--Cornell Woolrich, Waltz into Darkness (Penzler, 2020; originally published by Lippincott,1947)

Francis M. Nevins, Jr., Woolrich's biographer, refers to the "lunatic excess" of Waltz into Darkness, and also says, " As Woolrich couldn't shake free from his mother's grip, neither can Durand from the grip of la femme fatale."  The novel takes place in Louisiana, and other Southern states, in 1880, as coffee tycoon Louis Durand marries a mail order bride.  The bride, Julia, turns out to be someone other than who she claims to be,  something Durand finds out when she takes all his money and disappears.  He tracks her down but when he finds her he falls for her story and falls for her again. Durand kills the private detective who he had hired to find his bride and Durand and Julia go on the run.  When Durand runs out of money his wife tries to kill him with rat poison, changing her mind a moment too late.

This rather implausible and full-of-coincidences tale reminds one of Wilkie Collins and of other 19th century writers, including Dickens. Woolrich adds misogyny and misanthropy to the mix and fills out the novel (his longest) with details and descriptions of the weather, the houses and the clothes everyone wears, adding verisimilitude to the nightmarish and passionate plot.  Many of Woolrich's stories and novels were made into film noir movies, though Waltz into Darkness was not made into a film until 1969, Mississippi Mermaid, directed by Francois Truffaut, which did not have Woolrich's intense prose to shield it from absurdity.

Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2020

 Sept. 1 has several Hitchcocks to start off the month; my favorite of the group is The Lady Vanishes (1938), with its impressive combination of suspense and humor.

Sept. 1 also has Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle, 1995, the first of many films this month directed by women.

Sept. 4 has Billy Wilder's The Apartment, 1960, with its dark comedy.

Sept. 5 has John Ford's Stagecoach, 1939, his first sound Western.

Sept. 6 has Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not, 1944, the first of the three versions of Hemingway's story.

Sept. 8 has John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, 1950, a terrific film noir, and Barbara Loden's Wanda, 1970.

Sept. 9 has Frank Strayer's Blondie Goes to College, 1942, part of an excellent B series.

Sept. 10 has three of Val Lewton's films, including Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher, 1945

Sept. 14 has Alfred E. Green's pre-code Union Station, 1932

Sept. 16 is Edgar Selwyn's fantasy Turn Back the Clock, 1933

Sept. 17 has a number of Otto Preminger's films, my favorite being Bunny Lake is Missing, 1965, in beautiful widescreen black-and-white.

Sept. 19 is Delmer Daves's exemplary Western 3:10 to Yuma, 1957

Sept. 20 is Leo McCarey's Going My Way, 1944

Sept. 21 is Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli, 1950.

Sept. 24 has two of Douglas Sirk's best films: All That Heaven Allows, 1955, and Written on the Wind, 1957.

Sept. 28 has a number of King Vidor films, my favorite is Street Scene, 1931, a pre-code film with Syliva Sidney.

Ted Tetzlaff's A Dangerous Profession

A Dangerous Profession (bail bondsman) has many of the important elements of film noir without being totally successful as one.  The plot is convoluted enough, the visuals are impressively dark and seedy, but there is not enough of the moody fatalism that makes an outstanding film noir.  George Raft is minimally acceptable; though he doesn't project much emotion he shows it, to a certain extent, with his eyes.  Raft is a partner with Pat O'Brien in a bail bond business and is hired to bail out the husband (Bill Williams) of his former lover, the estimable femme fatale Ella Raines; when they first go looking for Williams there is the smell of Raines's perfume that Raft instantly recognizes. Williams ends up dead when he is bailed out and Raines and Raft end up together in a rather sappy ending. Director Tetzlaff (who started out as a cinematographer) and director of photography Robert de Grasse (who shot Hitchcock's Notorious in 1946) effectively capture the dour atmosphere of jails and bail bond offices and use location shots on the streets of Los Angeles effectively; the script, by Martin Rackin and Warren Duff, is direct ("lay off that sentiment stuff.") 

The Vanished by Lotte and Soren Hammer

 For the rest of the week Simonsen's investigation made little headway.  The autumn again turned damp and dismal as police officers methodically sifted through the area surrounding Norballe Vandrehjem, comparing summer houses with images photocopied from Kramer Nielsen's photographs.  It was a slow and meticulous business, and one that produced nothing in the way of results.  Klavs Arnold insisted on a second pass, and then another.

--Lotte and Soren Hammer, The Vanished (Bloomsbury, 2011, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken)

In the July 26 New York Times Book Review there was a survey of "Nordic Noir," downbeat detective stories from Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Norway.  I've read many of these authors and the standouts are still Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, who wrote the ten Martin Beck novels that ended in 1975, when Wahloo died, and Henning Mankell, who died in 2015 after publishing eleven Kurt Wallander novels.  These Swedish novelists wrote detective novels that were as much about the political and cultural promises and problems of Sweden as about solving crimes. My most recent reading of this genre is The Vanished, from Denmark.

The hero (or, perhaps, anti-hero) of the Hammers' books is detective Konrad Simonsen, who is getting older and more and more looks back on the sixties and his romance with an activist hippie.  He is relentless in his investigations and doesn't give up until he is completely satisfied about an unusual death and whether it is actually an accident or caused by foul play, following every possible lead.  Simonsen has a daughter, a lover with whom he sort-of lives, and a bunch of neurotic but reliable subordinates.  In The Vanished he investigates the death of a man who has posted pictures of a vanished young girl in his apartment and Simonsen works hard and diligently to find out what happened, while brooding about his own past and future. The novel is especially impressive in its details of the technology now available to law enforcement and the ways in which it is both used and misused.

Terence Fisher's The Last Page 1952.

The Last Page (I prefer the more accurate English title to the lurid American Man Bait) was Terence Fisher's first film for Hammer; he would go on the direct the best of Hammer's horror color films, beginning with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957.  The Last Page takes place mostly in a genteel bookshop in London that is run by Brent and where Diana Dors is a young invoice clerk.  Dors becomes involved with the sleazy Peter Reynolds when she catches him stealing a book and he helps her extort Brent when Brent, who has an invalid wife at home, makes a pass at Dors.  Dors ends up dead and Brent is blamed and goes on the run, helped by Marguerite Chapman who finds out that Reynolds killed Dors and that he is also responsible for the death of Brent's wife.

The film is suffused with melancholy, with its screenplay by Frederick Knott, who two years later wrote Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, as Chapman was Brent's nurse in WWII and Brent hides in a bombed out church after discovering Dors's body in a trunk that was supposed to be full of books. As often in Fisher's films everyone is morally compromised in some way and everyone, with the exception of the amoral monster Reynolds, feels guilty in some way. The gritty black-and-white cinematography is by Walter Harvey -- who photographed seven films in 1952 -- and helps Fisher emphasize the contrast between the two main sets:  the genteel bookshop and Peter Reynold's hangout, the lurid The Blue Club.