Christian Petzold's Transit 2018

Christian Petzold's Transit is a beautiful and somewhat baffling film, taking Anna Seghers 1944 novel and having it take place in the present day. (There was a 1991 film version of the novel, directed by Rene Allio, which was a period piece.).  If Petzold's Phoenix (2014) was somewhat a reimagining of Hitchcock's Vertigo (see my post of March 25, 2019) then Transit is something of a reimagining of Curtiz's Casablanca.  Fascism has invaded France and Georg has fled to Marseilles in an attempt to find a way to flee the country.  Georg (Franz Rogowski) meets Marie (Paula Beer) who is looking for her husband and they hook up when Georg is looking for a doctor to help a young boy he has befriended, the son of the mute wife of Georg's friend who died on their trip to Marseilles. Marie is looking for her husband, who has committed suicide and whose papers Georg now possesses.

It's all rather confusing but Petzold clearly means to relate the refugees of today with the refugees of World War II and the difficulty of escaping fate (a common theme of German directors such as Lang and Ulmer who fled to the U. S.): even when Marie gets a boat out of France it hits a mine and all passengers are killed.  The film has a Bressonian-style narrator who turns out to be the bartender at one of the cafes Georg frequents, a café where he awaits his fate while the fascists arrive in Marseilles, as Petzold once again suggests that one can be in Hell even if one doesn't know it.

Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover 1977

Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover is as intense and funky as Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar (2011) is bland.  Like Cohen's other films (God Told Me To, 1976; It's Alive, 1974) The Private Files is both a horror film and a political one,  It follows Hoover's career from his early days to his death in 1972 and nobody comes across well, from FDR's insistence on internment for American citizens of Japanese descent to Martin Luther King's yielding to Hoover's blackmail, the main source of Hoover's power, with files on everyone in his orbit -- often from illegal phone taps -- and his willingness to use them.

Whether Hoover was actually gay can probably never be proven, but Cohen chronicles Hoover's devotion to his mother and his fear of women from early on, that any women who showed him affection were simply "honey traps."  Hoover (effectively played by Broderick Crawford as a dissipated racetrack devotee whose books were written by agents during working hours) and his second-in-command Clyde Tolson (played appropriately by song-and-dance man Dan Dailey) were obviously devoted to each other, though I suspect Hoover was essentially married to his job and the power that went with it. When Hoover died Colson is seen to be rescuing documents from Nixon's shredders and Cohen hints at the role those documents may have played in the Watergate scandal.

In the large cast of Cohen's film Michael Parks as Robert Kennedy and Rip Torn as a disaffected agent particularly stand out, along with Jose Ferrer, Lloyd Nolan and Celeste Holm.  Cohen's regular cinematographer, Paul Glickman, gives the film a desaturated and shaky newsreel feel and veteran composer Miklos Rozsa (The Killers, 1946 and many other films) provides an appropriate moody and dramatic score.

Roger Corman's Masque of the Red Death (1964)

The Poe Series, dominated by the possessed characterizations of Vincent Price, became ritualistic danses macabres paralleling the cancerous decadence of willful sixties excess.
--John H. Dorr, American Directors (McGraw Hill, 1983)

There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.  Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.
--Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death.

In Corman's film the wealthy hide in Prospero's castle as the red death ravages the villages of the peasants.  The film is undeniably creepy in many ways, even to the casting of an eight-year-old girl (Verina Greenlaw) as a ballet-dancing dwarf, her voice dubbed by an adult.  Prospero has made a deal with the devil, helped by the slutty Hazel Court and the virginal Jane Asher, who pledges allegiance to Prosero in order to rescue her lover. The castle is closed, even to the wealthy, to keep out the red death.  One noble pleads with Prospero to be allowed in, telling him that he will give him his wife "to do with as you please," to which Prospero replies "I have already had that doubtful pleasure."

There is no doubt this is a Corman film, with his common themes of moralism and fatalism, but as usual he is helped by his regular collaborators --production design by Daniel Haller and screenplay by Charles Beaumont and R.Wright Campbell -- and the addition of English cinematographer Nicholas Roeg, an expert in widescreen and color who would go on to direct his own idiosyncratic films.  Corman also shot in England both for tax breaks and to effectively use the sets left over from Becket.

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson

We have no obligation to make history.  We have no obligation to make art.  We have no obligation to make a statement.  To make money is our only objective.

--Michael Eisner, quoted in The Big Goodbye (Flatiron Press, 2020).

Wasson's fascinating book is really of two parts:  the main and best part is a detailed history of the making of Chinatown (1974), which makes it quite clear that the movie was in every way Roman Polanski's view of America after the murder of his wife Sharon Tate.  Producer Robert Evans and writer Robert Towne played significant roles in making the film but it was obviously Polanski's own vision and his own long goodbye after he had to flee the United States in 1978 in the wake of statutory rape charges. The second part of Wasson's book is a perpetuation of the myth of unbridled creativity in the late sixties and early seventies by director such as Coppola, Friedkin and Bogdanovitch, who together formed The Director's Company in order to make their movies with relative independence.  Few of these movies were any good and these directors quickly burned out, as the marketing of films changed in 1975 with the release of Jaws in 400 theatres.  

Wasson feels that in order to make his case he has to mock some of the films that came out just before Bogdanovitch's The Last Picture Show in 1972 and Coppola's The Godfather in 1974.  Among the films he mocks are Howard Hawk's El Dorado (1967), Otto Preminger's Skidoo (1968) and Blake Edwards's Darling Lili (1970).  As far as I'm concerned all of these mocked films are as personal as anything by Coppola or Bogdanovitch and benefit immensely from the professionalism and vision of their directors.                              

Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron

He wondered sometimes how he would end, and whether it would be anywhere like this:  in the ashtray of the city, surrounded by thieves and no-hopers.
--Mick Herron, Down Cemetery Road (Constable, 2003)

It is a pleasure to discover a "new" writer, especially one who has fifteen novels in print.  Down Cemetery Road was Mick Herron's first book and he writes with intense concentration on the intricacies of the plot as well as the details of the vivid characters, much of their thinking conveyed by interior monologues.  Sarah Tucker is a bored housewife in a suburb of Oxford who does not believe the official story of why a neighbor's house blew up and what happened to the four-year-old whose parents died.  Her investigation leads her to a private detective who ends up dead and she has to flee to Scotland in search of the missing child.  Even the characters who appear briefly have complicated histories and personalities and often we only find things out when Sarah herself does.  Herron's beautifully written leisurely descriptions of Oxford and its environs are punctuated with moments of startling violence, much of it not directly shown and all the more powerful for that.

William Seiter's I'll Be Yours (1947)

To the extent that I'll Be Yours succeeds the credit goes to Preston Sturges and Deanna Durbin.  The movie is written by Felix Jackson, who "adapted" it from Sturges's script for William Wyler's The Good Fairy (1935) based on a play by Ferenc Molar. Deanna Durbin plays Louis Ginglebusher (played by Margaret Sullavan in Wyler's film) and sings, beautifully, four songs -- Sari Waltz, Granada, Brahm's Lullaby and It's Dream Time -- that convey what the script fails to do, mainly maturity and passion, as Universal tries to keep Durbin the young girl that they think her fans want to her to be.   Seiter's direction is plodding and only comes alive with Durbin and Adolph Menjou as her manipulative suitor (Jack Webb to William Holden in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, "Where did you get that suit, Adolph Menjou?"); Durbin ends up with Tom Drake, the "boy next door" from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

There's little in Seiter's career to suggest he knew or cared much about either music or comedy; he directed the poorest Mark Brothers movie (Room Service, 1938) and the worst Astaire/Roberts film --Roberta in 1938 -- which is saved by Irene Dunne's singing, just as I'll Be Yours is saved by Durbin's lovely soprano.  When Universal continued to give Durbin's films low budgets, mediocre scripts and directors and juvenile roles (with the one glowing exception of Robert Siodmak's Christmas Holiday in 1944 that was little appreciated when it came out)  she quit movies in 1948 at the age of twenty-seven and lived happily with her husband, Charles David, in France until his death in 1999 and her death in 2013.

A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig

As Cohen studied his anecdotes and memories, he sorted them into three categories that he believed best described Trump:  racist, con man and cheat.
--Rucker and Leonnig, A Very Stable Genius (Penguin, 2020).

To those of us who read The New York Times fairly thoroughly every day there is nothing new in this book; it is a detailed description of Trump's presidency so far and serves the useful historical purpose of recording all the dreadful details and the dissembling of his administration.  It is told largely from the perspective of all those originally loyal to Trump who either resigned when he asked them to undertake illegal and unethical actions or were fired because they were insufficiently supportive of every Trump move. Leonnig and Rucker detail all the comings and goings of insufficiently toadying staff and appointees and state, in conclusion:

As the legislative branch scrutinized his actions, Trump looked in the mirror and saw no wrongdoing.  Rather, he nursed a deep and inescapable sense of persecution and self-pity, casting himself as a victim in a warped reality and alleging that Democrats and the media were conspiring to perpetuate hoaxes, defraud the public, and stage a coup.  This mind-set followed the historical pattern of authoritarian leaders creating a cult of victimization to hold on to power and to justify their repressive agendas. 

Edwin L. Marin's Race Street (1948)

Edwin L Marin's Race Street speaks to the strength of the film noir genre in the way that his Raton Pass (which I wrote about in January) speaks to the strength of the Western drama.  Race Street has all the trappings of the film noir -- a nightclub singer singing torch songs, post-WWII disillusionment, a femme fatale, etc. --without an important element, i.e., a vulnerable hero.  William Bendix as a cop, Marilyn Maxwell as the two-timing femme fatale, Harry Morgan as the struggling bookie, Gale Robbins as the nightclub chanteuse, Frank Faylen as the gang leader muscling in with the protection racket, even Charles Lane as the paid-off hotel manager, are all terrific.  Only lead actor George Raft fails to project the necessary vulnerability and fatality to make this a successful film noir.

Still, there are wonderful things in this movie.  The superb use of San Francisco locations (cinematography by J. Roy Hunt) and its hilly streets give one a sense of the roller coaster that life can be, just as Hitchcock did in Vertigo (1958).  Also, when Gale Robbins sings "I'm in a Jam with Baby" (music by Ray Heindorf and M.K.  Jerome, lyrics by Ted Koehler) as she magically floats above the nightclub crowd and, especially, the complex relationships of Raft with cop William Bendix and struggling bookie Harry Morgan that have evolved over a lifetime. 

Anthony Powell's The Acceptance World

I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world in which it is possible at will to wander.  All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element --happiness, for example -- is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill.

Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World (U. of Chicago Press, 1956)

In this third volume of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time it is the early 1930's and narrator Nicholas Jenkins and his friends are in their late twenties, trying to make it in both the business and social worlds the way people in their twenties, at any time, try to, by both looking behind at their years in school and looking ahead to an unknown future.  People are continuing to dabble in politics and looking for love:  getting divorced, switching partners, starting and ending affairs.  The highlight of this volume is an Old Boys dinner where Widmerpool gives a pompous speech which is interrupted by La Bas's (their old housemaster) heart attack, after which Jenkins and Widmerpool take a drunken Stringham home and put him to bed. Jenkins then leaves to meet his lover, Jean Dupont, and is greeted with the news that Jean's husband is back in England.

The Novels of Thomas Perry and Alan Furst

"Stein said it.  We all lost people.  Two years ago, we both heard you say that if the FBI didn't find those twelve killers within two years you were going after them yourself.  Now, exactly two years later, you tell us you're  leaving. We know what you're doing.  We want you to succeed.  We want them dead and you alive.  What we're doing is trying to make that more likely."
--Thomas Perry, A Small Town (The Mysterious Press, 2020)

The tugboat carrying the torpedo left at dawn, on the Loire canal that wound its way to Orleans, then to the Rhone, the great river that flowed south to empty into the Mediterranean Sea near the city of Montpelier.  Ricard sat against a bollard at the stern of the tugboat.  As the sea rose, the leafy branches of oak and chestnut trees formed a canopy above the canal and threw shadows on the still, green water.
--Alan Furst, Under Occupation (Random House, 2019)

Alan Furst has written fifteen spy novels in a rather lovely poetic prose.  Lately his novels have taken place in occupied Paris during WWII, with vivid personalities and detailed descriptions of time and place as, in Under Occupation, writer Paul Ricard enters into the Resistance and goes to Poland to steal a Nazi torpedo, the pace varying from intense and suspenseful to leisurely and uneventful.  I do tend to prefer Furst's earlier novels, especially Night Soldiers (1988) and Dark Star (1991), for their complexity and wider-ranging geography, to the effective economy of Under Occupation.

A Small Town is the first of Thomas Perry's novels I've read; I was attracted by its title because I grew up in a small town and admire Richard Lingeman's Small Town America (1980).  The small town in Perry's book is of a particular kind these days:  a town where a prison is the main source of employment.  Twelve prisoners plot an escape and thousands of prisoners flee with them. All but the twelve are quickly rounded up, though not before they rape, murder and burn down a number of the houses of the residents of the town, Weldonville.  But most of the book takes place outside the small town, as Detective Lt. Leah Hawkins is given a generous budget to track down and kill the twelve leaders of the escape, after the FBI has failed to find them. Hawkins eventually succeeds, using her considerable mental and physical strength.