Maxwell Shane's The Naked Street (1955)

 The Naked Street is the penultimate of the five films Shane directed after writing dozens of B films (none of which I have seen), starting in 1937.  It is an okay combination of family drama and gangster film and though it has dark elements I would not call it a film noir, though Eddie Muller showed it recently in his Noir Alley series on Turner Classic Movies.  It stars Anthony Quinn as gangster Phil Regal, Anne Bancroft as his sister Rosalie Regalzyk, Elsa Neft as their mother, and Farley Granger as Nicky Bravna.  When Phil finds out his sister is pregnant, that  Nicky is the father and is on death row for murder, Phil gets Nicky off by using his goons to make witnesses change their stories and when Nicky is free Phil gets him a job as a truck driver.  Nicky resents not becoming part of Phil's profitable organization and turns back to crime after Phil blames him for the death of Rosalie's baby.  Phil frames Nicky for another murder but before Nicky is executed he spills all the beans on Phil to journalist  Joe McFarland (Peter Graves).  Phil dies when he is chased by the cops and Joe and Rosalie end up together.  

Shane gets excellent performances from his actors, including Else Neft as Phil's mother, and Floyd Crosby's black-and-white cinamatography is crisp and beautiful (Crosby worked on everything from F.W. Murnau's Tabu in 1931 to Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace in 1963), with most of the film shot in the studio.  But Shane's direction is flat and lacking the fatalism that would make it a genuine film noir, a genre, if one can call it that, that more or less came to an end in 1955 with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly. 

Edward Dmytryk's Obsession (1949)

It is safe to say that the HUAC trauma, if it did foster Dmytryk's neurotic dispositions, did not create them, as they can be traced almost to his earliest works.  Sado-masochism, for instance, which is rampant in The Hidden Room [the American title for Obsession] and The Sniper, was already a dominant feature in Murder, My Sweet and Cornered and even in some of his "B" movies.

Jean-Pierre Coursodon, American Directors Volume II (McGraw-Hill, 1983)

Dmytryk was one of the "Hollywood Ten" cited by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for Communist Party membership in 1947, at which time he fled to England, where he made Obsession, written by Alec Coppel from his novel A Man About a Dog.  The film has four main characters: Dr. Clive Riordan (Robert Newton), Storm Riordan (Sally Gray), Bill Kronin (Phil Brown) and Scotland Yard Superintendent  Finsbury (Naunton Wayne), as well as a dog, Monty, that has an important role in the plot.  Clive is tired of Storm's affairs so he kidnaps her lover Bill and holds him prisoner in a bombed-out building for months, planning to kill him eventually and destroy his body in a bath of acid; he enjoys telling Bill his plans.  But Storm's dog finds Clive so Monty is also imprisoned by Clive and Finsbury comes looking for the dog.

 Dmytryk is excellent with the actors:  Clive is effectively low-key in a James Mason way; the estimable Sally Gray fights back intensely; Bill handles his imprisonment sardonically; Naunton Wayne is persistent and intelligent; Monty is adorable and a quick learner.  The film is an interesting crime story but, like most of Dmytryk's films, lacks an appropriate visual style.  Most of Obsession takes place at night and is well filmed in black-and-white by C.M. Pennington-Richards but lacks the fatalism and psychological depth that would make this a film noir (and the somewhat sappy ending doesn't help).

Incidentally, Dmytryk's passport expired after he made Obsession and he returned to the United States, where he received a prison sentence of six months.  While serving his sentence he agreed to testify before HUAC and named names, the only one of The Hollywood Ten who testified as a friendly witness in order to work in Hollywood again.  Dmytryk made a couple of dozen more mostly mediocre movies until retiring in 1975; he died in 1999 at the age of 90.

It Walks by Night by John Dickson Carr

But the point is, as you know, Doctor, that we know our friends rather by their mannerisms than by their exact appearance; for if their mannerisms are not always the same, that is the thing that surprises us, and we say, 'Why don't you seem like the same person.'  The physical appearance, unless it bears to us a psychic signicicance, is vague.

John Dickson Carr, It Walks by Night (Harper and Brothers, 1930)

Carr had no interest in writing realistically.  If his characters do not speak the way real Frenchmen do, what does that matter?  It Walks By Night is a puzzle story in the form of a Poe-esque fantasy, set in a Poe-esque France, colored by an imperially purple imagination.

Douglas G. Green, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (Crippen and Landru 2019)

It Walks By Night is the first of Carr's eighty novels and the first of his many "locked room" mysteries, in which a murder takes place in a locked room where no one other than the victim has seemed able to get in. It Walks By Night is considerably influenced by Poe, with its nightmare of Paris, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle, as American Jeff Marle, in the role of Watson, narrates the grusome murders solved by detective Henri Bencolin, who is rather like the cerebral Sherlock Holmes.  I have to admit that I found Bencolin's solution to the two decapitations he is investigating quite ingenious, though somewhat strained in its reality and believability but beautifully imagined by Carr.   The film takes place almost entirely at night, in gambling dens, country houses and opium dens, all described in fascinating detail.

Stanley Donen's Royal Wedding (1951)

 The best thing about Royal Wedding is Fred Astaire, still spry at 52, but one of the worst things is the choreography by Nick Castle, which is mostly gimmicky in an attempt to cover up Astaire's aging:  Astaire dances with a coat rack, on the ceiling and on a rolling boat going across the Atlantic so Astaire as Tom Bowen can dance with his sister Ellen Bowen (Jane Powell) in a show in London during the 1947 celebration of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh.  This is perhaps an attempt to remind us of Astaire's original dance partner, his sister Adele, who retired from the stage in 1932 to marry a lord.  Of course this means that Tom has to have a romance with Anne Ashmond (Sarah Churchhill), who can dance a little, and Ellen has a romance with Lord Brindale (Peter Lawford), who apparently can only dance a bit of ballroom; this eliminates the sexual tension that was one of the reasons for the effectiveness of the Astaire relationship with Ginger Rogers in the 30's.

Not only does one miss the Hermes Pan choreograpy of Astaire's films with Ginger Rogers, one also misses the lovely black-and-white cinematography of those films; the garish color of Royal Wedding is another distraction from Astaire's dancing.  That Astaire's co-star Jane Powell is thirty years younger than Astaire doesn't bother me as much as her limited dancing ability and her Jeanette-MacDonald- operetta style of singing, though Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner's songs are hardly the equal of those by the Gershwins and Irving Berlin in the Astaire/Rogers RKO films.

Alan Jay Lerner also wrote the unamusing screenplay for this first directorial effort of Stanley Donen, after Donen co-directed On the Town with Gene Kelly in 1948.  I have to admit that I have never been a big fan of the dancing in the Donen and Kelly films, where athleticism is more important than subtlety and grace.

John Dahl's Joy Ride (2001)

 "Growing up in the West with all those big landscapes, that's a world I know really well.  I was drawn in by that, the isolation of it.  You're talking about the one place in America where you can still run your car off the road and people won't even find you if you crash in the right spot."

-- Director John Dahl on Joy Ride

John Dahl recently received the annual award of Modern Noir Master from the Film Noir Foundation.  His two best noir films are The Last Seduction (1994) and Red Rock West (1993) but all his movie and television work has significant noir elements.  Joy Ride is the kind of mixed genre film, a noir road trip with horror elements, that once was common during the studio era, incorporating a cb radio (not seen much in movies since Sam Peckinpah's Convoy in 1978) as an important plot element.   Three young people -- played effectively by Steve Zahn, Paul Walker, Leelee Sobieski-- are traveling across the West by car when they decide to pull a prank on a truck driver with the handle Rusty Nail, with one of the men imitating a girl who offers to meet Rusty Nail at a motel.  This unfunny joke not surprisingly leads to violence, as Rusty Nail pursues the trio through a cornfield with an eighteen wheeler monster belching smoke while tracking them with spotlights.

Unfortunately John Dahl has not directed a film since 2007; the kind of mid-budget genre film he does so well is not currently much in fashion. He is, however, thriving in televsion.  I recently watched the first episode of American Rust, which Dahl directed with a noir sensibility, though unfortunately the series was cancelled after one season.

Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw

 Answering the telephone was the least of what Howard did for Vidal.  In addition to handling hundreds of mundane chores, he had monitored Gore's drinking, curbed his excesses, scolded him when he crossed the line, and generally prevented him from going over the edge.  He hadn't just enabled Gore to create; he had enabled him to continue living when he declared that he wanted to die. 

--Michael Mewshaw, Sympathy for the Devil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

I have come across Gore Vidal several times in my life:  he ran for Congress from my district in upstate New York in 1960 (he lost but received more votes than any other Democrat who had previously run in the district); he gave a speech at Exeter when I was a student there in the sixties (he was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy); he was a frequent writer for The Nation when I worked there in the eighties.  I watched Vidal with fascination when he sparred with William F. Buckley, Jr. during the 1968 presidential conventions and I was quite impressed with his political insights, just as I have always found his essays more interesting than his didactic novels.  

Mewshaw knew Vidal during the last half of his life as Vidal gradually became a falling-down drunk, especially after the death of Howard Austen, who had been Vidal's companion for many years.  Vidal, who died at 86 in 2012, was probably the last public intellectual in this country and I miss his acerbic wit and his intelligent analyses of (mostly) what's wrong with our nation and what we can do about it. 

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym (1977)

 "I suppose I'm more likely to end my days in an old people's home," said Norman, taking up the large economy size of instant coffee.  "It says 'Family Size' here -- funny when it's mostly used by people in offices."  He spooned coffee powder into a mug.  "Of course you do save a bit -- that's what Marcia and I thought."                                                                                                                      

 -- Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn (Penguin, 1977)

Quartet in Autumn reminds me of Chaplin's Limelight (1952) in its presage of its author's death.  Four office mates -- Letty, Marcia, Edwin and Norman -- are all near retirement age and Marcia retires first and dies after having a mastectomy and neglecting her health.  Pym herself worked for years in the office of The International African Institute and wrote Quartet in Autumn as she was getting ready to retire after having a mastectomy and not having published a book in sixteen years; Quartet in Autumn was only published when when Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both cited Pym as an underrated writer of the 20th century in the Times Literary Supplement. Pym died in 1980.

Pym has a great deal of compassion for the officemates, each mostly alone in life and clinging to their individual eccentricities.  This late novel by Pym has little of the social comedy of her earlier novels and the church has only a small role relatively to her earlier work.  The focus is on the characters and the quotidian aspects of their lives, which mostly take place within the office and, to a lesser extent, in their solitary homes and some of which is familiar to one who has worked in an office, including the pettiness and crabbiness. 

Jean Vigo's Zero de conduite (1933)

 

All of Vigo's own wretched schooling was avenged in Zero de conduite, forty-four minutes of sustained, if roughly shot, anarchist crescendo.  The attempt by society to regiment raw childhood, and the failure of the attempt, are conveyed by the very tender high-angled photography.                                                                  -- David Thomson

Vigo's film brings back memories of one's childhood in school and all its arbitrary authority.  When I was in sixth grade our history teacher said she was going to leave us alone for a few minutes so she could prove to us the importance of authority.  We all erupted into chaos, wildly running around and throwing everything we could get our hands on.  I later regretted that I did not take upon myself the burden of organizing the class to prove the value of anarchy and self-government, as the teacher, Mrs. Shook, returned to point out how she was needed in the classroom to control things.  Vigo's film takes the approach of endorsing the fight against opression by the union of four students to lead the effective rebellion against the teachers who not only give out "zeros for conduct" but steal desserts from the students' lunches while the students are outside being marched around.  

Vigo unfortunately made only four films, including the lovely L'atalante, before dying at the age of 29, but his films were quite influential in Europe, especially on Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson, whose If.... (1968) was strongly influenced by Zero de conduite.

Turner Classic Movies September 2022

 September has a pretty solid line-up of films, but since most of the ones I like have been shown before on TCM you can look them up on this blog and if you don't find them send me an email and I'll tell you what I know and think about them.  The list here is just the major highlights.

Sept. 1:  Blake Edwards's marvelous visual comedy The Party (1968)

Sept. 4: Ernst Lubitsch's brilliant To Be or Not to Be  (1942)

Sept. 5:  G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929), starring Louise Brooks and Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance, a wonderful musical comedy starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

Sept. 12: King Vidor's great silent film The Crowd (1928)

Sept. 13:  Jean Renoir's American film The Woman on the Beach (1947)

Sept. 16:  Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Sept. 18: Walsh's Manpower (1941), with Marlene Dietrich and Edward G. Robinson

Sept. 23: Nicholas Ray's great film noir In a Lonely Place (1950)

Sept. 24:  Budd Boetticher's beautifully austere Western Ride Lonesome (1959)

Sept. 26: Ermanno Olmi's soaring The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

Sept. 27: Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street  (1945)

Harold Kress's Apache War Smoke (1952)

 Harold Kress was primarily an editor, Apache War Smoke being one of the only three films he directed, in 1951 and 1952.  Not surprisingly the film is well edited, especially in the more active scenes of Apache attacks on a stagecoach station in the Southwest, with the staff and stagecoach passengers fighting off the attackers.  The enclosed spaces of the station are beautifully photographed in black-and-white by the estimable John Alton, whose brilliant cinematography was most effectively used in the films of Anthony Mann, such as Raw Deal (1948).  The script was written by Jerry Davis, who worked mostly in television, based on a story by Ernest Haycox, who also wrote the story that was the basis for John Ford's Stagecoach (1939).

The cast includes Hank Worden, a member of John Ford's stock company, and stars Gilbert Roland, an outlaw known as Peso, and Robert Horton as Peso's estranged son Tom. who manages the stage station.  Relations between the passengers become complicated and tense, with Apaches attacking the station in search of a murderer; gold from the stagecoach locked in box in a storeroom; a triangle of Tom, Nancy (stagecoach passenger and Tom's former lover, played by Barbara Ruick), and Lorraine (Patricia Tiernan), passing through with her soldier father.  Fanny Wilson (a vibrant Glenda Farrell), another stagecoach passenger, is a former lover of Peso's. Also present is Cyril Snowden (Gene Lockhart), a rather pompous employee of the stagecoach company who turns out to be pretty handy with a rifle. 

The film effectively demonstrates the tensions between the pioneering stagecoach routes and the Native Americans in a part of the country where there is no official law yet, as well as the tensions between those who follow the law and those who choose not to do so.  Kress's biggest achievement is not so much the effective battle scenes as creating individuals beneath the surface of the somewhat stereotyped characters, especially considering that the film is only 67 minutes long. 

Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie (1995)

 Chabrol was one of the most enigmatic directors.  A fringe instigator of the original New Wave, he managed to create a world for himself -- some private Hollywood -- in which it was possible to produce a stream of subtle studies of human motivation.                                                                            

  -- David Thomson

Claude Chabrol was one of those directors whose films to which I always looked forward: he made more that fifty films between 1958 and his death in 2010.  He didn't always get the scripts or the actors or the money he wanted but he always persevered to make the film, including more that a dozen that I would call masterpieces, among La Ceremonie, from his late period, based on Ruth Rendell's Judgement in Stone and Jean Genet's The Maids.  The title refers to the march to the guillotine, though in this case it is a march to the death for a bourgeois family  (mother, father, two children) who hire a maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), and treat her condescendingly and patronizingly. Sophie, who manages to hide the fact that she is illiterate, becomes friends with a postal clerk Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) who encourages Sophie to rebel.

Class distinctions are clear-cut in La Ceremonie, with Jeanne and Sophie watch variety shows on TV while their employer Madame Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset) and her family watch Mozart operas. One can see this film as Chabrol saw it, as Marxist, but also as a warning about everything from keeping guns in the house to making sure you employees are properly vetted (both Sophie and Jeanne were suspected of murder) and not taking your bourgeois life for granted, though even if you do all these things one can never be certain of anyone's motivations.   The low-key cinematography for La Ceremonie is by Bernard Zitzerman and the effectively sparse score is by Mattieu Chabrol, Claude Chabrol's son. 

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder and the Movies by Paul Fischer

 Lizzie was certain Thomas Edison had something to do with her husband's disappearance.  Everyone knew he stole credit that wasn't his and Louis had vanished eight months before Edison had suddenly unveiled "his" Kinotoscope, so similar to Louis's invention.  Adolphe, too, was certain his father had been "eliminated."  It was said, after all, that Edison sometimes worked with Allan Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, whose squads infiltrated unions and violently broke up labot movements, whose armed watchmen could be relied on to do whatever it took to protect the financial interests of their clients.                                                                                                                                                                 Paul Fischer, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

Fischer makes a good case for Louis Le Prince as the inventor of the motion picture; his patents in America and Europe in 1890 were the first from a number of inventors working on this same idea.  But Le Prince disappeared in 1890 and no trace of him was ever found, therefore Louis's wife Lizzie could not invoke the patents until 1897, when Louis was declared officially dead and Thomas Edison had succeeded in manipulating his own patents in order to declare himself the inventor of motion pictures and to sue anyone who exhibited films as infringements on his invention (which was actually developed by Edison's employee William K. Dickson).  Le Prince's first film, Roundhay Garden Scene, was produced in 1888 but shown only to friends and not publicly shown.

Fischer's book is partly a defense of Le Prince as inventor of motion pictures -- including a great deal of technical detail -- but is also a history of others who were working towards the same end, including those we may have heard of, Georges Melies and the Lumiere brothers, as well as those we may not have heard of, William Friese-Greene and Etienne-Jules Marey.  Fischer's research is both deep and wide, from the France of Le Prince's birth to the time he spent in America and, mostly, in England, including the names of all his helpers and assistants.

Budd Boetticher's Westbound (1959)

Westbound is often ignored as a Boetticher Western because it does not have the single-minded and austere quality of the Ranown Westerns that Boetticher made around the same time, including Ride Lonesome, also made in 1959, that were written by Burt Kennedy and produced by Harry Joe Brown.   But Westbound is an excellent Western even if it is outside the cycle of Boetticher's more personal films.

Westbound stars craggy Randolph Scott as a Union officer in 1864 who is assigned to run a stagecoach company in Julesberg, Colorado that will make daily shipments of gold from California to the East to help the Union Army.  Julesberg is run by Southern sympathizers who will do all they can to stop Scott, including destroying stagecoaches full of innocent civilians. Scott also has to deal with his former lover, played by Virginia Mayo, who is now married to the town boss, as well as with Karen Steele, who is married to a disabled Union soldier, played by Michael Dante. The movie is beautifully photographed in Warnercolor, with its emphasis on greens and blues, by veteran cinematographer J. Pervell Marley, whose career began in the twenties and includes Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (1941).

When Scott has to shoot it our with the town boss's hired guns he is surprised to see the town's citizens show up to help (another rebuke of High Noon).  Virginia Mayo decides to head back East while Karen Steele, whose husband has been killed by the hired guns, stays to run the stagecoach station and hopes that Scott will eventually return, as he rides off at the end.

Payment in Blood by Elizabeth George (1989)

 "Dad?"  Barbara repeated.  He gave no answer. She walked into the room, lowered the volume, and turned to him.  He was asleep, his jaw slack, the tubes that fed him oxygen askew in his nostrils.  Racing magazines covered the floor near his chair and a newspaper was open over his knees.  It was too hot in the room, in the entire house for that matter, and the musty smell of her parents' ageing seemed to seep from the walls and the floor and the furniture.  This mixed with a stronger, more recent scent of food overcooked and inedible.                                                                                                                                       -- Elizabeth George, Payment in Blood (Bantam Dell, 1989)

This is the second of George's novels about posh Thomas Lynley and his working class partner at Scotland Yard Barbara Havers, who in this book are assigned to investigate a murder in Scotland among an acting and producing group gathered for rehearsals.  A continuity in the novels involves Lynley's infatuation with Lady Helen Clyde, who turns up in Scotland, sleeping with one of the actors, and not only provokes Lynley's jealousy but his jealousy interferes with the investigation of the murder, as well as a second murder in Scotland.  There are too many suspects and too many red herrings for my taste but George gradually moves to the most likely candidates, with Havers and Lynley both considerably influenced by their respective backgrounds, as everyone in the acting group has a secret in the past or in the present. George's prose is as rich and detailed as in the other two books in this group about which I have posted, and she deftly portrays the complex history and psychology of her characters. 

The New York Yankees vs. The Seattle Mariners Aug. 9, 2022

 Yes, there were some base running mistakes by the Yankees on Aug. 9:   in the tenth inning Andrew Benintendi wandered off second base and was picked off; in the eleventh inning Michael Andujar was doubled off second when Aaron Hicks hit a line drive to the second baseman; in the twelfth Isiah Kiner-Falefa was thrown out at second trying to stretch a single after Jose Trevino was caught in a rundown off second. While announcer Cameron Maybin was making consescending remarks that the game looked like Little League it occurred to me that perhaps they don't have a "ghost runner" in Little League extra innings like they do in Major League Baseball, a runner on second base to start each extra inning.  This rule was supposed to be gone this year but they kept it -- and I fondly hope this is the last year they have it -- because of the compressed schedule due to the late start of the season.  It  can only be disorienting for a runner to be on second base when they did not earn their way there and feeling the pressure that one is in "scoring position" and it is important to score first if you are the visiting team; the Yankee base running mistakes were all related to the goofy rule of the "ghost runner."

Part of what is going on here is related to the attempts to make games shorter.  As I have previously said, all that needs to be done is to enforce the rules that currently exist:  the pitcher has to pitch within twelve seconds of receiving the ball when there are no runners on base and batters are not allowed to step out of the batter's box unless time is called (and a few other exceptions, including a passed ball and a wild pitch).  If one ever gets the chance to see a recorded baseball game from the fifties one will see that batters almost never stepped out of the box, unlike now when it is common for a batter to step out after every pitch, which makes it often impossible for the pitcher to pitch within twelve seconds, i.e., both rules need to be enforced. 

Frank R. Strayer's Blondie in Society (1941)

Blondie in Society is the ninth of twenty-eight Blondie movies made by Columbia Pictures between 1939 and 1950, of which twelve were directed by Frank R. Strayer and seven were written by Karen DeWolf, who made Blondie in Society, along with veteran cinematographer Henry Freulich, who photographed five films in 1941.  The verbal wit and physical comedy of this film may even have been influenced by brilliant comedy writer Preston Sturges, whose first two directorial efforts were released in 1940.

Blondie is played by Penny Singleton and Dagwood by Arthur Lake, as in all the Blondie films.  Trouble starts when police and bank officials show up at the Bumstead residence suspecting that someone had forged Dagwood's signature on a check  for fifty dollars.  Dagwood says he wrote the check as a loan for his friend Cliff (Chick Chandler), a dog breeder.  Unfortunately he forgot to tell Blondie about the loan after she had counted on that money for a bicycle for their son Baby Dumpling, a new washing machine and a permanent for herself.  Blondie insists that Cliff return the money immediately but Cliff doesn't have the money so he gives Dagwood a Great Dane named Chin Up White Tie for Dinner instead.  Then chaos and entropy ensue, including Dagwood being attacked by a woman with a broom when Chin Up eats the pies cooling on her window.

I'm not one to worry about so-called "spoilers," since knowing the plot in advance usually will enhance rather than diminish my enjoyment of a movie, book, ballet, etc. but I will limit my comments here because the plot here is so brilliantly detailed and the performances so superb that I would find it  difficult to capture the combined intelligence of the screenplay and mise-en-scene verbally; a good print is available on YouTube. For the time being I just want to praise -- in addition to DeWolf's screenplay and Strayer's direction -- the excellent casting and performances of the character actors who so beautifully support Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton:  Jonathan Hale as J.C. Dithers, Dagwood's agressive boss; Edgar Kennedy, of the "slow burn," as the veterinarian who takes care of Chin Up; William Frawley as Waldo Pincus, who has his own Great Dane named Hamlet's Soliloquy; Charles Lane as the washing machine salesman, who has a demonstration machine attack him; the juveniles Larry Simms as Baby Dumpling and Danny Mummert, the sharp-tongued Alvin, Baby Dumpling's friend. Excellent, as usual, is the Bumstead's dog Daisy, played by a mixed breed terrier, poodle, cocker spaniel.

The film ends with Blondie taking Chin Up White Tie to a dog show with a $500 prize and when Chin Up won't allow himself to be shown Blondie rouses him by beautifully singing Joyce Kilmer's Trees, put to music by Oscar Rasbach, and wins the prize.

William Keighley's Journal of a Crime 1934

 Journal of a Crime just makes it under the wire as a pre-Code film, the Code going into effect later in 1934.  It is written by F. Hugh Herbert and Charles Kenyon and based on a play by Jacques Duval.  It is basically a two-person story:  Francoise Moliet (Ruth Chatterton) kills her husband's (Adolf Menjou) mistress, Odette Florey (Claire Dodd) and gets away with it when they catch a bankrobber, Costelli (Noel Madison) who had killed a bank teller and was hiding in the theatre where the murder of Odette took place as the play that Mr. Moliet had written was in rehearsal; Costell is blamed for also shooting Odette and is sentenced to death.  Paul Moliet doesn't turn his wife in and just lets her guilty conscience gradually destroy her health, as Paul even takes in Odette's dog and Francoise goes to Costelli in his jail cell to confess to him; Costelli doesn't care and only wants to know how Robinson Crusoe ends, since his tattered copy is missing the ending.

Francoise eventually decides to turn herself in but, as she is walking to the district attorney's office she rescues a child from being hit by a car;  she herself suffers a severe brain injury and when she recovers she cannot remember anything of the past.  The film ends with Paul taking Francoise home.

This admittedly contrived plot is beautifully acted, with complete conviction by Chatterton (whose film acting career ended in the thirties) and dapper Menjou (who acted in Chaplin's A Womam of Paris in 1923 and made his last film in 1960).  Keighley, who directed mostly routine films (from 1932 to 1953), works with cinematographer Ernest Haller to keep his camera mobile, as Paul continues his writing career while Francoise stays miserably at home.

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne

 One of the main reasons for Pym's many rejections was the closure of the commercial circulating libraries, where for a small fee readers could rent out books at a time when buying books was still costly.  This had been the key not only to Pym's own voracious consumption of fiction as a young woman, but also to her wide readership back in the fifties.                                                                       -- Paula Byrne, The Adventures of Miss Barara Pym (William Collins, 2021)

It is always a pleasure to discover a new writer whose books give one pleasure.  I first heard of Barbara Pym in Alison Light's review of Byrne's biography in "The London Review of Books" 29 July 2021 and have now posted comments about three of her novels on this blog.  Pym published six books from 1950 to 1961 and then faced only rejection from not only her own publisher but more than twenty others to whom she submitted manuscripts; she was considered old-fashioned and her books were not considered particularly profitable (if Byrne unearthed any actual sales figures for Pym's books she doesn't share them with us). Finally Pym was able to get additional books published after "The Times Literary Supplement" did a survey in 1977 of the most under-rated and most over-rated novels of the 20th century and Pym's name was the only one listed as under-rated by two of the people surveyed, Philip Larkin(who had long been a supporter) and Lord David Cecil, English professor at Oxford (from which Pym had graduated). Pym died in 1980 and had four books published posthumously that had not been accepted by a publisher.

As fascinating and beautifully written as Byrne's book is and as useful as she found Pym's diaries (from which she quotes frequently) -- she has been very influenced by Pym's style -- it remains a question as to how important the life of a writer is to the understanding and appreciation of her work.  There is a great deal of information in Byrne's book about Pym's Nazi lover as well as her many failed relationships with men, who were often homosexual, married or otherwise unavailable. I read biographies of artists because I am fascinated about their ability to accomplish so much in this world that defeats the efforts of many of us.  Pym had a particularly complex life, filled with happiness as well as sadness, but she managed in her novels to create a world of her own, filled with requited and unrequited love in a small slice of England, with characters vividly alive. 

Alfred L. Werker's At Gunpoint (1955)

 Fred MacMurray has never gotten his due as an actor; though he made successful soap operas (Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow, 1956), comedies (Remember the Night, 1940, written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitch Leisen) and film noir (Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, 1944) he seems unfortunately remembered mostly for his TV program My Three Sons (1960-1972) and his awful movies for Disney (The Shaggy Dog, 1959).  MacMurray also starred in seventeen Westerns, mostly low-budget films with journeymen directors, with the exception of the excellent The Texas Rangers, directed by King Vidor in 1936.

Alfred L. Werker was one of those journeymen directors who made a number of superb Westerns in the fifties (see my previous posts), including At Gunpoint.  Werker's film is seen as something of an imitation of Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952), but I see it as more of a response to Zinneman's film, just as Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) is.  High Noon was written by Carl Foreman, a blacklisted writer who was understandably bitter about how his friends had deserted him, just as the townfolk in the film deserted sheriff Gary Cooper.  In Werker's film the townspeople try to get shopkeeper Jack Wright (MacMurray)to leave town after killing a bank robber, when the remaining members of the outlaw gang kill a new sheriff and threaten the entire town.  But Jack sticks to his guns, even when his brother-in-law Wally (James O'Hara) is killed (the gang thought he was Jack).  Jack gives an inspiring talk to the town about the importance of community and at the last moment the townspeople and his wife Martha back him up.

At Gunpoint was written by Daniel Ullman and photographed in color and cinemascope by Ellsworth Fredericks, both of whom were involved with many Westerns on film and on television.  MacMurray is strong and forthright as the shopkeeper who won't back down, even though he barely knows how to use a gun.  Martha is played with intelligence and subtlety by Dorothy Malone.  Walter Brennan is the chess-playing doctor who stands by MacMurray when no one else will and the rest of the cast includes character actors John Qualen, Skip Homeier and Whit Bissel.  Werker's direction is precise and graceful.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

 About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion.  And this same widening gulf -- which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich -- will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along line of social stratification, less and less frequent.  So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.         --H,G. Wells, The Time Machine (Signet Classics, originally published in 1895)

The main body of Wells's book is in quotations, as The Time Traveller (as he is called) explains the details of time travel and his visit to the year 802,701, where the world has evolved to the working Morlocks who live underground and the peaceful Eloi, who fear the Morlocks as cannibals.  The Time Traveller returns to the Victorian era to tell his fellow scientists what will happen in the future, which the scientists are skeptical about until The Time Traveller shows them vegetation he brought back from the future and then disappears with his time machine three years later.  

When I read this book as a child I missed out completely on its didactic quality; now Well's warning about increasing class differences seems more relevant than ever, as studies show it becoming more and more difficult to transcend the class one is born into and the so-called middle class is being squeezed out.  One can still read this as an adventure story, as The Time Traveller examines the world of 802,701, dallies with Weena, a female Eloi, and finds museums devoted to the past, where everything has crumbled to dust, though the tone is indeed pessimistic. 

Turner Classic Movies August 2022

 TCM has an excellent series of classical movies in August, including the films of Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley, Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, Clint Eastwood, Spencer Tracy, Constance Bennett and Peter Sellers.  Many of these films I have recommended previously but if you have questions about any of them please send me an e-mail and I will respond.

The highlights of August include:

Aug. 2:  Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the best civilian aviation film.

Aug. 8: W.S. Van Dyke's Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)

Aug. 15: Mark Sandrich's Follow the Fleet, one of the best Astaire/Rogers films; Budd Boetticher's beautiful Western Ride Lonesome (1959)

Aug. 16:  Andre DeToth's The Bounty Hunter (1954)

Aug. 17: Fritz Lang's Fury (1936)

Aug. 27:  John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Howard Hawks's Monkey Business (1952)

Aug. 28: Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952) and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959)

Aug. 30:  Raoul Walsh's boisterous Gentleman Jim (1942)

Jack Conway's Red-Headed Woman (1932)

 Red-Headed Woman was written by Anita Loos (after F.Scott Fitzgerald's script was deemed inadequate) based on Katherine Brush's novel, and Jean Harlow, playing Lil Andrews, tears through it as a secretary trying to break into high society.  The first scene in the film shows Lil trying on a dress and asking "can you see through this?"  When the answer is "I'm afraid you can" she says she'll take it.  

Director Jack Conway started directing in 1917 and gradually became a bland house director for MGM, following the script and coming in under budget.  In Red-Headed Woman Jean Harlow is a force of nature that Conway makes little attempt to control and she is even occasionally sympathetic in her attempts to use her sexuality to break into society.  When Lil seduces her boss Bill Legendre Jr. (the square-jawed Chester Morris) his society wife Ilene (Leila Hyams) discovers them together and files for divorce.  Bill and Lil get married but Lil is annoyed that Bill won't involve her is his social circle and they have a big fight; Bill slaps her and Lil says, "Do it again, I like it!  Do it again!" 

Next Lil seduces Bill's business associate Charles Gaerste (Henry Stephenson), who doesn't know Lil is married to Bill; she also is having an affair with Gaerste's chauffer Albert (Charles Boyer).  Although Lil is doing well financially she still is not socially acceptable to Bill's friends and goes out of her way to denounce them when they leave her party to visit Ilene.  If there's any doubt that this is a pre-Code film:  at the end of the film Lil shoots Bill when he drives off with Ilene, she gets away with it because Bill survives and won't press charges and Lil ends up in Paris with an older man with a long beard and Albert as their chauffer!

John Dickson Carr's The Eight of Swords (1934)

 "Ma'am," said Dr. Fell urbanely, "one of the most unfortunate features of police work is that it brings us into contact with people whom we should otherwise run a mile to avoid.  Pray accept my assurance, ma'am, that nobody appreciates this more than I do."                                                                       -- John Dickson Carr, The Eight of Swords (1934, republished by Penzler Publishers 2021)

The so-called "golden age of detective fiction" never really existed, unless one thinks that English writer Agatha Christie has a great deal in common with Americans Erle Stanley Gardner and John Dickson Carr; as a splitter rather than a lumper I don't see it.  Most of Carr's novel's do take place in England, but usually include a certain level of subdued American irony.  The Eight of Swords is the third of twenty-three books with detective Dr. Gideon Fell, who looks rather like G.K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown novels.  This is not a locked room mystery; indeed there are many open doors and windows to the room where Nick Depping was killed and no one in the neighborhood seems to have a motive.  But Fell begins to figure out that not everyone is who they claim to be; Depping himself has something of a secret past and was even known to wear a disguise at one point the night he was killed.  There are poltergeists and bishops sliding down banisters, crooked lawyers and incompetent police, writers and servants, attractive young ladies and dowdy old wives.  Fell gradually sorts it all out as two additional murders take place during his investigation while Fell narrows down the dwindling number of suspects.  As Fell concludes, "the one-little-damning clue was a large and many-caloried dinner, steaming before your noses."

Alfred L. Werker's Rebel in Town 1956

 Another austere Western from director Werker, with a tightly-plotted script by Danny Arnold and black-and-white cinematography by Gordon Avil (who photographed King Vidor's Hallelujah in 1929 and Vidor's Billy the Kid in 1930 before turning to B movies and television).  It stars John Payne, who made an effective transition from song-and-dance man in the forties to Westerns and film noir in the fifties.

We start with a view of John and Nora Willoughby's (John Payne and Ruth Roman) small farm in Arizona with their son Petey (Bobby Clark), who idolizes his father for his Civil War record and dresses up in a uniform of his own.  Petey gets a cap pistol for his birthday and when he sees former Confederate soldiers in town he shoots his cap pistol at them and one of them, hearing the noise, turns around and shoots him.  Petey dies and John swears vengance.  The killer turns out to be part of the Mason family, Confederates burned out of their home in Alabama and wandering the West, robbing banks, headed by bible-quoting patriarch Bedloe Mason (J. Carrol Naish) and including his sons Gray (Ben Cooper), Wesley (John Smith), Frank (Ben Johnson) and Cain (Sterling Franck).

John Willoughby seeks revenge and goes looking for the Mason family and finds an injured Gray, who had started back to town to find out about Petey and is stabbed by Wesley, who had shot the boy.  John and Nora nurse Gray back to health until John finds out that Gray is part of the killer's family and brings him in to the sheriff in town, where a lynch mob gathers.  Bedloe and the rest of his family show up and Bedloe points out Wesley as the killer, who immediately flees.  John Willoughby chases Wesley and kills him, somewhat in self-defense, and reunites with Nora, who had known all along who Gray was.  Bedloe, saddened, says "what the sons of some men do to the sons of others is the tragedy of the world."

This stark moral tale shows how the wounds of the Civil War festered -- and still do even today -- after the conflict ended, with Willougby's and Mason's children continuing to suffer and director Werker showing the hatred and suffering of the children from both sides. 

Alfred L. Werker's Three Hours to Kill (1954)

 I've written how the conventions of film noir can elevate even routine films and that's also true of the Western.  Werker's Three Hours to Kill is obviously influenced by Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952) and William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).  In Wellman's film Dana Andrews is lynched for something he didn't do while in Werker's film the attempted lynching fails, Dana Andrews's Jim Guthrie escapes and comes back three years later to find out who killed the man whose murder was blamed on Guthrie. Guthrie's friend Sherrif Ben East (Stephen Elliot) gives Guthrie three hours to find the real killer.

There are plenty of suspects, Niles (Richard Coogan), who has married Guthrie's sweetheart Laurie Mastin (Donna Reed) while Guthrie was on the run, and gambler Marty (Laurence Hugo), part of a menage-a-troi with Betty (Charlotte Fletcher) and Polly (Carolyn Jones); practically everyone in the town took part in the attempted lynching and they all had a reason to murder the victim, Carter (Richard Webb).  When Guthrie finds the real killer he kills him in a gun battle and rides off, realizing that he and Laurie can never be together again.  Guthrie, however, is followed by dance hall girl Chris Palmer (Dianne Foster), who had always loved him; it's an unusual twist in Westen iconography. 

Although one often thinks of Dana Andrews as the urban figure from his films with Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang he also did a number of excellent Westerns, including Jacques Tourneur's Canyon Passage (1946).  Alfred L. Werker was also better known for his film noirs (They Walked by Night, 1948) though he did a number of interesting Westerns near the end of his career;  he made four films after Three Hours to Kill and though his direction is intelligant and often subtle credit also goes to cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr. and producer Harry Joe Brown.  Lawton started as a cinematographer in 1937 and worked with John Ford and Budd Boetticher, among many other directors, and helped to create the beautiful palette -- browns, blues and yellow -- of Three Hours to Kill.  Harry Joe Brown went on to produce Boetticher's superb Westerns with Randolph Scott.

Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire (1971)

 I wrote previously about Rothman's Terminal Island (1973) on Feb. 14, 2017.  Rothman was mentored by Roger Corman after her graduation from film school and made seven movies between 1967 and 1978, all of them low-budget exploitation films (small budgets, nudity, violence and unknown actors) and eventually started her own company, where she was unable to find financing for additional films; it was thought she could only make exploitation films -- which she had done mainly to get a foothold in the business -- and she was a woman, few of whom were allowed to direct in the seventies.  She quit making movies and went into the real estate business.

My own feeling is that part of the problem was that the exploitation films Rothman made all had strong leading women asserting themselves, as in The Velvet Vampire, where Susan Ritter (Sherry E. DeBoer) battles it out with vampire Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall) for the soul of Susan's husband Lee (Michael Blodgett) in the desert (LeFanu is a reference to nineteenth-century writer Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, who wrote the lesbian vampire novella Camilla).  The film takes place mostly in the desert and the desert home of Diane, though after Diane kills Lee she chases Susan into the Greyhound bus terminal in Los Angeles, where Susan kills Diane with a cross and bright sunlight.  Rothman and her cinematographer Daniel Lacambre shot the film in bright primary colors, primarily red (of course), yellow and blue and included a number of effectively erotic scenes, with Rothman (who wrote the film with Maurice Jules and Charles S. Swartz) using some standard vampire lore while also inventing new rules of her own. 

Eric Rohmer's Le Rayon Vert 1986

"I saw an Eric Rohmer film once; it was kind of like watching paint dry."                                                      -- Harry Noseby (Gene Hackman) in Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975, written by Alan Sharp)

The first Eric Rohmer film I saw was Ma nuit chez Maude in 1969, after waiting in the rain on a long line at the 72nd St. Playhouse on Manhattan's East Side.  It was fascinating both verbally and visually, intensive with a unique point of view. I looked forward to each of Rohmer's films after that and saw all of his films after that as they arrived in the United States, including his six "Moral Tales" and his six "Comedies and Proverbs," of which Le Rayon Vert ( The Green Ray) is the fifth, shot on 16 mm. during the summer of 1985.  Rohmer made his last film in 2007 and died in 2010.  I recently ordered the biography of Rohmer, by Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe, and decided to see some of Rohmer's films again that I had not seen in years 

Le Rayon Vert is the story of Delphine (Marie Rivere, who collaborated on the screenplay), a secretary in Paris who has her summer vacation in Greece canceled when the friend with whom Delphine was going cancels Delphine in favor of the friend's boyfriend.  Delphine is desperate and eventually goes to Cherbourg with a friend but doesn't get along with the family (they mock her for being a vegetarian), goes to the Alps and only spends a day there and ends up at the beach in Biarritz, where she overhears a conversation about Jules Verne's Le Rayon Vert and how if one is fortunate to see the green ray at the second the sun goes down one's thoughts and those of others are revealed.  At Biarritz Delphine meets Lena (Carita Holmstrom) from Sweden who tries to teach Delphine about picking up men but Delphine flees when two men join them for drinks.  She heads to the train station where she meets a man she is attracted to and they go together to a fishing village, where Dephine sees the green ray for a second as the sun goes down.

The film consists of Delphine's awkward conversations with others, as Rohmer focuses on her listening and rarely talking, her long walks by herself and her tears in lonely hotel rooms; she occasionally picks up discarded playing cards in the street that she thinks may have something to do with her destiny.  Marie Rivere's character is complex, sometimes charming, often irritating, as she insists on being herself and is not interested in "holding back her cards," as Lena suggests, Delphine being one of many Rohmer characters who will not compromise their moral integrity.

Rickey: The Life and Legend of An American Original by Howard Bryant

While Bob Ryan argued that Rickey could could have been even better had he played more, how much better could Mays or Aaron have been if they played less?  ...The practices of of Mays's time and earlier had filled  a virtual graveyard of dead, shortened, or never-was careers; victims of over-use, players had been afraid of being discarded if they disclosed an injury.                                                                                 -- Howard Bryant, Rickey (Mariner Books, 2022)

Rickey is an elegantly written book about one of baseball's greatest players, who brought style and excitement to a game now dominated by strikeouts and home runs.  When I was a kid in the 50's the one major league record we thought would never be broken was Ty Cobb's 96 stolen bases in 1915; in 1957 Willie Mays was the major league leader in stolen bases with 38.  Then things changed, with Maury Wills stealing 104 bases in 1962, Lou Brock stealing 118 in 1974 and Rickey Henderson stealing 130 in 1982; Henderson ended up with a total of 1406 stolen bases in his career, 50% more that Lou Brock at 938 (Cobb stole a total of 897).  Now one thinks Henderson's record will never be broken, as  dominant analytics say that a player should not attempt to steal because he might get thrown out (Sterling Marte lead the major leagues in steals last year with 47).

Bryant's book covers all aspects of baseball and its relationship to society during Rickey's playing years (1979 to 1993), when free agency had taken over from the reserve clause, which had bound players to a particular team.  Bryant is particularly perceptive and detailed about the role of African-American players during this period and the racism still endemic in the game, as the percentage of African-American players has gone from 19% in 1986 to 8% in 2021, for complex reasons not fully understood, though some think that it's because teams carry many more pitcher than they use to and African-American are discouraged from pitching.  Bryant analyzes Rickey's relationship with each of his managers and team owners -- Rickey and Billy Martin were particularly compatible in their aggresssive approach to the game -- and gives deserved credit to Rickey's wife Pamela as well as Rickey's good friend on the Oakland A's Dave Stewart.  Bryant tracks down the truth and exaggeration of the many stories told about Rickey and ends with the text of Rickey's eloquent speech at his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2009.  

John Reinhardt's Chicago Calling (1951)

 Chicago Calling is a downbeat film about an alcoholic, (Bill Cannnon,played with subtlety and intelligence by Dan Duryea), in Los Angeles whose wife Mary (Mary Anderson) and young daughter Nancy (Melinda Casey) have left him to live with Mary's parents in Chicago because after all his lies Mary has "lost faith" in Bill.  Bill goes on a drunken binge and when he finally wakes up there is a telegram from Mary telling him that they have been in an automobile accident and Nancy is in the hospital; Mary will call him later.  Unfortunately Bill's phone has been cut off because the bill hasn't been paid and even after robbing Nancy's piggy bank Bill can't raise nearly enough money to pay it and he has no idea how to reach Mary.  Then Bill's odyssey to raise the fifty-three dollars he needs to pay his phone bill begins and it lasts all day and night, as banks and loan companies laugh at him, welfare would take weeks before he received anything and his one drinking buddy, who works as a short-order cook can't afford to help him.  A waitress at a lunch wagon (Marcia Mae Jones) gives him five bucks but that's all the money he can find.

As he walks through Los Angeles in despair he is accompanied by his dog, Smitty, who is accidentally hit by a young boy, Bobbie(Gordon Gebert) on his bicycle.  The dog is unharmed and Bobbie offers to loan him the money that he's saved from working at a produce store.  Bill relunctantly agrees but when they get to Bobbie's house his guardian sister has hidden the money so Bobbie steals the money from his sister's boyfriend and he and Bill go to a Holllywood Stars baseball game, where Bobby loses the money; they find it at the lost-and-found where the clerk says "you must be in a good place," which convinces Bill to tell Bobbie to return the money and then Bill finds a one-night job on a construction crew.  When Bill gets home the phone rings and the phone guy says he fixed it for Mary's call to come through that day.  Just then the cops arrive to take Bill in; he had been reported for theft.  The phone rings and the cops let him answer and the news from Mary is not good, based on Bill's responses.  Bill's despair deepens and he leaves when the cops let him go, on an apparently aimless walk, with Bobbie following him.  

The cinematographer is Robert De Grasse, who made a film with Douglas Sirk, The First Legion, also in 1951, and had been making movies starting in the 20's.  Bill Cannon's apartment was in a seedy section of Los Angeles, Bunker Hill, and Reinhardt and De Grasse capture the poverty and desperation of the area with their location shooting.  Duryea is remembered by most people for his superb slimeball roles, as in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) and Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (1950) but in Chicago Calling he is a sympathetic and resilient character, even though he has brought all his problems on himself he deserves one's sympathy and understanding for the moral lessons he teaches the fatherless Bobbie and for his fight for survival in a mostly heedless world. 

John Reinhardt's High Tide (1947)

 John Reinhardt was Austrian and made his start in films directing foreign versions of American films, with completely different actors speaking languages other than English.  He ended up at Poverty Row studio Monogram in the 40's and directed a number of interesting low-budget melodramas there with film noir elements, including dark urban streets, betrayals and femme fatales.  High Tide was one of them.  It starts out with the swirling waters of the ocean, suggesting the swirling and changing plot, and moves to two men trapped in a wrecked car as the tide comes in.  The men are Tim Slade (Don Castle) and Hugh Fresney (Lee Tracy) and the film quickly moves to flashback, with newspaper editor Fresney hiring Slade as a bodyguard.  Fresney had been in love with Julie Bishop (Julie Vaughn), currently married to newpaper owner Clinton Vaughn (Douglas Walton), and when Julie tries to renew the romance Slade turns to Vaughn's secretary Dana Jones (Anabel Shaw).  Then things become complicated, as Vaughn is killed and so is Pop Garron (Francis Ford), a man with a portfolio of secrets.

Slade investigates, with the help of Dana and tells Fresney, as they drive together, what he knows about Fresney's role in all this, including three murders.  Fresney drives off the road and crashes the car at the edge of the ocean as the tide comes in.  Slade is able to dig himself out but Fresney insists that he be left in the wrecked car as the tide comes in.  High Tide is dark, both literally and figuratively, as Reinhardt and cinematographer Henry Sharp (who worked on films with Fritz Lang) shot this low-budget film almost entirely at nigth in a claustrophobic environemnt with only back projection supplying any light. 

July 10, 2022: Staten Island Ferry Hawks 4, Charleston(W. Va.) Dirty Birds 1

 It was wonderful to see a baseball game live after more than two years on Sunday, a beautiful day for a game and my thanks particularly to my wonderful wife Susan who arranged the attendance of family and friends to celebrate my birthday.  We attended a game between the Staten Island Ferry Hawks and the Charleston (W.Va.) Dirty Birds in the Atlantic League, an independent league affiliated with Major League Baseball.  The ball park, now known as Staten Island University Hospital Community Park, originally was built for the AA Staten Island Yankees and my family attended many games there before MLB decided to eliminate a fair amount of minor league teams; the rather cynical rationale being that minor league teams are costly and don't produce enough major leaguers in any case.  Fortunately some investors stepped in to form the Ferry Hawks as an expansion team in the Atlantic League

The ball park is a ten-minute walk from the Staten Island ferry terminal and has a lovely view of the harbor and the New York City skyline; tickets and concessions are reasonably priced so the whole family can afford to go; the park seats 7,000 people and all the seats have excellent views  The game we saw was at a fairly high level of performance, with Ferry Hawks pitcher Anthony Rodriquez giving up only one run in 6 2/3 innings and closer Victor Capellan getting the save, his fourth in six days; outfielder Joseph Monge, who played in six seasons for the Boston Red Sox, had three runs batted in and at one point stole both second and third.  One slight disappointment was that Kelsie Whitmore, the first woman to play in the Atlantic League and a member of the Ferry Hawks, did not play in Sunday's game but, all in all, a delightful day of baseball on a lovely day at the ball park, seeing the white ball against the blue sky with family and friends.

William Keighley's Easy to Love (1934)

Easy to Love  comes at the end of the pre-Code era and is considered by some as a "screwball comedy", a term which I, as a splitter rather than a lumper, do not much care for; the idea that one can lump together films by Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey, and Gregory La Cava just because they are comedies I find absurd.  Unlike film noir "screwball comedy" is not a genre that can transcend directors and writers, as we can see in Easy to Love, a comedy in search of a better director than William Keighley, whose first film this is (after co-directing two movies) and who spent most of his career directing gangster and adventure films.

The screenplay -- by Carl Erikson, Manuel Seff, David Boehm -- is clever in its pre- Code way ("funny how marriage is; you start in a double bed, move to twin beds and end up in separate rooms") and some of the casting is okay, especially Genevieve Tobin as Carol, who tries to win her husband John back by "accidentally" dropping the soap on the bathroom floor when taking a bath so John (Adolphe Menjou) can see her naked when he hands it back to her; John is carrying on an affair with Charlotte (Mary Astor) every afternoon when he tells Carol that he is playing polo, but Keighley's direction is somewhat slack, depending as it does on slamming doors and hiding in closets. Eric (Edward Everett Horton) has been romancing Carol but ends up with Charlotte when Carol and John become reunited in their outrage at their daughter Janet pretending she is moving in with her lover Paul (Paul Kaye) without benefit of marriage.

There is at least one amusing scene when Eric and Carol visit Charlotte and John one afternoon (Carol had hired a private detective); while John hides in the closet Charlotte hides John's hat and pretends to be smoking the cigar John leaves out.  Eric then takes John's hat when he leaves (it's too small) and John ends up with Eric's hat (it's too big).  I don't know if Leo McCarey ever saw Easy to Love but he directs a similar scene of switched hats in The Awful Truth (1937) that's much funnier than Keighley's scene.  Of course McCarey had Cary Grant in his film; whenever I see Adolph Menjou I'm reminded of what Jack Webb says to William Holden in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard when Webb sees Holden after Gloria Swanson has given him some clothes, "Where did you get that suit, from Adolphe Menjou?"

The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World by Claire Tomalin

Wells has given his own account of his life in his Experiment in Autobiography, published in 1934, when he was nearly seventy.  It is a book of great charm; it made me love Wells when I first read it, and led me to reread many of the books and stories I already knew, and look for more.  It soon became clear to me that the books of his I most admired were all written -- apart from the autobiography and the Outline of History (1920) -- in the period starting in 1895, when he published his first story, The Time Machine, at the age of twenty-nine, and up to 1911.                                                                                                             -- Claire Tomalin, The Young H.G. Wells (Penguin, 2021)

One of the reasons I read biographies is to see what methods people use to overcome poverty and illness and achieve their desired ends.  According to Tomalin, as she also said in her biography of Thomas Hardy (see my post of Aug. 30, 2016) the answer is perseverance and hard work.  Wells was born in relative poverty and originally worked as a draper's apprentice before taking an exam that got him a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, followed by teaching jobs and writing assignments, before hitting it big with The Time Machine.  Tomalin follows Wells life in fascinating detail through 1911 and sums up his later life (he died in 1946) in one concluding chapter (more details of his later life can be found in Michael Sherborne's biography, published in 2011). 

Tomalin is particularly fond of Wells's novels through The History of Mr. Polly in 1910 and also praises his work for the Fabian society and for politics in general, "he never lost his enthusiasm for revolution and republicanism."  Wells, however, was not a particularly good husband or father. His first marriage was so sexually disappointing that when he married again he felt he was entitled to extramarital affairs (he claimed his second wife, Amy Robbins, understood and accepted this) and he had children with Amber Reeves and Rebecca West in addition to two children with Robbins. Wells was a very social person, on friendly terms with other writers, including George Bernard Shaw, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Tomalin describers Wells's early years intelligently and succintly, concluding that "the best of his books will go on being read for generations, entertaining, surprising, and provoking different readers to different questions -- as good books should."

Professional Sweetheart and Chance at Heaven, both directed by William A. Seiter in 1933 and starring Ginger Rogers

William A. Seiter had a long career directing both movies and televison, movies from 1919 to 1960 and television from 1960 to 1965; working with everyone from the Marx Brothers to Rogers and Astaire.  Both Professional Sweetheart and Chance at Heaven were among the six movies Seiter made in 1933, the first one a comedy, the second a soap opera of sorts.  Both were pre-Code, with Professional Sweetheart being particularly racy, while both films are particularly class conscious. 

In A Chance at Heaven Ginger Rogers and Joel McCrea are charming young lovers who hope to get married soon until, that is, wealthy Marian Nixon comes into town and seduces McCrea and they run off and get hitched.  But Rogers sticks around, even helping to paint their new house and teaching Nixon to cook.  Marian Nixon becomes pregnant and her mother insists she come to New York.  McCrea follow her there and Marian says the marriage is over -- she loves expensive things too much -- and when McCrea asks about the baby Marian's mother says the doctor made a mistake, not-so-broadly hinting at an abortion.  McCrea returns to Ginger Rogers and they reconcile while eating McCrea's favorite that she cooks for him: chicken pie.  The film is essentially a paen to small towns and the working class, writtten by Julian Josephson and Sarah Y. Mason and photographed in sparkling black-and-white by Nicholas Musuraca (who would later be the cinematographer on Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past in 1947, among many other films.  This is one of ten films that Ginger Rogers made in 1933,  including Flying Down to Rio, the first of her partnership with Fred Astaire.

Professional Sweetheart is something of a show business comedy, with the business here that of radio.  Ginger Rogers is a radio star who is known for her "purity" but she wants to drink and go to Harlem, which her sponsors, the executives of IpsiWipsie Wash Cloth company, don't want her to do.  So they pick a name from her fan mail and pick someone from Kentucky (Norman Foster, who was so good in John Ford's Pilgramage) for Rogers to marry. So far so good, until Foster takes her forcibly to Kentucky and spanks her.  Her handlers decide to put Theresa Harris, her Black maid, on in her place and she convinces Foster to take her back to New York by promising to read his primitive poetry on the air.  Theresa Harris's role is an unusual and interesting use at this time of a Black performer in Hollywood, as Harris's singing is particularly sensual, though we don't find out what happens to her when Ginger Rogers returns.  Professional Sweetheart is full of wonderful character actors, including Zasu Pitts as a gossip columnist who says that all actors love her --"I eat with them, I sleep with them" -- and prissy Franklin Pangborn as a costume designer who spills coffe on his pants and sends the pants out to be pressed; when Zasu Pitts opens a door and sees Pangborn without any pants she simply walks right in and shuts the door behind her.  

Turner Classic Movies July 2022

 A rather good slate of classic films this month

July 1:  Howard Hawks's Red River (1948), Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1948), Anthony Mann's Side Street (1950), Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960)

July 2:  John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

July 4: Eugene O' Neil's Ah, Wilderness (1935) directed by Clarence Brown.

July 5: Three by Val Lewton, including The Seventh Victim  (1943) and Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

July 6:  John Ford's Tobacco Road (1941)

July 9:  Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire (1971)

July 10::  Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

July 11:  Two by Eric Rohmer Summer (1986) and Claire's Knee (1970)

July 12: Two by Howard Hawks, The Big Sky (1952) and Rio Bravo (1959) and Budd Boetticher's beautiful Western Ride Lonesome (1959)

July 13: Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon (1947)

July 16:  Terence Fisher's Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

July 17:  Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939), Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee (1934) with Rogers and Astaire and Vincente Minnelli's Bells Are Ringing (1959)

July 19: Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

July 20:  Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

July 23:  Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950)

July 24:  Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

July 31:  Anthony Mann's Raw Deal (1948)

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the above movies or anything else showing on Turner Classic Movies in July.

Arnold Laven's Down Three Dark Streets (1954)

Down Three Dark Streets was recently presented on TCM's Noir Alley, hosted by Eddie Muller. Muller did his usual superb commentary on the role of the movie in film history, making reference to Gordon Gordon and Mildred Gordon, who wrote the screenplay based on their books about FBI agent John Ripley (Gordon Gordon had briefly been an FBI agent), played in Laven's film by Broderick Crawford (who later played J.Edgar Hoover in Larry Cohen's 1977 film The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover). Although I would not call this movie a film noir (not enough neurosis and fatalism, among other things) it is an excellent police procedural, as Rip's partner Zack Stewart (Kenneth Tobey) is shot and killed and Rip has to investigate the three crimes Zack was working on -- car theft, murder, extortion --to find out why he was killed, crimes that affected three women: Connie Andersen (Martha Hyer), a floozie whose lover is a killer; Kate Martell (Ruth Roman), a widow and mother who is being extorted; and Julie Angelino (Marisa Pavane), whose husband is involved in a car theft ring. Broderick Crawford is effectively low-key with the women in each case, though there is an undercurrent of some feeling for Kate, though it never goes anywhere.

Laven and his cinematograper Joe Biroc -- an experienced professional who worked with Sam Fuller, Frank Capra, Robert Aldrich and others -- shoot mostly on location in the many seedy areas of Los Angeles, with a violent climax directly under the famous HOLLYWOOD sign.  Laven directed only a handful of movies before making his way to television, where he directed twenty-two episodes of The Rifleman (1958-1963) and episodes for many other series. After Down Three Dark Streets Crawford mostly worked in TV, including five years of Highway Patrol in the fifties,while continuing to do occasional movies.

An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym

 In her house Ianthe made a determined effort to pull herself together, as her upbringing and training told her that she should.  She bathed her eyes and face in cold water, changed into a cotton dress and comfortable sandals, and went into the garden.  She did not fling herself down on the grass as Penelope might have done, but lay in a deckchair with her eyes closed.  If only she could have loved Rupert Stonebird!  Could she not even now, by some effort of the will, turn her thoughts towards him and make herself care for him?  It would be much easier to love Rupert than to love Mervyn, she thought..                                                                                                                                                      Barbara Pym, An Unsuitable Attachment (E.P. Dutton, 1983)

Pym published six novels through 1961 but was unable to find a publisher for An Unsuitable Attachment in 1963 and it was not published until 1983 (Pym died in 1980. after publishing three novels in the 1970's).  Pym, like many great writers, portrays a world of her own, populated by Anglican clergy, spinsters and unrequited loves (no wonder everyone except Philip Larkin thought An Unsuitable Attachment was too old-fashioned for the 60's), a world in which everyone is trying too hard to do the right thing.  At the center of An Unsuitable Attachment is Ianthe Broome who works in a library and falls in love with fellow librarian John Challow, while head librarian Mervyn Cantrell and anthropologist Rubert Stonebird also attempt to court her.  Meanwhile Mark Ainger, rector of St. Basil's church in North London, and his wife Sophia are looking for someone suitable to marry Sophia's sister Penelope, who is not sure she wants to marry at all.

This makes for effectively droll comedy, as Pym lets us know what everyone is thinking, even if they don't share their thoughts with anyone else.  There is a particularly amusing section where Mark, Sophia and the parishoners of St.Basil's visit Rome and misunderstandings arise, such as when Rubert calls Penelope "a jolly little thing" as he is maneuvering to kiss her. Pym's world, like that of P.G. Wodehouse -- and I intend this as a compliment -- does not change when the world changes. 

Harry Beaumont's Unashamed (1932)

 Unashamed could be the title of many pre-Code films and in Beaumont's film it is shown in a number of ways:  Joan Ogden (played beautifully by Helen Twelvetrees) is not ashamed when she goes off and spends the night at a hotel with her lover, Harry Swift (Monroe Owsley), after he convinces her that her father (Robert Warwick) will have to let her marry him; if she doesn't get her father's permission then Swift won't get her money.  Her father refuses his permission and Joan's brother Dick (Robert Young) shoots and kills Swift.  Joan loved Swift and is unashamed to testify against her brother at his trial.  After her testimony her brother's lawyer Henry Trask (Lewis Stone) tells Joan that unless she changes her story under cross-examination Dick will go to the electric chair; in other words Trask is suborning perjury.  Joan is unashamed to change her story, portraying herself as a slut who doesn't care about marriage, and Dick is aquitted.  And because this is a pre-Code film everyone goes free. 

In the pre-Code days one could get away with murder and suborning perjury, at the price of a double standard when the woman takes the blame, even if it means that her reputation is forever ruined.  The film, of course, makes broad hints that Dick and Joan are incestuously interested in each other -- the first time we see them a fountain is spewing out plumes of water while they are kissing each other on the lips -- and that this is what motivates Joan's change of heart.  Beaumont and his veteran cinematographer Norbert Brodine photographs Joan with sexy low-angle shots when she is unrepentant and at eye-level when she changes her story.  Unashamed, like many pre-code films, is about class, as Harry Swift's father (Jean Hersholt) pleads with Joan's father not to let Joan marry Swift, whose real name is August Schmidt, because Swift is no good and extorts money from everyone he can. Bayard Veiller's original script emphasizes class differences, while Beaumont's gentle direction finds that everyone has their reasons for what they do, even showing a loving relationship between Swift and his father, in spite of all their differences.

William A. Seiter's Why Be Good? (1929)

 Why Be Good? is an effective critique of the hypocrisy of men; as Pert Kelly (Colleen Moore) says to Winthrop Peabody, Jr. (Neil Hamilton), "you bawl women out for being what you want" (one can see the class consciousness just in the name of the characters).  Department store heir Peabody falls in love with working-class Kelly and Kelly has to prove that just because she wears short skirts and loves to dance she is still virtuous, just as she has to prove to her parents that just because Peabody gives her presents does not prove that she is a "strumpet," after all, her father spent all his money on her mother when they were courting.

This is an effective jazz-age story, where the music and dancing are intense and the drinking (especially by the men) is even more so, and Colleen Moore epitomizes the period as she wears her hair in a Dutch Bowl (even before Louise Brooks did), works hard during the day as a salesgirl and dances in Charleston contests at night.  Most of the film takes place at parties and in nightclubs, with a synchronized jazz score using performers from the period, including drummer Phil Harris. Seiter directs energetically with the help of veteran cinematographer Sidney Hickox.  Colleen Moore was an extremely popular actress in the silent era but made only four sound films (including The Power and the Glory in 1933, written by Preston Sturges and directed by William K. Howard) before retiring.  William A. Seiter directed a number of other Colleen Moore vehicles and in 1929 directed a total of seven films; he directed 150 films and television shows in his career from 1919 to 1960 and died in 1964.

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Being Wagner by Simon Callow (2017)

 Before Freud and Jung, Wagner made the old myths mean something again; like them, he looked beyond the rational brain.  He saw man as a turbulent, troubled, writhing, longing, betraying, creating, destroying, loving, loathing mess of instincts and impulses so deeply buried within us that we scarcely dare look at them.  He forced us to do so.  He was all of these things himself.  Had he been anything other than a musical genius, he would have been locked up.                                                                                                 -- Simon Callow, Being Wagner (Vintage, 2017)

It took me a while to appreciate opera.  Susan and I love the ballet but after hearing and seeing the brilliant use of Wagner's Tannhauser overture by Preston Sturges in Unfaithfully Yours (1948), among other reasons, we decided to learn about and experience opera. In the 90's we went fairly indiscriminately to The Metropolitan Opera and The New York City Opera and, though we liked well enough some of Puccini and Verdi we found we particularly responded to Mozart and Wagner, the highlight of our experience being The Ring Cycle of Wagner at The Metropolitan Opera in 1999, a total immersion in the gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner, following which we saw and heard the rest of the Wagner repertory, the highlight of which was Robert Wilson's beautiful styilized production of Lohengrin.

Since our  children were born we have not been to the opera as often -- our children enjoy the ballet immensely -- but Simon Callow's book reminds me of how much I love Wagner and how beautiful his music is.  It is a detailed description of Wagner's passion to create in spite of the tremendous difficulties in his way, many of which he put there himself, with others caused by the political turmoil of the time and his constant erysipelas (an infection of the upper layer of the skin).  But Wagner persisted, with many of his operas unperformed until fate intervened with the sudden emergence of King Ludwig II of Bavaria as a patron and, as Callow says, "Wagner knew better than most how to recognize the intervention of fate." Though to some exten Wagner remained his own worst enemy he finally achieved recognition and his operas gradually began to become regularly performed, "for Wagner, it was if his lifelong dream of the artist's place in the scheme of things had at last become a reality."

Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

 I'm always looking for movies that my young daughter, my older son, my fastidious wife and I can all enjoy; we all enjoyed Gentelmen Prefer Blondes, though for somewhat different reasons: my wife Susan enjoyed some of the wit and the performances of Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, my son Gideon particularly liked the humor of Charles Lederer's script, my daughter Victoria loved the art direction of Lyle Wheeler and the costumes by Travilla, and I liked the film particularly for the choreography of Jack Cole and the direction of Howard Hawks, whose work has fascinated me ever since I read the book about Hawks by Robin Wood that came out in 1968, the same year I first saw Citizen Kane.

Of course Wood did not much care for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes because it did not conform to Wood's view at the time that art (and he considered Hawks's films art) should show a moral interest in life as well as being well-structured, a view strongly influenced by British critic F.R. Leavis, whose courses Wood took at Cambridge.  As far as I know Wood did not write about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes after he moved to Canada, came out as gay, and became interested in Marxism, psychoanalysis and structuralism, but I feel fairly certain his view of the film shifted, especially since the film contains strong homoerotic elements: Jane Russell sings "Anyone Here for Love" (by Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson) while male Olympians cavort around her in skimpy bathing suits and ignore her; at the end of the film as Russell and Marilyn Monroe emerge in wedding dresses together they look as if they would prefer to marry each other than the schlubs (Elliot Reid and Tommy Noonan) they've chosen for sex (Russell) and money (Monroe). 

A kind word here about Marilyn Monroe.  In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and some of the other films in which she appeared she reminds one of Stepin Fetchit, i.e., she effectively pretends to be something of a empty-headed sex kitten in order to exploit the considerable gullibility of men, in the same way Stepin Fetchit faked his laziness to get his way with white men.  Hawks's films, of course, are full of formidable women (Lauren Bacall, Angie Dickinson, Katherine Hepburn, Paula Prentiss, etc.) undermining the partriarchy. 

Andrew Stone's Highway 301 (1950)

 Highway 301 is a terrific and kinetic crime film, the first such film Andrew Stone made after starting out with innocuous musicals and comedies.  Although in some ways it looks like a film noir (deserted rainswept streets at night) it lacks the fatalism and moral ambiguity of that genre; it's more a gangster film in the Warner Brothers tradition, as the police track down the Tri-State Gang, led by obvious psychopath Steve Cochran.  There is no backstory of how the gang came together, they just move from one robbery to another in three different states, and there are few details of how they choose their jobs. Cochran has no scruples about shooting his girlfriend (Aline Towne) in the back when she starts to object to his crimes.  The first part of the film is devoted to the gang's crimes and the second part to the gang's attempt to kill Gaby Andre in the hospital after Cochran plugs her in a taxi when she tries to escape the gang after her lover, gang member Robert Webber, is killed by the police (he told her he was a salesman).  With the help of cinematographer Carl Guthrie and his high-contrast black-and-white photography and editor Owen Marks, Stone (who also wrote the screenplay) keeps this programmer moving quickly without skimping on the suspencse.  Like other crime films of this period (Call Northside 777 in 1948, The Phenix City Story in 1955) the film has a narration as well, in this case an introduction by the govenors of three states and brief  comments at the end by Edmund Ryan, who plays a police sergeant in the film, that "you can't be kind to congenital criminals." 

James Whale's Waterloo Bridge (1931)

 Whale's overall career reflects the stylistic ambitions and dramatic disappointments of an expressionist in the studio-controlled Hollywood of the thirties.                                                                   --  Andrew Sarris

Although Whale is known today mostly for his horror films (Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Old Dark House), which are effectively stylish, he also directed a number of other beautiful films of love and fatalism that are not so well known:  The Kiss Before the Mirror, The Great Garrick, Showboat and Waterloo Bridge among them.

Waterloo Bridge is a pre-code film about a soldier on leave, Roy (played by Douglass Montgomery) who meets a woman, Myra (beautifully played by Mae Clark) on Waterloo Bridge during an air raid and falls in love with her.  Myra is a chorus girl who has turned to prostitution to survive but she hates herself for it and won't accept financial help from Roy.  Roy tricks Myra into meeting his family when they take a trip to the country and Myra confesses to Roy's mother before leaving immediately for London.  Roy finds Myra again on the Waterloo Bridge just before leaving for the battlefield and they plan to marry when he returns; as Myra heads home on the bridge she is killed by a bomb.

Whale made this eloquent film on a low budget with a number of gritty sets that evoke London durning WWI, in which Whale had been a British Infantry officer.  It reminds one of Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958) in its evocation of how brief love can be in turbulent times. Whale handles his small cast beautifully (which also includes Bette Davis as Roy's sister) with a script by Benn Levy and Tom Reed based on Robert Sherwood's play and cinematography by veteran Arthur Edeson.

 

A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George

The Village was surrounded by woods, by the upward slope of meadow, by the feeling of absolute security and peace.  Once St. Catherine's bells ceased ringing, the birds took up, tittering from rooftops and trees.  Somewhere, a fire had been lit and woodsmoke, just the ghost of its fragrance, was like a whisper in the air.  It was hard to believe that three weeks past, a mile from out of town, a man had been decapitated by his only daughter.                                                                                                   -- Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance (Bantam, 1988)

This is the first (of 21 so far) of George's series of detective novels about Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner Dective Sergeant Barbara Havers of Soctland Yard, as well as Lynley's girlfriend Helen Clyde, forensic scientist Simon St. James and his wife Deborah (who was once Lynley's lover).  It's 400 pages long and somwhat unusual in the genre, first of all because the murderer is not in doubt and, secondly, George devotes an unusual amount of time to the private lives of the detectives and their personal responses to the criminal behavior they investigate.  George writes well, with a precise vocabulary and intense psychological insight into all the characters of the small town of Keldale, starting with the priest who brings the case to Scotland Yard.  As an American George is fascinated by the class divides in England, contrasting the upper-class Lynley with the working-class Havers as well as the insular town of Keldale with cosmopolitan London.

Hong San-soo's Claire's Camera (2017)

 Hong San-soo has made two or three films a year for the last twenty years and all of the ones I have seen (about a third of his output) have been lovely examples of how men and women interact with each other, as friends, lovers, co-workers, etc. and all Hong's films are made with low budgets (usually around $100,000) and minimal crews.  Claire's Camera was filmed in Cannes and stars Isabelle Huppert as Claire, a French photographer, and Kim Min-hee as Jeon Manhee, former marketing associate who was fired for reasons her boss won't explain (we find out later that they had the same lover) who meet there and become friends.  Much of the film consists of static two-shots with an occasional zoom as we see and hear conversations about work, relationships and personal philosophy, much of which is spoken in English, and see the body language that alludes to things not spoken. Bresson and Rohmer are obvious influences on Hong, though his films are very personal views of art and artists in South Korea. 

Bert Glennon's Girl of the Port (1930)

Readers of this blog know the esteem I have for Turner Classic Movies, where I recently saw Girl of the Port, a lively film of the early sound era.  It is directed by Bert Glennon, who directed eleven films in the early days of sound and then became one of the great cinematographers, working with John Ford, Billy Wilder, Raoul Walsh and other top directors.  At 69 minutes and with a limited amount of sets Girl of the Port is a lively film about the chorus girl Josie (Sally O'Neil) who flees to the Fiji Islands to work in a bar.  She is lusted after by McEwen (played by Mitchell Lewis), who promotes white supremacy but is actually a "half-caste" himself.  Josie fights off McEwen with the help of dipsomaniac Jimmy (Reginald Sharland), a victim of flame-throwers in WWI whom Josie nurses back to health.  The dialogue (by Beulah Marie Dix) is snappy -- "you can't confuse love with gratitude, they're like champagne and Ovaltine" -- and director Glennon maintains a tense and somewhat claustrophobic visual style with the help of cinematographer Leo Tover, who would later work with some of the same directors as Glennon did.

William K. Howard's The Squeaker (1937)

In his book American Cinema 1929-1968 (E.P. Dutton) Andrew Sarris put William K. Howard in the category of "subjects for further research" and, as far as I am able to find out, there has not yet been any significant further research, perhaps because, as Sarris says, "Unfortunately, Howard's films do not display the degree of talent necessary to overcome the problem of a difficult temperament."  At this point the one movie Howard is known for is The Power and the Glory (1933), with a flashback structure and narrative that is considered to be a significant influence on Citizen Kane. The Squeaker is based on a novel and play by Edgar Wallace, a prolific writer of so-called "thrillers" who died in 1932; Edgar's son Bryant wrote the screenplay.  The music is by Miklos Rozsa, then at the beginning of his career (he wrote the score for Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity in 1944) and the cinematography by George Perinal, who later worked regularly with Otto Preminger.

The Squeaker is a too genteel melodrama presented by the tasteful Alexander Korda in England and starring Edmund Lowe (who was in the stage version) and Ann Todd, although the film only truly comes alive when Tamara Desni dances and sings Ted Berkman's torch songs "He's Gone" and "I Can't Get Along Without You."  Otherwise it's routine intrique, as Lowe plays a disgraced Scotland Yard dipsomaniac who is trying to find "the squeaker," a fence who turns in crooks when they don't accept his terms,  and at the same time Lowe is making love to Ann Todd.