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.