Turner Classic Movies Jan. 2022

 The first month of 2022 includes a number of excellent movies from the classical period.

Jan. 2   Alfred Werker's Repeat Performance, 1947, in which a woman gets to repeat the past year and make changes, and John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, 1941, a great film.

Jan. 3 Ernst Lubitsch's terrific comedy Trouble in Paradise, 1941

Jan. 5 James Whale's lovely period piece about theatre in the time of The Great Garrick, 1937

Jan. 6  Chaplin's The Great Dictator, 1940 and Hitchcock's innovative Rope. 1948

Jan. 7  Ida Lupino's gritty The Hitch-Hiker, 1953

Jan. 8 Raoul Walsh's rambunctious The Strawberry Blonde, 1941

Jan. 9 two oneiric masterpieces:  Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley, 1947 and Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running, 1958

Jan. 14 Cy Endfield's Hell Drivers, 1958

Jan. 18 Hitchcock's North by Northwest, 1959

Jan. 19 Howard Hawks's great Western Rio Bravo 1958

Jan. 24 Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles, 1976 and Andre de Toth's Western Bounty Hunter 1954

Jan. 26 Jean Renoir's The Southerner, 1945

Jan. 27 William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road 1933, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity 1944. and Phil Karlson's corrosive The Phenix City Story 1955

Ernst Lubitsch's The Doll (1919)

 The Oyster Princess and The Doll remain landmark achievements in Lubitsch's career, each a unique and dazzlingly feat of cinematic style.  These zany films, starring the irrepressibly madcap Ossi Oswalda in very different roles (in The Doll, she is a dollmaker's daughter who masquerades as a mechanical sex toy) show Lubitsch's already-advanced sense of cinematic style, drawing on the surrealist and expressionist movements that were then so influential in Europe.

Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?

The sources of The Doll are two stories by E.T.A. Hoffman from the early nineteenth century, Der Sandman and Die Puppa, that were used in Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffman as well as being the source of the ballet Coppelia.  Lubitsch packs a great deal into this movie, which runs for just over an hour and begins with Lubitsch himself building a minature set.  In the story Lancelot (Hermann Thimig) is promised his uncle's inheritance if he marries quickly and when word gets out he is chased by dozens of women (this obviously influenced Keaton's Seven Chances of 1925, where the same thing happens) until he escapes to a monastery full of greedy monks, who suggest he go to see a puppet maker named Hilarius (Victor Janson) who will make a puppet for him that he can then marry and then give the inheritance to the monks.  But Hilarius's apprentice breaks the doll Hilarius had made and because the doll looks exactly like Hilarius's daughter (Ossi Oswalda) she takes the doll's place and Lancelot buys and marries her without realizing she is not a doll; Oswalda pretends to be a doll while acting like a woman when Lancelot is not looking.  Lubitsch includes numerous fanciful sets as he progresses from Hilarius's workshop, where the numerous dolls Hilarius had made obey his orders to dance, to the monastery where Lancelot and Ossi sleep in a spartan cell and Lancelot discovers his doll is a real woman.  

Allen Baron's Blast of Silence (1961)

 Until I recently saw Blast of Silence on Turner Classic movies I would have said that film noir ended with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), but Blast of Silence, with its film noir tropes, either signifies the end of film noir or the beginning of neo-noir, as Eddie Muller said in his erudite introduction to the film.  Allen Baron, the director, plays the hired killer Frankie, adrift in New York at Christmas in this dark film with a budget of $20,000 (equivalent to about $180,000 today).  Molly McCarthy plays Lori, the girl he runs into from his childhood as he violates his own rule of avoiding everyone and lives (and dies) to regret it.  Larry Tucker, so good in bit roles in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962) and Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) makes his acting debut as a gun broker who lives with his pet rats. There is a fatalistic narration by blacklisted actor Lionel Stander, written by blacklisted Waldo Salt, in the unusal second person.  Unusual for movies, that is, but not in radio (The Whistler, in the forties and fifties) or in comic books, where Baron had worked for a time.

The film opens with a tiny dot of light, that becomes bigger and bigger as the train carrying Frankie from Cleveland to New York comes into Grand Central Station on Christmas Eve.  We follow him as he carries out his errands, from following his contracted victim to obtaining the gun with a silencer that he needs for the job and eventually throws into the river.  Baron plays the role quietly and intently, looking rather like George C, Scott in the intensity of his concentration.  Once he meets Lori he tries to get out of the job but the guy who hired him says "no" and "now you're in trouble."  After trying to force himself on Lori he returns to her to apologize and finds another man there, shaving.  Frankie goes ahead with the job, then goes to collect the money on a rainy and windswept Jamaica Bay and ends up dead, shot to death and covered with mud. 

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Ernst Lubitsch's Rosita (1923)

Rosita has an engagingly vivacious central character, some amusing sexual intrigue, and emotional scenes that alternate between the overwrought and the quietly touching. 

Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?

Mary Pickford in the 1920's was one of the most powerful people in Hollywood and was responsible for bringing Lubitsch to America from Germany  Originally they were going to make a version of Goethe's Faust but for various reasons -- including anti-German sentiment still alive after the world war -- they settled on Rosita instead, based on a play by Phillipe Dumanoir, taking place in a mythical 18th century Seville.  For reasons still unclear Pickford disliked the final film and didn't save a print, as she did with all her other films.  It was considered a lost film (like 90% of silent films) until a print was discovered in Russia and restored by the Museum of Modern Art.  This was the Rosita that was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies.

Rosita is a combination of humor and drama as only Lubitsch could do it.  Pickford is a street singer who mocks the king for his high taxes.  The king (played by Holbrook Blinn, who looks rather like Lubitsch) hears her sing and brings Rosita and her impoverished family to the palace (beautifully designed by Seven Gade and William Cameron Menzies) in an attempt to make her his mistress.  But Rosita falls in love with Don Diego (George Walsh), who saved her life and who the king had condemned to death.  Rosita pleads for Diego's life and the king agrees to spare it and then changes his mind when he realizes how attracted to Diego Rosita is.  But the queen, who is aware of the king's passion for Rosita, countermands the king's order and Rosita and Diego are reunited.

This was Pickford's attempt to play a grownup after years of playing young girls.  Although she is delightful in the film, which was financially successful, she felt it wasn't what the public wanted and clashed with Lubitsch, who stuck to his own vision of the work, with its subtle behavioral nuances, such as Pickford's circling a bowl of fruit when she is first brought to the palace, unsure whether it's okay to eat a piece. The film is beautifully lit and photographed by Charles Rosher, who three years later was the cinematographer for Murnau's Sunrise.

Ernst Lubitsch's Three Women (1924)

Where Three Women occasionally come alive is in its sardonic as well as compassionate treatmemt of Mabel's anxiety over aging and Lamont's indifference to her feelings.

--Joseph McBride. How Did Lubitsch Do It?

Sleazy businessman Edmund Lamont (Lew Cody) sees Mabel Wilton (Pauline Frederick) at a ball and can't help but notice how bedecked with jewels she is, especially since he has huge debts and no money with which to pay them.  Lamont courts Mabel until Mabel's daughter Jeannie comes home suddenly from college and Lamont switches his courting to her and marries her; Lamont knows how to exploit weakness, insecurity and vanity.  Meanwhile Jeannie's college beau Fred (Pierre Genron) follows Jeannie, only to discover that she has married Lamont after Fred (now a doctor) has been called to tend to Lamont after a brawl in a nightclub -- Lamont had been out with a third woman, Harriet (Marie Prevost) when he was supposed to be at a business meeting.  Mabel is doubly angry for first being spurned and then seeing her daughter spurned; Marie shoots and kills Lamont, is acquitted by an all-male jury and Jeannie goes back to Fred. 

This overwrought drama is handled with impressive subtlety by Lubitsch; there is a minimum of titles in this silent film, as Lubitsch makes visually clear the content of the dialogue.  It has been suggested by some that the film would have been more believable if Lamont had been played by someone (Adolph Menjou has been suggested) less slimy but that would have have made for a very different movie; I find Lew Cody effectively cast as a suitor who knows how to get what he wants from women.  There is also an interesting contrast between Mabel as a mother and Fred's mother (Mary Carr):  in neither case is a father present, or even mentioned, and each mother finds different ways to encourage their child to become educated and independent.

 

Ernst Lubitsch's Die Austernprinzessin (1919)

The dazzling pirouettes of Lubitsch's visual style throughout The Oyster Princess are always in the service of pure humor rather than self-concious artistry, though unforced cinematic artistry is present in abundance.

--Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?

Although I have admiration for Lubitsch's German films I don't think they come even close to the beauty and style of his American films, which began with Rosita in 1923.  The Oyster Princess has some successful satire of the wealthy, as the princess (touchingly played by Ossi Oswalda) and her father (Victor Janson) are attended to by dozens of servants for every purpose, including holding the father's giant cigar between puffs, and the importance of nobility, as the princess wants to marry a prince, no matter how poor.  There are many of Lubitsch's touches throughout the film but they exist for their own sake rather than as integral to the plot and style of the film, as they became in the American films. We even see a precursor to the delightful dancing in Lubitsch's American films (such as 1934's The Merry Widow) in "the Foxtrot Epidemic" in The Oyster Princess, with wild dancing by the wedding guests as well as the cooks and servants, led by the incredible gyrating of the orchestra leader.  Oswalda is charming indeed but too much of the humor consists of episodic dipsomania as well as peeking through keyholes.

Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (1942)

 To Be or Not To Be was an astonishing act of courage for any filmmaker to make in 1941-42, particularly for a German Jewish emigre, and it is audacious aesthetically as it is politically.

Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia University Press, 2018)

I first saw To Be or Not To Be on a double bill at Film Forum with Preston Stuges's Unfaithfully Yours; both could be described as serious black comedies but at that viewing the Lubitsch lost out to the considerably more aggressive Sturges.  The Lubitsch, however, is in many ways a gentle comedy about love and relationships, even as it lampoons the Nazis as both buffoons and savages.  Jack Benny and Carole Lombard are both superb as married members of an acting troupe in Poland when Hitler invades the country and the actors use their costumes from a banned play to impersonate Nazis in order to stop a traitor from revealing the addresses of families in Poland of fliers fighting in exile from Britain (Truffaut once said he loved the film but could never quite figure out the plot).  Lombard is elegant in the center of the plot, as she is fancied by flier Robert Stack, who tells her about the traitor, who is exposed and shot by the actors in an empty theatre, with the help of Benny playing the role of Nazi commander.  At times the hammy actors have to tone down their impersonations, stopped by other actors from going too far.  There are many wonderful moments of both suspense and humor in this Lubitsch film,  one of my favorites being Felix Bressart, as actor Greenberg, quoting the "if you prick us do we not bleed?" speech from the Merchant of Venice to Nazi soldiers.

Cy Endfield's The Argyle Secrets (1948)

 There are so many interlocking and often paranoid intrigues crammed into one 24-hour storyline in The Argyle Secrets that I'd defy anyone to come up with a comprehensive synopsis even after a couple of viewings.

--Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader (Jan. 15, 1993)

Cy Endfield was a writer and director blacklisted because of HUAC who fled to England in 1953, where he continued his successful career after writing and directing The Underworld Story (see my post of Aug. 18, 1993) and The Sound of Fury in 1950, two corrosive views of America.  The Argyle Secrets was first written by Endfield for the radio show Suspense, broadcast as The Argyle Album, directed by William Spier on Dec. 13, 1945, starring Robert Taylor.  The film, The Argyle Secrets, was made in 1948 on a budget of $100,000, shot in eight days by cinematographer Mack Stengler, who photographed an incredible 13 films in 1948. 

The Argyle Secrets follows the radio play fairly closely, with some additional scenes and complications, including Harry Mitchell's (William Gargan) escape from thugs down the fire escape and through the window of an apartment where an old friend lives with her two sons, one of whom is a cop with a newspaper headlining Mitchell's being wanted for murder.  Mitchell, a reporter, visited a sick fellow report to find out about the Argyle document and when the friend ended up dead Mitchell went on the lam in an attempt to find the Argyle report.  But others were looking for it, too, including femme fatale Marla (Marjorie Lord), who tells Mitchell that the missing document details the financial help given Nazi Germany by wealthy American industrialists.  Marla and others want to use the document for blackmail.  Endfield's bleak view of postwar America is very much in the film noir tradition, as Mitchell's search for The Argyle Album leads to half a dozen violent deaths in this dark and complex 63-minute film.

Dorothy Arzner's Dance,Girl, Dance (1940)

 The gender power asymetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses.

-- Laura Mulvey

Dorothy Arzner was the only female director in Hollywood in 1940  (Ida Lupino would not direct her first film until 1950) and Dance,Girl,Dance is an impressive critique of "the male gaze."  Maureen O'Hara plays Judy O'Brien, who decides she will never be a good ballet dancer after seeing a rehearsal of a serious ballet with lead dancer Vivian Fay; her friend Bubbles (Lucille Ball) gets Judy a job as part of Bubbles's burlesque act:  Judy plays a stooge who dances classical ballet, leading the male audience to demand the return of Bubbles.  Judy finally gets fed up, stops her dance and speaks directly to the audience:  "I know you want to see me tear my clothes off so you can look your fifty cents worth.  Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won't let you."  Throughout the film the dancers are watched and leered at by the men who decide what jobs they will get and what they will do. There is some beautiful choreography by Arzner's longtime lover Marion Morgan, who finds beauty in both nightclub dancing and classical ballet, though power in both cases is dominated by males.

I don't mean to make the movie sound particularly didactic; the critique of "the male gaze" is going on somewhat beneath the surface of an enjoyable musical, with Judy and Bubbles competing for the same man and eventually battling it out on stage and in court.  Arzner cleverly undercuts the usual traditions of musicals, with the most authority going to Judy's ballet teacher Madame Lydia Basilova, played by Maria Ouspenskaya, and the males being mostly leering fools, with the exception of Steve Adams (played by Ralph Bellamy), who takes Judy and dance seriously.

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

The Buick sailed off the overpass.  It plummeted twenty-five feet like a stone.  The trunk slammed into the pile of dirt , but the dirt helped to cushion their fall.  The edge of the overpass rapidly receded into Beauregard's vision as they fell.  He braced himself by gripping the steering wheel and leaning back in his seat as hard as he could.  The rear bumper took some of the force.  The load-leveling shocks he had installed took the rest.  He coule feel every inch of the steel plating he welded to the chassis stretch to its tensile limit.

--S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron Books, 2020) 

Blacktop Wasteland is a riveting crime and chase book and, like the best crime novels (Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Wahloo and Sjowall) it works on multiple levels, including the politics and economics of a particular milieu; in the case of Blacktop Wasteland it's about the poor whites and Blacks in southern Virginia.  Beauregard Montage is a Black auto mechanic whose shop in losing business to a newer, whiter place and Beauregard needs money badly:  his daughter is going to college,  his mother is about to get thrown out of her nursing home and rent on his shop and trailer are due.  So he takes a job driving the getaway car in a jewelry store heist.  Some of the details of the robbery strain credulity but Cosby describes the caper and the getaway with style, as the diamonds they steal turn out to belong to a local mob, who track down the robbers and make them do a dangerous robbery of a rival gang, and that's when things turn to hell, with everyone eventually dead except Beauregard, who feels like he is repeating the sins of his long-absent father against the wishes of his second wife and two young children. Can he stop?  As he says to his wife, "I don't know if I can."

Southern Virginia is effectively described by Cosby:  beautiful scenery with plenty of poverty and Confederate flags, full of hard workers, the unemployed and the methheads, where life is sometimes cheap and almost everything else is expensive.

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch

Many of Poe's admirers became influential innovators.  From his blueprints they built the modern genres of detective fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle), science fiction (Jules Verne) and horror, particularly of a weird and psychological cast (Robert Louis Stevenson, H.P. Lovecraft, and eventually Stephen King).  While these advances in genre fiction have had a remarkable long-lasting popular success, for a long time they were not treated as "high literature" worthy of serious critical attention.

In antebellum America the institutional markers separating professional scientists from amateurs or cranks were just beginning to take shape, and Poe made the most of this ambiguity to put forward his own analyses in aeronautics, conchology and psychology and put his stamp on cryptology, information theory, and cosmology.  With these neglected achievements we might be inclined to add him to the pantheon of contrbutors to what his contemporary David Brewster called the "one vast miracle" of modern science.

--John Tresch, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021)

This is a fascinating book that interweaves the life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) with the science and scientists of the first half of the 19th century, as well as the worlds of journalism and publishing.  Most of the names, lives and achievements of the people Poe knew and sparred with were unfamiliar to me -- George Combe. Samuel Morton, Alexander Dallas Bache -- while other important figures of the time -- Daguerre. Mesmer -- I have heard of but knew little about.  I have read most of Poe's stories and poems as well as the marvelous novella The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket, but I was unaware of Poe's involvement with the scientific issues of the day and his journalistic exposures of the frauds and humbug of his time, all analyzed and documented in Tresch's book, as he follows Poe and his writing from Virginia to West Point, Boston, New York and Baltimore. 

Turner Classic Movies Dec. 2021

 Yes, there are some films this month with Christmas scenes and allegories.  I recommend Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940), John Ford's The Three Godfathers (1948), Mitch Leisen and Preston Sturges's Remember the Night (1940), Leo McCarey's Going My Way (1944), Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955).  All of these are showing at multiple times in December.

Other movies include:

Dec. 1 Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance (1937) with Rogers and Astaire

Dec. 6 Otto Preminger's film noir Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950

Dec. 7 John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945)

Dec. 11 Samuel Fuller's Park Row (1952)

Dec. 13 John Ford's Stagecoach (1939)

Dec. 16 Jean Renoir's Elena et les hommes (1956)

Dec. 18 Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940) and John Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934)

Tom Donahue's Dean Martin: The King of Cool

 TCM's documentary is detailed but superficial; stuck with the foolish title it emphasizes what was perceived as cool about Dean Martin, including the alcohol and tobacco that killed him.  He and Jerry Lewis made 17 films between 1949 and 1956, but Martin wanted to be taken seriously as an actor (though he was a terrific straight man) and Lewis wanted to direct his own films; Martin and Lewis's last two films were their best -- Artists and Models in 1955 and Hollywood or Bust in 1956 -- and they were the only ones directed by a top-notch director, Frank Tashlin. But after years of mediocre directors (producer Hal Wallis felt that the films made plenty of money without necessarily being well directed) Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were ready to move on, separately.

Martin hoped to be taken seriously as an actor in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions in 1957 but it didn't happen, though he went on to terrific roles in Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958) and Bells Are Ringing(1960) as well as Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959).  From then on he played mostly caricature versions of himself on televison, with the so-called Rat Pack in Los Vegas and, most effectively, in Billy Wilder's brilliant widescreen black-and-white Kiss Me, Stupid in 1964. Despite the onslaught of rock 'n roll Martin continued to make record albums in his smooth style and did "celebrity roasts" on tv until 1984.  He died at the age of 78 in 1995., 

Connie Hochman's In Balanchine's Classroom (2021)

Watching Connie Hochman's film I was reminded of something that Balanchine once said, "Only God creates, I assemble."  Hochman's film is a wonderful and fascinating assembly of dance footage, Balanchine's classes and interviews with those who danced his ballets and took his classes, most notably Merrill Ashley, Jacque d'Amboise, Gloria Govrin, Edward Villella and Suki Shorer (who wrote a definitive book: Suki Shorer on Balanchine Technique).   I remarked to Susan that I was disappointed that there was so little shown of Balanchine's classes and she replied that she was pleased there was so much. It's interesting to me that the dancers compared Balanchine to Einstein, Picasso and Mozart when most people have never heard of him, ballet still being a mysterious art to many.  I wonder who would be most likely to enjoy this marvelous film:  those who never heard of Balanchine would probably be mystified by it and those of us who know his work well probably will not hear or see anything new, as much as we enjoy the previously unseen footage. One can't get inside the mind of a genius and Balanchine's comments in class and in interviews were often cryptic, as he emphasized speed, precision, and musicality with metaphors and obscure references for dancers to absorb.  It is clear from the footage that we do get to see that Balanchine quickly could grasp what each dancer could and couldn't do and would often adjust the choreography appropriately.

Most of the dancers who are interviewed are licensed by the Balanchine Trust as repetiteurs, i.e., they go all over the world to stage Balanchine ballets; there is interesting footage of them working with young dancers, passing on their knowledge.   There are also a number of companies that are now run by former New York City Ballet dancers who worked with Balanchine, in San Francisco, Seattle and other cities; many Balanchine ballets will survive.  I did miss hearing from Suzanne Farrell, who revived many ballets for her company in Washington, D. C. (I finally got to see Balanchine's marvelous Don Quixote there) and Peter Martins was apparently not interviewed, though he appeared several times in Hochman's film in archival footage; I think Hochman intelligently wanted to focus on Balanchine and didn't want to get involved in former or current controversies.  

Mervyn LeRoy's Three on a Match (1932)

Three on a Match indicates the power of a studio over a good director (LeRoy) who doesn't have a vision of his own, i.e., Three on a Match is obviously a Warner Brothers picture as much as LeRoy's Quo Vadis (1953) is an MGM film. Three on a Match is also a pre-code film, a combiantion of soap opera and gangster film, including drug addiction as well as extra-marital sex.  The film starts in 1919 when the three leading women are in school and grow up to be Mary (Joan Blondell), Vivian (Ann Dvorak) and Ruth (Bette Davis).  Ruth ends up as a secretary, Mary goes to reform school and eventually becomes an actress, Vivian marries a wealthy lawyer (Warren Willian playing a non-cad).  Times passes as newspaper headlines roll by and Vivian leaves her husband out of boredom --taking her child with her --to live with a low-level gangster, Michael Loftus (Lyle Talbot), and gets addicted to drugs; her husband divorces her and marries Mary and hires Ruth as his governess after he gets custody of his and Vivian's son.  Lyle and his gang (including a young Humphrey Bogart) kidnap Vivian's son and hold him for ransom while they lock Vivian in a tenement room. Vivian leaps through a nailed-shut window with a message of where her son is written on her slip in lipstick.

The film is crisply shot (by Sol Polito, who photographed 8 films in 1932; LeRoy directed 6) and edited (by Ray Curtis) and packs a great deal into its running time of 63 minutes.  Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak have the biggest roles; Bette Davis's potential had yet to be discovered, though she is quite intense in her relatively small role.

Otto Preminger's Skidoo (1968)

 Despite the impulse toward disintegration so apparent in much of the film, Preminger's visual control is fully evident throughout Skidoo.

-- Chris Fujiwara, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (Faber and Faber 2008)

What an interesting cast Skidoo has -- Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Mickey Rooney, Doro Merande, Groucho Marx; members of Preminger's stock company:  Arnold Stang, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford; the youth contingent:  John Phillip Law, Alexandra Hay, Austin Pendleton, Luna; also Geroge Raft, Slim Pickens, Cesar Romero and Frank Gorshin -- in Preminger's attempt to reconcile the hippies of 1968 with the Mafia and the old fogeys based on his own experience of LSD under the tutelage of Timoth Leary.  He effectively uses the music of Nilsson (who even sings the credits at the end, down to the last assistant director) and the vivid cinematography of Leon Shamroy (who photographed Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It in 1956, another intensesly colorful film in  a widescreen ratio).

I found the movie quite funny in its exploration of the relationship between hippies and adults, with Preminger showing an understanding for the reasons behind each group's behavior.  But whether one finds this film amusing (Preminger's only previous comedy was the droll The Moon is Blue in 1953) or not is to me irrelevant, since even the best comedies are not necessarily funny in their examinations of the absurdity of life and how people behave.  Skidoo is certainly a product of its time but also looks optimistically ahead toward reconciliation, with the last shot showing Austin Pendleton (in his first movie) as a draft dodger and Groucho Marx (in his last film) as  a Mafia boss escaping turmoil and peacefully sharing a boat and a joint.

William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

If anyone is nostalgic for the 80's I recommend William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A., in which Friedkin's main interest was in doing a car chase, with a car going the wrong way on the freeway, which Friedkin felt outdid the chase in The French Connection (1971). Friedkin briefly soared with that film and with The Exorcist (1973) before petering out, along with Peter Bogdanovitch and Francis Ford Coppola, in the short-lived Director's Company.  To Live and Die  in L.A. has everything an 80's film needs:  bright and neon colors (courtesy of Dutch cinematographer Robby Muller), a morally ambiguous cop (William Petersen) and a morally ambiguous criminal (Willem Dafoe), foot chases and car chases, gunfights and fist fights. indistinguishable and morally ambiguous women, a pop soundtrack courtesty of Wang Chung, and gritty Los Angeles locations. 

My favorite part of To Live and Die in L.A. is a fascinating examination of Eric Masters' (Dafoe) attention to detail in printing counterfeit twenty-dollar bills.  For an example of an excellent film about  U.S. Treasury agents tracking down counterfeiters I suggest Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947), with John Alton's beautiful black-and-white cinematography.

Philip Roth's When She Was Good (1967)

 "And what's wrong with my family that isn't with yours, Roy?  Look, you, if you don't want to marry me," she said, "because someone has begin to tell you that I'm not good enough for you, well, believe me, you don't have to."

Lucy Nelson in Philip Roth's When She Was Good (Random House, 1967) 

When She Was Good takes place in the Midwest during the 40's and 50's and there's nothing Jewish about it.  How much, if anything, Roth knew about the Midwest is unclear, though he did attend graduate school at the University of Chicago, but I found that his satirization of small-town America in that era (when I was growing up in a small town) is eerily accurate, from the social standing of an assistant postmaster to family quarrels, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and chronic alcoholism.  The main characters are Lucy Nelson (apparently based on Margaret Martinson Williams, Roth's first wife), her mother Myra, her father Whitey, her eventual husband Roy Bassart and his parents and uncle.

The novel has an impressive structure, flashing back to Lucy's death and following her through school and to a local college, until she returns home in the first year, pregnant.  She gradually grows mad as she learns that her long-absent father is now in jail in Florida and starts feeling that everyone is against her, as she flees into a snowstorm,  In other word, it's a melodrama -- via Dreiser out of Henry James -- that would have made a good Douglas Sirk film; unfortunately Roth considered Sirk's films to be "Hollywood dreck," according to Roth's friend Benjamin Taylor.

Frank R. Strayer's Blondie Plays Cupid 1940

 I find the Blondie series, especially the twelve earliest films (there were 28 in all, between 1939 and 1950) directed by Frank Strayer, charming, funny, moving and sometimes a bit hokey.  Strayer is good at physical comedy -- there is a bit in Blondie Plays Cupid where Dagwood gets stuck to a freshly painted chair, strongly influenced by Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. (1924) and another where Dagwood tries to climb a ladder from which he had just fallen, breaking all the rungs on the way down.  But there are also many elements of sweetness among Blondie (Penny Singleton), Dagwood (Arthur Lake), Baby Dumpling  (Larry Simms) and Daisy their dog (though I could do without the reaction shots of Daisy), as they leave the city to stay in the country with Aunt Hannah (Leona Roberts) and Uncle Albert (Spencer Charters) on the 4th of July, after Blondie had confiscated Dagwood and Baby Dumpling's firecrackers.

Strayer and his writers (Richard Flournoy and Karen DeWolf) pack a great deal of plot into a sixty-eight minute film, as Blondie and Dagwood are picked up on their walk from the bus by Millie (Luane Walters) and Charlie (Glen Ford, early in his career) on their way to get married, a marriage interrupted by Millie's father (Will Wright) because Charlie had promised him an oil well on his property that has not yet materialized.  Dagwood is enlisted to spirit Millie out of her house but goes in through her father's window instead, though all ends well when Baby Dumpling throws a stick of dynamite that he thinks is a firecracker and that starts the oil gushing, as Dagwood and Blondie reconcile.

One can read my posts about Strayer's other Blondie films: five in 2018 and two in 2020.

Henry S. Kesler's Five Steps to Danger 1956

 Although introduced by Eddie Muller on Turner Classic Movies as a film noir Five Steps to Danger only marginally fits in that genre.  It does have a sense of fatality, as Ann Nicholson (Ruth Roman) and John Emmet (Sterling Hayden) meet at a car repair shop; Emmet's car is sold and he gets a ride with Nicholson, about whom he knows nothing, but she's headed to Santa Fe and he is on his way to Texas. Five Steps to Danger seems more like "Cold War noir," as director Kesler made few movies but did direct twenty-six episodes of "I Led Three Lives," a  TV communist spy drama that probably helped him to get financing for the low-budget (except for the two stars) Five Steps to Danger, which was beautifully framed and filmed in black-and-white by cinematographer Kenneth Peach, a veteran of B movies and televison.

Ann and John are followed by the cops, who try to arrest Ann for a murder.  Ann and John fight them off and escaped handcuffed together like Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), as Ann tells her story about escaping from Germany with some secret information about nuclear bombs (the "Macguffin," i.e., the device that motivates the plot).  It becomes hard to tell the bad guys from the good guys but Ann and John finally figure out who are the commie spies and who are government agents when the scientist to whom Ann is delivering the information turns out to be an imposter; a college dean and Ann's doctor are also working for the commies. Although this film is very much of its time it also transcends it, as strangers Ann and John gradually learn to trust, understand and help each other, though the "happy" ending is somewhat inconsistent with the film noir motifs that precede it. 

World Series 2021

 I don't have too much to say about this year's World Series, as it continued the current trend in the game of strikeouts and home runs, with not much in between, as every game except the fifth had more strikeouts than hits  The most impressive effort was by the Houston Astros in game five, when they scored nine runs without a home run and the most dubious was Braves manager Brian Snitker taking pitcher Ian Anderson out of game three after five no-hit innings (yes, I know he had his reasons).  Most of the games were close to four hours long with as many as a dozen pitchers used and only Braves pitcher Max Fried going as many as six innings, in game six. 

Once again we had to put up with TV announcer Joe Buck, with an occasional intelligent remark from John Smoltz; I found I was able to "see" more with ESPN radio announcer Dan Shulman, effectively low-key in the manner of Vin Scully.  Buck belongs to the bombastic announcer style of Yankee announcers Michael Kay and John Sterling, rooting for their team to win and trying to impress with their questionable assertions.  The best post-season announcing team only did one game, a White Sox/Astros game for the MLB network:  Bob Costas, Buck Showalter and Jim Kaat, with much intelligent analysis and the ability to sometimes be quiet and let the game speak for itself.

Incidentally it was a pleasure to see how well catcher Travis d'Arnaud played for the Braves in this World Series, batting .292 and doing a superb job of handling the pitchers.  d'Arnaud is part of a long line of former Mets, including Nolan Ryan, who were traded or discarded by the Mets and had impressive careers thereafter. 

Turner Classic Movies Nov. 2021

 Not much new or unusual, a fair number of B movies (especially Westerns), many solid classics.

Nov. 3  Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) and three excellent film noirs:  Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937), Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night (1948), Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1950)

Nov. 5  Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1968) with its marvelous Ennio Morricone score.

Nov. 6 Raoul Walsh's corrosive White Heat (1949)

Nov. 7 Vincente Minnelli's musical Bells Are Ringing (1960), with the marvelous Judy Holliday.

Nov. 12 Jacques Tourneur movies, including Out of the Past (1947)

Nov. 13 Otto Preminger's charmingly bizzare Skidoo (1968)

Nov. 14 Don Siegel's The Lineup (1958).

Nov. 15 John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and Rogers and Astaire in Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee (1934)

Nov. 19 Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959)

Nov. 20 Billy Wilder's brilliant Kiss Me Stupid (1964)

Nov. 22 Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1967) and Michael Powell's glorious The Red Shoes (1948)

Nov. 25 Raoul Walsh's marvelous They Died With Their Boots On (1941)

Nov. 26 A number of Lubitsch films, of which my favorite is To Be or Not To Be (1942)

Nov. 30 Leo MCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957), laughter and tears.

Lionel Shriver's Should We Stay or Should We Go

 "I'll keep it simple, then.  How much better are our lives going to get than they are right now?  What are the chances that everything gets worse from here on out?  Not only a bit worse.  Loads worse?"                  "One hundred percent," Cyril said.

Lionel Shriver, Should We Stay or Should We Go (HarperCollins 2021)

Shriver is one of the few contemporary author whose new books I look forward to.  Should We Stay or Should We Go starts off with an agreement between Cyril and Kay Wilkinson in London that they will commit suicide together when they have both reached 80, thirty years away in 2020; among other reasons they don't want to end up with the dementia that Cyril's father suffered for years, dominating Kay and Cyril's life.  Shriver then gives us a dozen versions of what happens next: Kay goes through with it but Cyril doesn't; Cyril does but Kay doesn't; Kay reveals the plan to her daughter just as Kay turns 80 and Cyril and Kay are committed to Close of the Day Cottages, a horrible nursing home, for the rest of their lives; they voluntarily go to a posh nursing home, Journey's End, where Kay dies and Cyril lives to ninety-three with locked-in syndrome; a drug is discovered --Retorgarifax --that means nobody ever dies; they get frozen by a company called Sleeping Beauties and wake up in a world strange to them, without their love for each other; they both live to 110 and die together peacefully at their own wake.

Each alternate reality is presented both logically and imaginatively: Cyril and Kay go through Brexit (one votes to stay, the other to leave) and the coronavirus and crises with their three children while always maintaining their love for each other.  Shriver examines with intelligence and humor the various ways one can grow older and the advantages and disadvantages of doing so, as one's body changes in ways it is usually impossible to control.

John Farrow's Men in Exile (1937)

Men in Exile is Farrow's first film, made at the B unit of Warner Brothers.  It's an efficient and entertaining B picture, with a lot of plot in its 58 minutes running time.  Dick Purcell is a cabdriver in Miami whose cab in used in a heist and when he's blamed he leaves for the island of Caribo, which is composed of hotels, bars and police stations; it looks very much like the place McGinty fled to in Preston Sturges's The Great McGinty (1941)  Purcell gets a job in a bar/nightclub and falls in love with June Travis, daughter of the owner.  Purcell avoids getting mixed up in the gun-running of an old friend, played by Norman Willis, from stir, which Travis's brother (Alan Baxter) is involed in, while also romancing Willis's wife.  

The style of the film is rather flat; the cinematographer is Arthur Todd, who photographed eight films in 1937 (Farrow directed three films in '37, five in '38 and six in '39), as Farrow devotes his attention to the effective bunch of character actors in the film, including Olin Howland, Victor Varconi and Veda Ann Borg.  The screenplay is by Roy Chanslor, who wrote the novel that Nicholas Ray turned into the film Johnny Guitar (1954).  Farrow was a prolific director of B movies, though unfortunately his films became no more personal when he moved on to bigger budgets later, with movies such as The Big Clock (1948).

Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story (2019)

I'm not going to say much about Marriage Story, except that it is a not-loose-enough remake of Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (2005), with fewer children at stake, and is made as though D.W. Griffith had never lived. I just want to let readers of this blog know that I do watch some contemporary films, even if I usually end up regretting it.  Marriage Story, unlike Baumbach's earlier film, has only one child at stake, as Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson -- a theatre director and an actress -- battle it out for a divorce and the custody of their child, played by Azhy Robertson.  The Robertson character gets short shrift indeed:  he is supposed to be (I think) about eight years old and has trouble reading, for which he gets no help from either parent.  Johansson and Driver both hire sleazy divorce lawyers (which they had originally agreed not to do) and fight it out in court and in person.  Why this film is called Marriage Story instead of Divorce Story I don't understand, since only the divorce is shown; perhaps Baumbach thinks divorce inevitably follows marriage.  If one wants to see a married couple battle on personal and professional grounds with wit and intelligence I recommend the 1949 film Adam's Rib; it stars Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, was directed by George Cukor and written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin; it's available on DVD and shows up fairly often on Turner Classic Movies. 

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men

 Crooks said gently, "Maybe you can see now.  You got George.  You know he's goin' to come back.  S'pose you didn't have nobody.  S'pose you couldn't come into the bunk house and play rummy 'cause you was black.  S'pose you had to sit out here an' read books.  Sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books.  Books ain't no good.  A guy needs somebody -- to be near him."  He whined, "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.  Don't make no difference who the guy is long as he's with you.  I tell ya," he cried, "I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."

The deep green pool of the Salinas River was still in the late afternoon.  Already the sun had left the valley to go climbing up the slopes of the Gabilan mountains, and the hill tops were rosy in the sun.  But by the pool among the mottled sycamores, a pleasant shade had fallen.

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (Viking, 1937)

On September 5 I wrote about Lewis Milestone's film of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men; now that I've read the book (a novella of about one hundred pages) I can see how closely the book and the play made from it were followed, at least in terms of the characters and the dialogue.  One thing that was missing in the movie was Steinbeck's constrast between the beauty of the landscape and of nature and the ugliness of human behavior, a contrast that fatally squeezes Lennie and George and their dreams as well as those of the other bindlestiffs (Steinbeck was one himself).

Anthony Powell's The Kindly Ones 1962 and Hilary Spurling's Invitation to the Dance 1977

 I had told Albert I would find my own way to the bedroom, which was some floors up.  It was small, dingy, facing inland.  The sea was in any case visible from the Bellevue -- in spite of its name -- only from the attic windows, glimpsed through a gap between two larger hotels, though the waves could be heard clattering against the shingle.  Laid out on the bed were a couple of well-worn suits; three or four shirts, frayed at the cuff; half a dozen discreet, often-knotted ties; darned socks (who had darned them?); hankerchiefs embroided with the initials GDJ (who had embroidered them?); thick woolen underclothes; two pairs of pyjamas of unattractive pattern; two pairs of shoes, black and brown; bedroom slippers worthy of Albert; a raglan overcoat; a hat; an unrolled umbrella; several small boxes containing equipment such as studs and razor blades.  That was what Uncle Giles had left behind him.  No doubt there was more of the same sort of thing at the Ufford.  The display was a shade depressing.

Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (U. of Chicago Press, 1962)

The Kindly Ones is the sixth volume of Powell's twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time and includes narrator Nicholas Jenkins in its events more than the previous five volumes, starting out with Jenkins's childhood just before the beginning of World War I and returning to 1938 and 1939, as WW II is looming.  This volume is particularly droll, as some of the characters return from Jenkins's childhood, including Albert the cook and cult leader Dr. Trelawney, who gets stuck in a hotel bathroom.  Jenkins meets his old friend Bob Duport at the Bellevue and they have long and amusing conversations as Jenkins worries about whether Duport knows about Jenkins's affair with Jean Templer, who was married at the time to Duport.  Of course Kenneth Widmerpool turns up, already a captain in the army, and won't help hasten Jenkins's call-up as war edges closer..

This is my second time through Dance to the Music of Time and I still have difficulty keeping the characters straight as they come and go, as I make long pauses between volumes.  I highly recommend Hilary Spurling's Invitation to the Dance:  A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time; it includes a character index, a place index and synopses of each volume.  Spurling has also written an excellent biography of Powell, which I briefly reviewed on May 29, 2018.

Harold Daniels's Roadblock 1951

Considering that Harold Daniels directed only a handful of films before retreating to television the artistic success of Roadblock is a tribute to the power of the film noir genre and its icons, including star Charles McGraw, for whom it was one of his few starring roles after years of terrific tough-guy supporting roles in films such as Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946).  McGraw's role in Roadblock is Joe Peters, an insurance investigator who is starved for love and falls for Diane Morley (Joan Dixon) when Morley pretends to be Peters's wife in order to get a cheaper airline ticket.  But Diane wants nothing to do with Joe because, as she says, "I'm in the World Series and you're still in the minor leagues;"  Joe can't buy her a mink coat on his puny salary.  So Diane takes up with sleazy crook Kendall Webb (Lowell Gilmore) while Joe broods for her.  On Christmas Eve Diane is talking to a bartender who is looking forward to going home to his family and everything changes for Diane, as she rushes to Joe and says she loves him and doesn't care about mink anymore.

But it's too late; Joe, desperate for love, has already cooked up a deal with Webb to rob a train full of the insurance company's money.  Joe wants to call if off but Webb convinces him that his relationship with Diane won't last if he can't buy her what she craves.  Fate being what it is the robbery goes wrong and someone is killed.  Joe's partner  Henry Miller (Louis Jean Heydt) figures out what is happening -- Joe had his share of the money sent to him inside a fire extinguisher but Henry knew he already had an extinguisher --Joe slugs him over the head and tries to escape to Mexico with Diane via the dry storm drains of Los Angeles, but they are trapped; Joe is shot and killed and Diane walks off alone, filled with grief, down the dry riverbed.

McGraw effectively plays a vulnerable and gullible man, very different from his gangster roles. Joan Dixon plays a woman looking for the luxuries she never had as a secretary but discovers that it's not what she really wants (Dixon was a Howard Hughes discovery who only made a handful of films.) The cinematography is by Nicholas Musuraca, a master of chiaroscuro and the opressiveness of claustrophobic interiors (his best work for RKO, where Roadblock was made, was Jacques Tourneur's film noir Out of the Past, 1947).  The screenplay was by noir veterans Steve Fisher (who wrote John Cromwell's Dead Reckoning in 1947) and George Bricker (Jean Yarbrough's Inside Job, 1946)

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 1937

 Is there anything left to say about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film Sergei Eisenstein called "the greatest film ever made"?  Yes, including giving credit to the hundreds of people who worked on it and pointing out the superior beauty of its hand-drawn animation compared to today's mechanical computer animation.

Yesterday The New York Times published the obituary of Ruthie Tompson, written by Megalit Fox.  She was 111 years old and had worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of many uncredited women who did so, and was in the "Ink and Paint" Department, tranferring drawings (that were all done by men, a policy at Disney) to animation cels.  Walt Disney seldom gave much credit to anyone but himself, but David Hand was the "supervising director" of Snow White while William Cottrel, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Pearce Pearce and Ben Sharpsteen directed individual sequences.

Readers of this blog know my distaste for most current computer-animated feature films, a combination of too realistic in some ways but not in others, excessive details in some cases and abbreviated details in others.  The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs depends on stylization, necessary to keep the number of drawings limited by running the film at fifteen frames per second (as opposed to the standard 24 frames a second of sound films).  I was somewhat astonished at the beauty of the film, beauty that comes not only from the hand-drawn animation but from the fairy-tale limited story, from the original by the Brothers Grimm.  Disney and his team follow the original story quite closely with some interesting additions and changes: the dwarfs do not have individual names in the original story, the prince has not met Snow White before her death, the Queen is not a stepmother but Snow White's actual mother, the forest creatures do not exist in the original story.  I do think giving the dwarfs names and personalities made the film more effective, i.e., funnier before Snow White's "death" and sadder after it.

The multi-plane beauty of Snow White has a warmth not found in computer-animated films, in the same way that the digital restoration of Citizen Kane substitutes convenience for the warmth of 35 mm. film and in the way that the replacement of nitrate film with acetate, for convenience as well as safety, also decreased the beauty of films. 

Alfred E. Green's Parchute Jumper 1933

Alfred E. Green directed six films for Warner Bros. in 1933 and the cinematographer on Parachute Jumper, James Von Trees, photographed seven films in that year.  The speed with which these films were made is relflected in the plot of Parachute Jumper: the film is a Depression comedy, a romance, and a violent gangster film, with plenty of sex suggested, as well as a flipping of the bird and the sound of a toilet flushing (this is a pre-Code film).  Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Frank McHugh and Bette Davis make a charming and hungry (they even steal a fish from a cat) menage a trois, with Fairbanks supporting them first by wing-walking and jumping from planes, then chauffeuring for man-hungry Claire Dodd and finally smuggling in drugs from Canada for gangster Leo Carrillo. Bette Davis is blonde and vulerable, and called Alabama because of her Southern accent.  This seventy-two minute film shows us much about the struggle for jobs and the risks people will take, as well as the indifference of the wealthy and the crooked, in 1933.

Yankees 1 Rays O Oct. 3, 2021

 Not only does the New York Times not publish box scores but I can't find them anywhere else either.  Perhaps I'm being too cynical to suggest that one reason for this is that box scores traditionally include the time of the game and Major League Baseball perhaps doesn't care to reveal that all their dubious attempts to reduce the time of games (don't throw balls to give an intentional walk, force relief pitchers to pitch to three batters, etc.) have failed to speed up the game; it even appears that the ridiculous idea of starting every extra inning with a runner on second base will not be continued.  As I have said many times before:  just enforce the existing rules that limit the time of a pitcher to throw the next pitch to twelve seconds and don't allow the batter to step out of the batter's box except in an emergency.

Don't get me started on how badly baseball is televised (see earlier posts on this subject), causing me to usually listen to games on the radio.  Unfortunately Yankees radio announcer John Sterling is even worse than bombasic television announcer Michael Kay, who can't even keep track of the score,e.g., in a recent game with the Rays ahead 3-0 Anthony Rizzo hit a solo homerun and Kay bellows "tie game!"  Unfortunately mellow announcer Ken Singleton, who did very few games this year (he was usually replaced by the squeaky voices of Paul O'Neill and David Cone) has now "retired," though my guess is he was forced out because his low-key intelligence makes Kay look like the fool he is.

Oh yes, about the game.  It was a pitchers' (plural) duel, the Rays and the Yankees both using six pitchers and the hero was not Aaron Judge's ground ball in the bottom of the ninth but Tyler Wade's pinch running.  The wonderfully named Rougned Odor hit a bloop single in the ninth and was replaced by Tyler Wade, who tagged up at first on Gleyber Torres fly ball out and advanced to third on Anthony Rizzo's hit.  Aaron Judge hit a ground ball to second, slowed down somewhat by the pitcher, enabling Wade to beat second baseman Brandon Lowe's throw home with the winning run. 

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor

 If one doesn't have the stomach to read Blake Bailey's biography of Philip Roth one can read Benjamin Taylor's slim volume about his friendship with Roth, where Roth's misogyny is on full display.  Roth comes across like a college freshman who never matured, making endless snobbish remarks and telling unfunny jokes while blaming others for the fact that he never received the Nobel Prize he felt he deserved.  At one point Taylor tries to interest Roth in the films of the great director Douglas Sirk but "we got no further than the overheated credits to Written on the Wind.  'What do you see in all this Hollywood dreck, Ben? I really want to know.'  His own tastes run to Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray and Fellini."  To me this is conclusive evidence that Roth's view of the world is quite limited and lacking in a sense of irony about himself and everyone else. Taylor's praise of Roth's late works are unconvincing;  I think only The Plot Against America (2004), an alternate history, is at all successful.

Turner Clasic Movies October 2021

 Because it's October there are a fair number of horror films this month.  I recommend all the horror films directed by Jacques Tourneur as well as those directed by Terence Fisher and those produced by Val Lewton.  There are also a number of other good films in October:

Oct. 3 Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), an impressive melodrama about making movies.

Oct. 5 Minnelli's Band Wagon (1953), a somewhat melancholic musical with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and Nicholas Ray's Party Girl (1958), a sort of gangster film/musical

Oct. 6 John Ford's beautiful and moving How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Oct. 8 Mark Sandrich's Follow the Fleet, with Rogers and Astaire dancing to Irving Berlin music.

Oct. 11 Rudolph Mate's corrosive film noir D.O.A. (1950)

Oct. 13 Godard's Breathless (1961) and Andre De Toth's Pitfall (1948)

Oct. 15 Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941)

Oct. 18 Ernst Lubitsch's brilliantly funny Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Oct. 20 Michael Powell's A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Oct. 25 Jean Renoir's masterpiece The Rules of the Game (1939)

Oct. 29 Raoul Walsh's politically perceptive A Lion is in the Streets (1953)

Oct. 31 Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

William G. Hole, Jr.'s Hell Bound 1957

 As usual Eddie Muller did an excellent job of introducing Hell Bound on his weekly Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies, putting it in the context of the work of low-budget producers Howard W. Koch and Aubrey Schenck as well as the history of film noir, coming to an end with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly in 1955 and Orson Welles's Touch of Evil in 1958.  By 1957 and 1958 the memory of WW II and even the Korean War was fading and more and more movies were being made in color and widescreen because of the competition of TV, war memories and black-and-white being important elements of film noir.

With the low-budget Hell Bound in 1957 film noir goes out with exaggerated elements of cynicism and darkness.  It starts out with an off-kilter film by Jordan (John Russell) projected for a mob boss to raise money for a complicated heist of drugs from a navy ship.  The mob boss donates his girlfriend Paula (former Playboy bunny June Blair) to help with the plot, though when Paula takes her shoes off (which she often does) to seduce Jordan he just slaps her down, eventually stabbing her and substituting his own girlfriend after Paula falls for ambulance driver Eddie (Stuart Whitman).  Jordan gets a layout of the ship he plans to rob and then kills the crew member he paid for it.  He also recruits a health officer and a junkie to help with his complicated plot, the health officer paid off and the junkie blackmailed. The heist does not go well. 

The sleaziness of the film is considerably enhanced by the decrepit locations where the film takes place, especially a junkyard of Los Angeles streetcars piled high(the LA trolley system was abandoned under pressure from freeway builders and car manufacturers), a powerful symbol of the changes happening to Los Angeles in the fifties. 

Barbara Pym's Excellent Women 1952

 I am tired, I said to myself, as I walked upstairs, and my face is quite grey.  Nobody must come near me.  I would have a rest this afternoon, for Winifred had gone back to the vicarage and was comforting Julian.  I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women.  But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs. Gray; sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew.  Perhaps it might after all be my duty to marry him, if only to save him from being too well protected.

-- Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (Penguin, 1953)

One of the pleasures of reading the London Review of Books is discovering new authors, as I did when reading Alison Light's review of Paula Byrne's biography of Barbara Pym, a writer who was unfamiliar to me, though I was vaguely aware that Philip Larkin was an admirer of her novels.  Excellent Women is written in the first person by spinster Mildred Lathbury, daughter of a clergyman and very involved in volunteer work in and about her Anglican church.  The novel is very much of its time and place --post-WWII London -- but more relevant than ever for its clear-eyed role of women in society and their relationships with the men who run things.  Mildred mildly flirts with men, including Rocky Napier (who lives with his wife just below Mildred's apartment; they share a bathroom), anthropologist Everard Bone (a name that reminds one of one of the funniest moments in Howard Hawks's 1938 film Bringing Up Baby), and her clergyman Father Malory, who lives with his sister Winifred.  She also mourns an unrequited love from her youth and is determined never to marry, especially as she watches the diastrous attempted couplings around her.

Pym has been compared to Jane Austen, but I find her observant and comical views of everything, including the Church, to be more akin to the novels of Trollope, full of compassion and understanding. Mildred sees that people can act like fools and even admits she can at times be foolish herself, but she understands the complex reasons that sometimes we have little choice in our behavior. I find the title, Excellent Women, to be ironic, as often women have fewer choices than men.

As far as I can determine none of Pym's novels have been made into movies.  In their time they might have made excellent Ealing comedies; today's audience might find their wonderfully droll humor too subtle. 

Leslie Selander's Tall Man Riding 1955

 Tall Man Riding is a pretty good B Western, starring Randolph Scott, a mainstay of Westerns throughout the 50's, culminating with the seven films he did with director Budd Boetticher starting in 1956.  The screenplay by Joseph Hoffman is tightly structured (from a novel by Norman Fox; one benefit of making Westerns is that they are seldom compared to the original source story or novel) and filmed on location, with "the wind in the trees," by veteran cinematographer Wilfrid Cline, who photographed five films in 1955, including Andre De Toth's Indian Fighter.  B veteran Selander's direction is workmanlike and impersonal.

Scott plays a man returning for revenge on the man who (literally) whipped him and broke up his romance with Dorothy Malone (one year away from her extraordinary role in Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind).  The other woman, a saloon singer played by Peggie Castle (from Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, 1953), saves Scott's life with her superb shooting and is gunned down by her bad-guy lover John Baragrey.  In Westerns what is iconography and what is cliche' depends on how effective it is.  In Tall Man Riding there is one particularly impressive shoot-out that takes place entirely in a dark room, with only muzzle flashes visible.  Unfortunately there is a "happy" ending that's all-too-common in B films, with Scott ready to ride off alone before changing his mind and going inside with Malone. 

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time 1936

 Dorothy Fields's colloquialism was perfectly suited to her adult view of sexuality, which is delightfully embodied in "A Fine Romance."  The first verse, sung by Rogers to Astaire in Swing Time, is the quintessance of her style, at once slangy and elegantly-turned -- not to mention warm-blooded:  "We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes, / But you're as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes."

Terry Teachout, "The Two Female Giants of the American Songbook," Commentary, Sept. 2021

One's favorite Astaire/Rogers film depends on how much one enjoys the comedy of these "musical comedies," often embodied by Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton, and whether one prefers Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin or George Gershwin.  The dancing, choreographed by Astaire and Hermes Pan, is always wonderful, though there is never quite enough of it.

In Swing Time the comedy is often ineffective -- Eric Blore has only a small part with too many reaction shots and Horton is completely absent; director George Stevens works hard and mostly unsuccessfully to get laughs with Helen Broderick and Victor Moore but the two actors do most of the laughing themselves. The dancing, however, is lovely and so are the songs by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, especially "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance."  The dances are effective in expressing the increasing love between Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in spite of their betrothals to others and are closely interwoven with the often absurd plot. There is also a dance for Astaire in blackface "Bojangles of Harlem" which might make one uncomfortable today but is an impressive homage to dancer Bill Robinson, as Arlene Croce says, "it is homage, not impersonation."  The comedy might not be at the level of the Rogers/Astaire films directed by Mark Sandrich (especially Shall We Dance, 1937) but the dancing is exquisite.

Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina by Georgina Pazcoguin

 He [Peter Martins] used this production as a vessel to promote most of the cast (alas, not moi).  I had not been promoted for my contibutions, and all I had left was a bruised ego and this mess of trauma I'm still trying to work through.  I had my legs splayed and breasts fondled onstage by my colleagues.  I threw my body down the stairs repeatedly.  I had my anatomy once again shamed, this time for not being curvy enough.

--Georgina Pazcoguin, Swan Dive (Henry Holt and Company, 2021)

Being a ballerina is not for every girl or woman; reading Swan Dive causes one to believe that it is something one does because one has to do it:  the life is all-consuming and the financial rewards are limited for most dancers (about $65,000 a year for corps members in NYC Ballet) and one's career as a dancer ends somewhere between 30 and 40 years old and only lasts that long if one can avoid serious injury.

It can be a wild ride, both good and bad, for a ballet dancer, as Pazcoguin makes clear in this detailed book about her life as a dancer with NYC Ballet.  Pazcoguin is of mixed race (her dad is Filipino and her mother Italian)from Altoona, Pa. and started out at the Allegheny Ballet Academy, eventually doing an audition in Pittsburgh and getting a scholarship to the School of American Ballet at 14, leading to the corps of NYC Ballet and eventual promotion to soloist, while butting heads constantly with artistic director Peter Martins over everything from casting to moonlighting on Broadway.  She gradually began to feel that she was not getting the roles she deserved, in part because of her race, and helped to initiate Final Bow for Yellowface to promote diversity in ballet.

Pazcoguin is particularly foulmouthed for a ballerina, at least as we have seem them in the memoirs of such principal dancers as Suzanne Farrell and Merrill Ashley, but perhaps it's time for the pendulum to swing the way corps members talk to each other and express their anger and frustration.  Pazcoguin is full of highs and lows, the highs being when she is actually dancing roles she loves (such as Anita in West Side Story) and when she spends time with her fellow dancers sharing feelings, the lows when she is injured, miscast, or having to talk to the dour and authoritarian Peter Martins.  Martins quit in 2018 after accusations of harassment and abuse surfaced and as Swan Dive ends Pazcoguin is hopeful about her role with the new regime at NYC Ballet, but she now has a real estate license and is ready, if necessary, for her next season.

Richard Quine's Drive a Crooked Road 1954

Quine wrote Drive a Crooked Road with his friend Blake Edwards, both having started out as actors at Columbia Pictures.  Edwards always had a skill for comedy (my favorite of his films is The Party,  1968), though he did make a handful of melodramas.  Quine also worked mostly in comedy, though with less commercial and artistic success than Edwards.  Quine, however, made two excellent films noirs in 1954:  Pushover and Drive a Crooked Road. 

Drive a Crooked Road has an impressive performance by Mickey Rooney, who was constantly trying to reinvent himself after he was let go by MGM in the late forties.  In the Quine film he plays a lonely young man, living in a rented room full of second-place car racing trophies and working as an auto mechanic, just the kind of guy who can be lured by beautiful Dianne Foster to drive the getaway car in a bank robbery by slick operators Kevin McCarthy and Jack Kelly.  Rooney is so desperate for love he never even thinks he is being conned and plans that he and Forster will take his share of the stolen loot to Europe, where he can race in important auto races.

The film is an example of what I would call suburban noir:  it takes place mostly in the suburbs of Los Angeles during the daytime, with its inevitable existential violent ending taking place at night.  Foster is the mistress of McCarthy and has complicated feelings about how Rooney is being used, i.e., she is not the typical femme fatale of film noir.  Rooney's performance is a masterpiece of grim fatalism; without actually saying much his expressions convey the deteriorating hope of someone lost in the shuffle of 50's America.

Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother 1927

 Today most people have seen few silent films and when I tell people my favorite film is D.W. Griffith's Intolerance from 1916 they look at me as if I were demented.  In 1949 James Agee wrote an article for Life magazine called "Comedy's Greatest Era." about Harold Lloyd, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon.  Few of the films by those men were available at that time and it was not until the 70's that they began to emerge again; Chaplin and Lloyd controlled their own films and gradually began to release them; Keaton made a deal with distributor Raymond Rohauer to release Keaton's films (which produced lines around the block at the Elgin Theater in Manhattan) and only Langdon languished in obscurity.  Now most of these films are available in decent prints on DVD and I recently watched Lloyd's The Kid Brother with my two children and my wife Susan, who found the film too contrived.  Gideon, Victoria and I found it both funny and touching.

The Kid Brother is clearly influenced by rural romances such as D.W. Griffith's True Heart Susie (1916) and Henry King's Tol'able David (1921).  It not only has lovely location shooting ("the wind in the trees," as Griffith was fond of saying) but also chases influenced by Keaton and emotion influenced by Chaplin.  Perhaps its gags are hung on too slender a narrative thread, like the runaway closeline that Lloyd pursues to rescue his father's Sunday shirt, and perhaps the final chase goes on too long, but much of the film is not only funny but beautiful, as Lloyd uses his brain and occasionally his fists to win the girl, played by Jobyna Ralston; at one point the camera moves vertically higher and higher with Lloyd climbing a tree to follow Ralston as she moves farther and farther away.  The long chase on a deserted ship is highlighted by Lloyd putting his shoes on a monkey (played by Jocko, who was also in Keaton's The Cameraman in 1928) and the villain thinks it's Lloyd coming around the corner. 

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War by Scott Anderson

 In 1944 the United States was seen as a beacon of hope and a source of deliverance throughout the developing world, the emergent superpower, that in the postwar era envisioned by Franklin D. Roosevelt would nurture democracy across the globe and dismantle the obsolete and depised rule of the European colonial powers.... Just twelve years later, though, the United Nations was already beginning its long slow slide into irrelevance, and rather than dismantling the European colonial empires, in many places the United States was paying for their maintenance.  Instead of fostering the spread of democracy, the United States was overthrowing democratic governments -- in Iran, in Guatemala -- that it deemed communist-tilting or otherwise unreliable.

-- The Quiet Americans by Scott Anderson (Doubleday 2020)

Anderson follows the years 1944-1956 through the lives of four "spies" for the CIA: Michael Burke, Frank Wisner, Peter Sichel, and Edward Lansdale.  Whatever good these four tried to do --in Asia, South America and Europe -- during this period was often circumvented and overruled by Allen Dulles, CIA director, and John Foster Dulles, secretary of state.  Anderson points out that intelligence gathering was neglected in order to do more infiltration and sabotage, because that was expensive and garnered more money for the Central Intelligence Agency.  And when there was the kind of attempted revolution in Hungary -- the kind of thing the CIA had been trying to do throughout Eastern Europe -- Eisenhower sat on his hands while the USSR crushed it.

Time and time again the United States totally forgot that it once fought off a colonial power  as it backed the wrong side because of the fear of communism.  Anderson's book ends about 1961, when JFK starting sending troops to Vietnam and supported a coup against South Vietnam leader Ngo Dinh Diem, and we all know what happened after that, not only in Vietnam but subsequently in Iraq and now Afghanistan, as Islam and "the war on terror"  have replace communism as our bete noire, at the cost of many lives and trillions of dollars. 

Francis Searle's Cloudburst 1951

 There are several good things about Cloudburst, including leads Elizabeth Sellars as Carol Graham and Robert Preston as John Graham; it was common in low-budget British films of this period to use an available American star to improve the film's grosses in the U.S.  The film takes place in 1946 as Carol and John had helped each other in the resistance, Carol even being tortured to turn against John and refusing.  John, who continues to work in cryptology, is looking for a school for his about-to-be-born child and a lot to build a house on, when his pregnant wife is run over by two murderers on the run.  John beomes dedicated to finding the two murderers and killing them. 

This is an intelligent plot for a film noir and is written by Leo Marks, a cryptology expert in WWII, from his original play; he later wrote the extraordinary Peeping Tom (1960) for Michael Powell.  The low-budget black-and-white cinematograhy is by Walter J. Harvey, who photographed five films in 1951 for Hammer Films previous to their entry into baroque horror films.  Robert Preston, who was mostly working in TV in these years before The Music Man, gives an intense performance as a man who feels he has nothing left to live for except to kill the man and woman who murdered his wife.  Unfortunately the film is directed by Francis Searle, a Hammer regular who turned out four or five low-budget pictures a year.  The cheapness of the film is shown by -- among other things--shoehorning in scenes of decoding which have little to do with the plot and bring the movement of the film to a stop. One can only wonder what Cloudburst might have been like if it had been directed by Fritz Lang, who did the similar-themed Rancho Notorious in 1952, a film of  "hate, murder and revenge."

Lewis Milestone's Of Mice and Men 1939

 Milestone's Of Mice and Men has a lot going for it:  veteran Norbert Brodine's beautiful black-and-white cinematography; Aaron Copeland's effective score; superb acting, particularly leads Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr.; and Eugene Solow's script, which fairly closely follows John Steinbeck's novella and the play based on it. Andrew Sarris described Milestone as "a formalist of the Left" and the film is sympathetic to the farmworkers it depicts and their relationship to the farm owner -- though little of the farmwork, "bucking barley," is shown -- with the emphasis on the workers and their dreams.  But everyone's dream is thwarted, including the owner's daughter-in-law (Betty Field), who only married in order to get away from the farm and is accidentally killed by Lennie (Chaney), who suffers from mental illness and is protected by George (Meredith), as they both dream of getting a farm of their own.

Milestone portrays a rotten system well but it is unclear how he himself feels about it and whether he thinks anything can be done; in the same way he seems to criticize war in All Quiet on the Western Front,  another technically impressive film, and later took an opposite view of war in the pro-Soviet The North Star (1943). I don't deny some of Milstone's films are impressive -- though I prefer films with a stronger point of view by the director -- and he does an excellent job with the actors in Of Mice and Men, including Leigh Whipper, an African-American actor whose character is treated with great dignity at a time when that was rare in Hollywood. 

Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2021

 A pretty good month of classic films:

Sept. 1 Raoul Walsh's They Died With Their Boots On 1941

Sept. 2 John Ford's Mogambo 1953

Sept. 3 Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard 1950

Sept. 5 Fritz Lang's Moonfleet 1955 and Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be 1942

Sept. 6 Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly 1968

Sept. 9 Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times 1936 and Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance 1937, with Rogers and Astaire

Sept. 10 Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon 1957

Sept. 11 Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success 1957

Sept. 12 Richard Quine's Down a Crooked Road 1954 (film noir), Mark Sandrich's Follow the Fleet 1936 (musical with Rogers and Astaire, music by Irving Berlin), Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth 1937 (brilliant comedy with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant)

Sept. 13 Otto Preminger's Exodus 1960

Sept. 15 Raoul Walsh's The Strawberry Blonde 1941

Sept. 16 two by Howard Hawks starring Humphrey Bogart To Have and Have Not 1944 and The Big Sleep 1946

Sept. 19 Fritz Lang's Human Desire 1954

Sept. 21 two by Luis Bunuel The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz 1955 and Simon of the Desert 1965, Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night 1955

 NightSept. 22 Andre de Toth's Riding Shotgun 1954, Hawks's Rio Bravo 1959, Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men 1952, Robert Aldrich's Autumn Leaves 1956

Sept. 24 Jacques Demy's musical Young Girls of Rochefort 1967

Sept. 25 Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon 1947

Sept. 26 Anthony Mann's Western The Man from Laramie starring James Stewart 1955

Sept. 29 two superb silent films, Victor Seastrom's The Wind starring Lillian Gish 1928 and Chaplin's City Lights 1931 

Raoul Walsh's Cheyenne 1947

Cheyenne is a Western, a romance, a comedy, a film noir, even a musical, all genres at which director Walsh excelled.  The post-war period was great for all these genres; Cheyenne even reminds one of John Ford's masterpiece The Searchers (1956), having been written by Thames Williamson and Alan LeMay -- the latter wrote the novel The Seachers -- and with music by Warner Brothers stalwart Max Steiner, who also did the music for Ford's film.  The superb black-and-white cinematography for Cheyenne was by Sid Hickox, who photgraphed a number of Walsh's films.

Walsh made poetry out of Western iconography:  the good girl (Jane Wyman as Ann Kincaid), bad girl (Janis Paige as Emily Carson), the bad guy who is trying to be good (Dennis Morgan as James Wylie), the bad guy who leads a gang of stagecoach robbers (Arthur Kennedy as The Sundance Kid) and even an ineffective sheriff played somewhat for laughs (Alan Hale as Fred Durkin) and a stagecoach manager who is a crook (Bruce Bennett as Ed Landers, "the poet" who replaces money in strong boxes with poems).  Almost everyone is pretending to be someone else, as Ed Landers falls for Emily Carson and her suggestive saloon songs and skimpy outfits while Wylie falls for buttoned-to-the-neck Ann Kincaid, who is actually married to Bennett, the poet.  The town of Cheyenne is crowded with drinkers and gamblers while the location shooting (in Arizona) represents the untamed wilderness, where robberies and gunfights take place, away from "civilized" towns. 

joseph Losey's The Go-Between 1971

 Losey's film of L.P. Hartley's novel (which I wrote about earlier this month) has an effectively sparse and elegant screenplay by Harold Pinter, who also wrote Losey's Accident (1967) and The Servant (1963).  None of the important scenes from the novel are omitted, with Losey beautifully capturing "the wind in the trees" (to use D.W. Griffith's term) in Norfolk, England in the summer of 1900 (cinematography by Gerry Fisher)  I was impressed with the cast of Julie Christie as Marian, Alan Bates as Ted Burgess and Dominic Guard as young Leo Colston.  Hartley's novel is written in the first person by the older Leo Colston and Losey intercuts scenes of the older Leo (Michael Redgrave) on his way to re-connect with the older Marian, an effective correlative to the novel's first person narrative of the past.

Losey was American, chased out of America during the McCarthy years after making a number of excellent genre films, especially The Prowler (1951), and settled in England, resuming his career with a number of low-budget films.  His view of the English class system, as it was in 1900 and continued to be, was precise and accurate, especially in his films with Pinter.  Twelve-year-old Leo was from the middle class and enjoyed his summer with his mate Marcus (Richard Gibson) of the aristocratic Maudsley family, until he was given the task of bringing secret messages between Marian and farmer Ted Burgess and can't understand why Marian is engaged to Lord Timingham (Edward Fox) instead of marrying Burgess. The clash of classes ends in disaster for the Maudsleys as well as for Leo and Burgess.

Sam Raimi's The Gift (2000)

 Director Sam Raimi (not to be confused with bass-baritone opera singer Sam Ramey) has been directing movies since 1985, including most recently the first three Spider-Man films (2002-2007), but has spent most of his time since 2013 as a producer.  He is mostly known for his "horror" films, starting with The Evil Dead in 1981, but also made the excellent heist movie A Simple Plan in 1998.  The Gift is a somewhat supernatural piece of Southern Gothic, with an excellent cast of Cate Blanchett, Katie Holmes, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Rubisi, Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank, Gary Cole, J.K. Simmons.

Cate Blanchett plays a widow with three young children who manages to get by with fortune telling.  Katie Holmes is murdered and the violent husband of Swank, Keanu Reeves, is convicted of the murder.  Blanchett, however, has visions of someone else being the killer and, at some risk to herself, tracks down the murderer by going back to the scene of the murder, a gloomy pond surrounded by cypress trees.

The moody cinematography is by veteran Jamie Anderson and Raimi effectively captures the details of the denizens and details of a small Southern town, where sex and violence predominate and even jobs are unsafe, Cate Blanchett's husband having died in a factory explosion. 

Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941)

 Don't forget the Western is not only the history of this country, it is what the Saga of the Nibelungen is for the European.

-- Fritz Lang

Western Union is a tense and colorful Western, with an unusual depth of field in the early days of Technicolor, cinematography by Deward Cronjager and Allen M. Davey.  It is about, among other things, the building of a telegraph line from Omaha to Salt Lake City, which involves a fair amount of tricking the Native Americans into giving up their land.  The film was shot in Arizona and Utah in landscapes beautifully filmed by Lang and his crew.  There are a number of themes common to Lang's films, including dual identities --Randolph Scott/Vernon Shaw is a former outlaw, Robert Young/Richard Blake is an apparent "tenderfoot" who is really a superb horseman, bad guy Baron MacLane/Jack Slade disguises himself as an Indian, etc. -- and there is an element of destiny in the building of the telegraph line and the sacrificial death of Vernon Shaw at the end, an unusual fatalistic ending for a pre-war Western.

This film shows clearly Lang's roots in the expressionism of his early silent films in Germany, including the use of shadows in crowded scenes, which effectively include a fair number of grizzled veterans as cowboys:  John Carradine, Chill Wills, Victor Kilian, Francis Ford.  This was one of three Westerns Lang made in America, the other two being The Return of Frank James (1940) and Rancho Notorious (1952).

The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley

 Cricket is more than a game, they say, or used to say; it is sn attitude of mind, a point of view.  I don't know about that.  You can think of it as a set of ritual movements, or as a ballet, a ballet in a green field, a ballet of summer, which you can enjoy without knowing what it's about or what it means.  At least that is how I should recommend other people to enjoy it -- ballets are not for me.  I like facts.  In those days I knew the facts about cricket and I can still repeat some of them parrot-wise.  It is like knowing the figures of a sum without being able to add them up.  At least, if I added them up, they wouldn't have made a game of cricket as I used to know it.

--L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (copyright 1953, New York Review Books)

The Go-Between is a beautifully written book looking back to the summer of 1900 --nearing the end of the Victorian age and the beginning of the Edwardian -- as told by the twelve-year-old Leo Rosten as the much older Leo looks back at himself as a young boy.  spending the time with his school chum Marcus at Marcus's family's estate.  It evokes the peaceful summer of a boy of twelve having fun, at least until Marcus's older sister Marian convinces Leo to take messages to and from Ted, a local farmer.  Leo becomes gradually unhappy about being the messenger and gets suspicious about what's going on, especially once Marian is about to get engaged to Lord Trimingham and Ted attempts to tell Leo about "spooning." The one time the upper and lower classes get together in Brandham Hall, where Leo is staying, is an annual cricket match, where Leo catches a ball hit by Ted to win the game, after which everyone gathers around to sing.

Leo plays an unwitting role in Marian's mother discovering Ted and Marian together in the middle of a celebration of Leo's thirteenth birthday, a disaster for all concerned, as Leo has a nervous breakdown and has little memory of subsequent events, including Ted's suicide.  There is a moving epilogue as many years later Leo seeks out Marian, still living in the same town, who says there "was nothing mean or sordid in what we did, it was the fault of this hideous century we live in."

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

--Prologue to The Go-Between

Alfred E. Green's The Goose and the Gander 1935

 It's definitely time to retire the term "screwball comedy," which is basically meaningless and useless.  Do such so-called screwball comedies as Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby(1938), Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), and Gregory LaCava's My Ma Godfrey (1936) actually have much in common?  My answer is no, not in the way such genres as the Western, the film noir and the horror film do.  But then, I am a splitter and not a lumper and LaCava's exploration of class values, McCarey's story of marriage and divorce and Hawks's celebration of irresponsibility do not seem related in any way (except, perhaps, that they are all funny, though even that is not a unanimous reaction).

Which brings us to Green's The Goose and the Gander.  Green was a workmanlike director for Warner Brothers who directed five movies in 1935 (I have posted about five other of his movies).  The script for The Goose and the Gander was by Charles Kenyon and could have made a quite funny movie,i.e., if it had better direction and a better cast.  The only adept member of the cast is Kay Francis; her ability at comedy was not usually exploited except by the brilliant Ernst Lubitsch in 1932's The Trouble in Paradise, and in Green's film she often has amusing lines but hams it up too much.  The only cast member who is consistently droll is Genevieve Tobin, who plays Betty, married to Ralph (Ralph Forbes) but having a fling with Bob (George Brent).  Kay Francis plays Georgiana, formerly married to Ralph, who schemes to get him back by revealing Betty's fling with Bob.  To add to the confusion there is also the married jewel thieves, Connie (Claire Dodd) and Lawrence (John Eldredge), who have stolen jewels from both Betty and Georgiana.  It all gets sorted out at the jail after everyone is arrested (the film has many similarities to Bringing Up Baby), where Bob and Georgiana declare their love for each other.  

W.S. Van Dyke's Guilty Hands 1931

 Kay Francis was a once-popular actress in the thirties who is largely forgotten today.  There are those who say that her decline in the forties, when she was reduced to working for Poverty Row studio Monogram, was due to her fights with studio bosses, her slight lisp, the excessive importance she put on the clothes she wore in films, etc., but my own feeling is that most of her movies were not that good, for the simple reason that she almost never worked with good directors.  In 1932 she was directed by Ernst Lubitsch in the stylish comedy Trouble in Paradise; this is the only time she worked with a great director (and she complained about being billed second to Miriam Hopkins) and she was elegant, sexy and funny but never chose, as Bette Davis did, to demand better directors.

Guilty Hands was directed by W.S. Van Dyke, who was known as "One-Shot Woody'' because he never did more than one take and always stuck to his budgets.  Guilty Hands has elements of sloppiness and continuity problems but is satisfying in a number of ways, including clever plotting by screenwriter Bayard Veiller and over-the-top acting by Kay Francis and Lionel Barrymore (who, according to some sources, had a hand in the directing). Because this is a pre-code picture there is a fair amount of lust and passion displayed as lawyer Barrymore plans to kill the bounder (Alan Mowbray) who is about to marry his daughter (Madge Evans) and almost gets away with it.  Barrymore chews up the scenery while Francis, whom Mowbray plans to keep as his mistress after he marries Evans, works hard to prove Barrymore is the murderer, while a thunderstorm rages outside Mowbray's isolated mansion accessible only by boat.

For an intelligent analysis of Kay Francis's career I recommend Jeanine Basinger's book The Star Machine.

Andre de Toth's Passport to Suez (1943)

 Andre de Toth's most interesting films reveal an understanding of the instability and outright treachery of human relationships.

-- Andrew Sarris 

de Toth made five films in his native Hungary before emigrating to America via England at the beginning of WWII.  His first film in the U.S. was Passport to Suez for the B-unit at Columbia, an experience that allowed him limited freedom and convinced him to work mostly with smaller, independent producers who allowed him more independence in exchange for limited budgets.  Passport to Suez was one of the Lone Wolf B movies from the novels by Louis Joseph Vance; Warren William appeared in ten of them, after starting out as one of the cads of pre-code films in the early thirties. The Lone Wolf was Michael Lanyard, a thief turned private detective.

de Toth quickly sharpened his directing skills with the improbable plot of Passport to Suez, about a Nazi plot to blow up the Suez Canal.  The cast included the feisty Ann Savage (later the star of Edgar Ulmer's Detour in 1945) as a femme fatale as well as a somewhat dissipated William, Lloyd Bridges and Sheldon Leonard. de Toth keeps his camera relatively quiet (cinematography by L. William O'Connell), observing the characters taking chances and making decisions for better or worse, a style he refined though a number of impressive genre films, especially Westerns and crime films.  My own favorites are Springfield Rifle (1952), Crime Wave (1954) and Day of the Outlaw (1960), all of which have protagonists stuggling with conflicting loyalties. 

The Terrorists by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall (1976)

 Then he said magnanimously to Martin Beck, "Don't sit there thinking about all that now.  Violence has rushed like an avalanche throughout the whole of the Western world over the last ten years.  You can't stop or steer that avalanche on your own.  It just increases.  That's not your fault."

Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, The Terrorists (Pantheon, 1976, translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate)

It leaves one feeling melancholy, reading this last of the ten Martin Beck novels by Wahloo (who died just after it was published) and Sjowall (who died in 2020).  The combination of intensive plots, insight into personalities and analysis of Swedish society is unique, simultaneously of its time and timeless.  The books go in chronological order and we get to know Beck and his colleagues in the police well (I have a particular fondness for the gruff and cynical Gunvald Larsson) and the satire of Swedish  bureaucrats is both funny and depressing for the effect on Swedish citizens, especially the poor and helpless.

In The Terrorists Beck and his staff try to prevent the assassination of a visiting American politician and succeed, only to see the Swedish prime minister gunned down by a young girl who felt so helpless she thought she had nothing left to lose, even after Beck had tried to help her after she was arrested for robbing a bank and was beaten by police.  Beck himself is disillusioned with his job, divorced and alienated from his children, but finding some degree of happiness with a new lover.  We can only speculate what might have happened to him if Wahloo had not died and the series had continued.

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter (2020)

 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money [written by Keynes and published in 1936] is a liberating book because it reframed the central problem at the heart of economics as the alleviation of inequality, pivoting away from the demands of production and the incentives facing the rich and powerful that had occupied economists for centuries.

--Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace (Random House, 2020)

The Price of Peace beautifully combines the life of Keynes and his thoughts and analyses of economic policies, through the two world wars of the twentieth century.  Unlike many economists Keynes constantly thought about the effects of his economic ideas on the real world, regardless of the beauty of their mathematical calculations.  Carter's elegantly written book follows the formation and influence (or, often, the lack of it) of these ideas on policy makers.  Keynes was married to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova and close friends with members of the Bloombury Group; he believed strongly that economic and monetary policy could make life better for everyone.

Carter details how Keynes's attempts to solve post-WWI economic problems -- such as giving money to Germany that they could use for reparations -- were stymied by Woodrow Wilson and how FDR used Keynes's ideas to lessen the impact of the Depression.  The last third of the book details how America viewed Keynesian ideas as "socialist" during the cold war and how most recent Presidents misused Keynes's ideas to spend mony on wars (Vietnam, Iraq, etc) rather than to promote welfare and equality;  Carter also explains how credit default swaps led to a diastrous recession.

At the moment we seem to have a President who understands Keynes and is willing to spend the money necessary to improve not only our infrastructure but our lives and our equality, but we shall see how successful he is.  Meanwhile, I highly recommend Carter's book for understanding the important role of Keynes in the economies of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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