The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West

Papa, as I knew, was capable of forgetting the fact of our existence at moments when he should have been most careful to remember it, but from time to time suffered agonies because he realised that we were never going to be presented at court and that the Irish landowners who might have been our husbands could in all probability never hear of our existence; and Mamma often surveyed the social stagnation of Lovegrove and never at any time saw a professor of Greek improvising iambic pentameters as he ladled out egg-nog at midnight, or Hans Van Bulow dropping in for supper.  They had thought we had better realise the worst.  We thought it not bad at all.
-- Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows, (Virago Press, 1957)

The Fountain Overflows is a marvelous, beautifully written novel based on Rebecca West's Edwardian childhood (West was born in 1892).  The family consists of mother Clare, father Piers, daughters Rose (the narrator), Mary and Cordelia and son Richard Quin.  Mamma, former concert pianist, holds the family together while Papa is always changing jobs and writing political pamphlets. The children barely know they are poor; though their mother dresses in shabby clothes they always have a servant and plenty of Shakespeare and music, with intention of going on to musical careers, though older sister Cordelia gets a head start on the concert stage, even though Mary, Rose and Mamma think she is the one child without musical talent.  The novel follows the family for several years, including the murder trial of a friend's mother who is saved from the gallows by Papa, who eventually deserts the family.  There are wonderful details about family life, from detailed discussions about nature and the different elements of every season to the difficulties of learning new piano pieces by Mozart and Beethoven and the changing styles in clothes and furniture, which Rose recalls in perceptive detail.

Turner Classic Movies August 2020

This month TCM is highlighting stars; stars usually become stars when they work with good directors with whom they feel comfortable, so I will mention a film or two for each "star."

August 1 Barbara Stanwyck:  Crime of Passion (Gerd Oswald, 1957), Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

August 2 Rock Hudson:  two by Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows 1955, Written on the Wind 1957)

Aug. 3  Rita Hayworth:  Raoul Walsh's Strawberry Blonde (1941)

Aug. 7 Sylvia Sidney: King Vidor's Street Scene (1931), Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937)

Aug. 8 Charlie Chaplin, all his films are wonderful:  City Lights (1931)

Aug. 13 John Barrymore (Clarence Brown's Night Flight, 1933)

Aug. 15 Nina Foch (Joseph H. Lewis's My Name is Julia Ross, 1945)

Aug. 16 Cary Grant:  Leo McCarey's Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942)

Aug. 17 Maureen O'Hara: John Ford's The Wings of Eagles (1957)

Aug. 18 Warren Beatty: Robert Rossen's Lilith (1962)

Aug. 19 Dolores del Rio:  King Vidor's Bird of Paradise (1932)

Aug.21 Diana Dors: Terence Fisher's Man Bait (1952)

Aug. 22 Natalie Wood:  Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), John Ford's The Searchers (1956)

Aug.25 Anne Shirley:  King Vidor's Stella Dallas (1937)

Aug.27 Claudette Colbert: Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story (1942), John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)

Aug.28  Paul Henreid: Hollow Triumph (Steve Sekely, 1948)

Aug. 29 Eva Marie Saint:  Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959)

Aug. 30 Charlton Heston: Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

Aug. 31 Alain Delon: Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967)
     

baseball 2020

I think starting major league baseball was ill-advised, motivated as far as I can tell by greed.  I also heard that the baseball establishment was afraid that if they had no baseball this year that fans would not return next year.  I find this justification both dubious and offensive.  This is not a dispute over money, as the most recent strike in 1994 was, as well as several other strikes and lockouts, but about safety, life and death,  Especially now, when 14 Florida Marlins tested positive for the coronavirus, it would make sense to just cancel the season.  I love baseball but I -- and I think most baseball fans -- would prefer to see this so-called season, with its DH in the National League and its runner on second at the beginning of every extra inning, completely canceled.  Lives are at stake and certainly in this case the owners and players, unlike many of us, could easily forgo the money involved in taking a break. 

Edward Sedgewick's Spring Fever

Spring Fever (1927) is a low-key comedy, one of seventy-nine films (mostly B movies) Edward Sedgewick directed from 1920 to his death in 1953.  Sedgewick got decent performances from William Haines and Joan Crawford, who used subtle facial expressions to show emotion.  There is at least one experimental scene in this silent film where Haines and Crawford are getting undressed in a hotel just after their marriage and the screen goes completely black and one can just see the written words of what they are saying.  There is a theme of class consciousness as Haines becomes a golf champion at a ritzy resort, even though he is a mere shipping clerk in an elitist sport.

I would expect this to be a film that appeals to the gay community, not only because of the young Joan Crawford but because Haines was one of the few gay actors who refused to deny his homosexuality and was fired from MGM by Louis B. Mayer in 1933 when he refused to be part of a sham marriage.  Haines started his own design firm with his partner Jimmie Shields; Shields and Haines were together for 47 years until Haines's death in 1973.

Turner Classic Movies also recently showed the 1930 remake Love in the Rough, directed by Charles Reisner.  It starred Robert Montgomery and Dorothy Jordan, who lated played Martha Edwards in John Ford's The Searchers (1956), and included an unfunny Benny Rubin as Montgomery's caddy but also some amateurish singing and dancing that was actually rather charming.  Again a man who marries acts dishonestly by pretending to be rich but wins the father-in-law and the girl by winning a golf tournament!

The Impeachers by Brenda Wineapple

The impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson represented yet another attempt to preserve the Union and free the slaves, which, to the impeachers, were the self-same thing: to preserve the Union meant creating a more perfect one, liberated at last from the noxious and lingering effects of an appalling institution that retreated human beings as property.
-- Brenda Wineapple, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (Random House, 2019)

One thing we have learned from all three impeachments of America presidents is, as Wineapple writes, "sleaziness is hard to nail down" and what actions call clearly for impeachment is subjective and based on party affiliation as much as anything. The Johnson impeachment failed the necessary two-thirds vote by one vote, as all Democrats voted against conviction, along with seven Republican senators.  The seven Republican senators had various reasons for their votes; some were perhaps bought off (though this was never proven), but mostly: they did not want Radical Republican Benjamin Wade (president pro tempore of the senate; there was no vice-president) to become president, they were afraid to make Johnson a martyr, and they were concerned that conviction might keep Ulysses S. Grant from becoming president.  Johnson had many shortcomings, of course, especially his desire to return the southern states to the union quickly on dubious grounds and his hostility to allowing former slaves to vote, but whether his violation of Congress's tenure of office act, when he fired Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War, was sufficient grounds for impeachment remains controversial.

Wineapple's attention to the details of the case and the dramatis personae is impressive. I would have preferred fewer details of some of the more marginal characters and could have done without Wineapple's subjective descriptions of character, e.g., Benjamin Wade was "burly and belligerant, profane and tenacious," and more details of their actions.  The comings and goings of so many characters is slightly confusing and I would have preferred somewhat more historical context, but Wineapple's research and writing is impressive.

John Ford's Gideon of Scotland Yard 1958

I've made no secret of the fact that John Ford is my favorite director and that I think his films of the 40's and 50's are his best.  At first viewing Gideon of Scotland Yard is an anomaly among Ford's films,  his only tragicomedy and his only cop film, as Ford made few films during this period that took place in contemporary America, The Last Hurrah (also 1958) is an unusual exception. Gideon of Scotland Yard, of course, takes place in London, with the music of "London Bridge is Falling Down"  throughout.  Police Inspector George Gideon (Jack Hawkins) is the kind of character found in many Ford films,  a man who follows his duty while neglecting his family, not getting home in time for his daughter's (Anna Massey) concert or his wife's (Anna Lee) dinner and bringing home haddock instead of the salmon his wife requested.

In London Gideon is confronted with corruption and murder, in a modern world of entropy.  Cinematographer Freddie Young shows London in beautiful pastels -- the film was originally only shown in black-and-white in America!) -- while the cops face frustration at every turn, trying to stop murderers and robbers of every sort; Gideon doesn't even get time to eat lunch, though he regularly gets offered "a nice cup of tea" when he goes to see the relatives of those who have been killed.  As often happens in Ford's films the women hold down hearth and home and culture while Gideon faces a constant battle against bribery and violence.

The Falcon in San Francisco 1945, directd by Joseph H. Lewis

The Falcon in San Francisco is not a bad little B-movie:  it runs just over an hour, ha a romance, a cute moppet, comic relief, a femme fatale and even some location shooting.  Director Joseph H. Lewis would go on  to direct the less formulaic My Name is Julia Ross the same year and then the superb Gun Crazy in 1950.  How good one could make a series B-movie was part of the challenge for directors who aspired to better things and Lewis was able to include comedy (Ed Brophy), adventure and romance -- with both a sexy bad girl (Fay Helm) and a wholesome good girl (Joan Marshall).  The Falcon (no reason is given for the name) is played by Tom Conway, brother of George Sanders, who starred as the character in the first three films of the series, based on a story by Michael Arlen.

To a certain extend I enjoy B-movies from this period.    The Falcon in San Francisco starts out with a murder on a train, moves to a swanky nightclub and ends up with a ship exploding in the harbor. The crisp black-and-white cinematography is by Virgil Miller, and the film is full of skilled character actors, including Robert Armstrong and Carl Kent as well as an unbilled Dorothy Adams as a hotel maid.

Blake Edwards's The Perfect Furlough (1958)

I'm not going to be defending Blake Edwards any longer, except for the brilliantly funny The Party (1968).  The best I can say about The Perfect Furlough is that I would have loved it if I had seen it when it came out; I was twelve years old at the time and not allowed to go to the movies unless my parents took me, which they were never interested in doing.  I was just saying to my children recently that comedy is more effective in black-and- white (we just finished watching the first season of The Dick Van Dyke Show) because of the distraction from the physical and verbal humor in color.  Even if one concedes the beautiful mise-en-scene of many of Edwards's films it is still a distraction from what humor there is.  Also, Edwards's comedies do not transcend their time, as true of 10 (1979) as it is of The Perfect Furlough, which, with its back projection and backlot Paris seems more like an episode of the Phil Silvers show than a movie, as Cpl. Paul Hodges (Tony Curtis) manages to fix the lottery that rewards one soldier above the Arctic Circle a three-week furlough in Paris with sexy movie star Sandra Roca (Linda Cristal).

Accompanying Curtis on his furlough are army psychologist Lt. Vicki Loren(Janet Leigh) and public relations expert Liz Baker (Elaine Stritch, superb in her few scenes); their job is to make sure Curtis and Cristal don't engage in sex with each other.  Curtis sneaks out on his chaperones only to find out that Cristal is secretly married, though when it is discovered that she is pregnant the blame goes to Curtis, with whom Leigh falls in love when she falls into a wine-making vat.

The screenplay of The Perfect Furlough is written by Stanley Shapiro, who also wrote such dubious and dated films as Lover Come Back (1961) and That Touch of Mink (1962) and the unnecessary and intrusive wide-screen and color cinematography is by the usually reliable Philip Lathrop. A comedy doesn't have to be funny, as I have said many times, but it does have to say something other than that isolated soldiers get "restless."

The Snow Was Dirty by Georges Simenon

And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage.  The white powder that occasionally peels off from the crust of the sky in little clumps, like plaster from a ceiling, is unable to cover the filth.
--Georges Simenon, The Snow Was Dirty, translated by Howard Curtis (Penguin 1948)

This roman dur is bleaker than Camus, Graham Greene, Kafka and Orwell put together.  The lead character is Frank Friedmaier, son of a brothel owner, nineteen years old and a murderer in an unnamed country occupied by an unnamed occupying force.  The book was written by Simenon after WWII when Simenon fled to America to avoid questioning about possible collaboration with the Germans, still a subject of controversy.

Though the book is written in the third person it is seen from Frank's point of view, as he recruits prostitutes, whom he mistreats in his mother's brothel, and kills officials and shopkeepers for both fun and profit, though none of the violence is shown directly.  Frank flaunts his misbehavior and is eventually arrested, interrogated and executed, all of which he accepts fatalistically.  There is no redemption for Frank, whose mother's brothel was protected by the occupiers while most citizens stood in long freezing cold lines for food and scrounged for coal.

School of the American Ballet 2020

I have never been to a performance of the School of American Ballet, the school run by New York City Ballet, but based on what I saw recently on their website I intend to do so in the future.  One could say that it analogous to seeing minor league baseball -- which I love -- to see who will make it to the major leagues.  The big difference, of course, is that if one graduates from SAB they will definitely make it to the majors, if not New York City Ballet itself .

Because of the pandemic SAB did not have their regular performance this year but, instead, showed footage from previous years, with commentary from teachers Kay Mazzo, Maria Kowroski and Suki Schorer, who wrote the important book Balanchine Technique.  As Schorer said, "Balanchine said, 'teach what you know' and what I knew was Balanchine."  The program was varied, with performances from 2017 and 2018:  Jerome Robbins's Circus Polka to Stravinsky, Justin Peck's in creases (2012) to Phillip Glass, pas de deux from Balanchine's Agon (1957) by Stravinsky, and Balanchine's Scotch Symphony (1952) to Mendelssohn music.  They were all beautifully danced, from the many young girls of Circus Polka to the exquisite adagio in Scotch Symphony.  Particularly intense was the pas de deux from Agon danced by LaJeroneny Brown and Savannah Durham (originally danced by Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams).

Scotch Symphony is a lovely ballet not recently danced by New York City Ballet, perhaps because its Scottish themes are somewhere in the middle between Fokine's Les Sylphides and Balanchine's own Union Jack.  Nonetheless, it's one of Balanchine's most romantic ballets, a work about love and longing, loss and redemption, and was impressively and passionately danced by David Riccardo and Mira Nadon.

Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon

The narrative unfolds like a photograph slowly developing; it emerges from the official language and turns into a story of obsession, hate, dual identity, murder and suicide, and then switches back to the official language for the denouement.
--John Lancaster on Pietr the Latvian, "Maigret's Room," The London Review of Books June 4 2020.

Rivulets of rain water flowed from Maigret's overcoat, trousers and shoes into little puddles on the floor.  In that state he could not have sat down on the light-green velvet of the armchair in the lounge.
--George Simenon, Pietr the Latvian, translated by David Bellos (1930, Penguin)

Pietr the Latvian is Simenon's first novel about police detective Maigret, one of ten novels he published in 1930.  It establishes a sort of pattern that Simenon followed for the subsequent 74 Maigret novels:  only showing us what Maigret does to solve a case and little of what he thinks or what anyone else is doing except for their encounters with the detective.  There is somewhat more violence than most of the later Maigret novels --  Maigret is shot and almost drowns without it slowing him down much -- as he struggles to get sufficient evidence to bring an international criminal and his cohorts to justice. The Latvian commits suicide in front of Maigret before he can be put in handcuffs and the novel ends with Madame Maigret serving her husband her homemade plum liqueur. There is little that is romantic about Maigret's job as he stakes out houses and travels grimly throughout France in search of clues.

John Boorman's Having a Wild Week-End 1965

Most discussions of John Boorman tend to ignore Having a Wild Week-End at the expense of his best American films, Deliverance (1972) and Point Blank (1967).  Having a Wild Week-End was intended to boost the Dave Clark Five in the same way as Richard Lester boosted the Beatles in A Hard   Night Day's (does anyone remember the Dave Clark Five?).  At this point it's hard to tell if Having.. is a practice film (it was Boorman's first) or something of a melancholy put-on by Boorman and writer Peter Nichols.  The Dave Clark Five are heard on the soundtrack (their songs seem somewhat insipid today) but the five members are not a band in the film, instead they are stuntmen in a meat commercial, with Barbara Ferris playing a model promoting the slogan "Meat for Go."  Clark and Ferris decide to ditch the commercial and drive off to an island that Ferris is planning to buy and her agent plays up the publicity by saying she was kidnapped.  Their stolen Jaguar gets blown up in an army training exercise and they hitch a ride to Bath, where they end up with a strange couple in a costume party (are you Harpo Marx or Shirley Temple?) before the police catch up to them and Ferris decides to return to modeling.while the Dave Clark Five decide to go to Spain and teach scuba diving.

This film gives people few choices in England: sell meat, end up as hippies strung out on drugs, as Boorman shows them, or leave the country; even Ferris's attempt to buy an island fails, as it isn't even an island when the tide goes out.  Boorman and cinematographer Manny Wynn effectively capture the cold and dampness of an English winter, with tanks from WWII still rotting in the country.

A Tribute to Balanchine (1983) Lincoln Center at Home

I am rather overwhelmed attempting to write about the three Balanchine ballets in the recent broadcast by Lincoln Center at Home:  Who Cares (1970), Vienna Waltzes (1977) and Mozartiana (1981) -- so I will keep my comments rather brief, though I have already written about Vienna Waltzes (Sept. 26 2016) and Mozartiana (Jan.31 2018 and Jan. 29 2019) and I will post more about Who Cares when it returns to repertory and we are able to once again see live performances; the recordings are nice to have in the meantime, as one can watch them multiple times.

Certainly this recording from May 1983 (a month after Balanchine's death)is of historical interest, including many now retired dancers:  Suzanne Farrell in Vienna Waltzes and Mozartiana; Kyra Nichols, Heather Watts and Adam Luders in Vienna Waltzes; Patricia McBride, Lourdes Lopez and Mel Tomlinson in Who Cares and Sean Lavery in Vienna Waltzes and Who Cares (Lavery had to stop dancing when he turned thirty in 1986 due to a serious illness; he died in 2018)

The highlights for me in this program:  Suzanne Farrell, Adam Luders and the corps dancing to Ricard Strauss's waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier, that seemed to me influenced by Ernst Lubitsch's film of The Merry Widow (1934):  it starts out with Farrell all alone, then joined and separated and joined again by Adam Luders before they are swept together with dozens of other couples as the bright lights come on.
In Mozartiana --Balanchine's final masterpiece -- Suzanne Farrell dances with Ib Andersen, as she looks back to her childhood (represented by four young girls from The School of the American Ballet) and forward to death, possibly represented by Victor Castelli, dancing a gigue.  This version of Mozartiana is the fourth version made by Balanchine to this Tschaikovsky music; it fascinated him throughout his life, the first version was in 1933.
For me the highlight of Who Cares is the pas de deux of Sean Lavery and Patricia McBride in The  Man I Love, one of seventeen Gershwin songs in the ballet, orchestrated by Hershy Kay.  Who Cares is a ballet of the seventies that looks back to the twenties and today looks more classic than ever, with Balanchine's ballet interpretation of these wonderful popular songs.

I have said before in this blog that some of my favorite Balanchine ballets are done in practice clothes, where the classical line is sharper and more precise. But many Balanchine ballets have marvelous and appropriate costumes; in this case Karinska's for Vienna Waltzes and Who Cares and Rouben Ter-Arutunian's for Mozartiana.  Also, kudos for Robert Irving, conducting beautifully.