Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954)

 It was by now perfectly clear that my previous pattern of life was gone forever.  I can take a hint from the fates.  What new pattern would in due course emerge I had no means of telling.  Meanwhile there were certain problems which would undoubtedly give me no rest until I had at least made some attempt to solve them.                                                                                                                                                            -- Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (The Viking Press, 1954)

Under the Net was Murdoch's first novel, written in the first person and narrated by writer and sponger Jake Donaghue, it is often quite funny, taking place in the twentieth century with considerable influence of such eighteenth century picaresque novels as those of Tobias Smollett, author of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1754).  Murdoch's novel can be called The Adventures of Jake Donaghue, as the story follows Jake from woman to woman and from England to France in his search for adventure, love, friendship and commercial success as a writer and translator.

Murdoch's other influences below the narrative surface include Raymond Queneau (to whom the book is dedicated), Samuel Beckett, Sir Isaac Newton, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Shakespeare.  Jake is in love with singer and mime Anna Quentin, Anna is besotted with film producer Hugo Befounder, Hugo is besotted with Anna's sister Sadie, an actress, and Sadie is besotted with Jake; things get rather crazy, as Jake kidnaps a dog film star, Mr. Mars, owned by Sammy, a bookie friend of Sadie's. Jake is short of money and takes a job as an orderly, where he runs into Hugo, a patient with whom he had collaborated on a book without Hugo understanding what was going on, and Jake's best friend Finn departs for Ireland.  Confused and penniless at the end of the novel, Jake writes:  I wrote the cheque.  I reckoned that this left me with just about as much cash to my name as I had had when I left Earls Court Road at the beginning of this story.  I sighed a little over this, and for a moment the spectral fortunes which I had been so near to winning rose about me in a whirl until I was blinded in a snowstorm of five-pound notes.  But the tempest subsided; and I knew that I had no deep regrets.  Like a fish that swims calmly in deep water, I felt all about me the secure supporting pressure of my own life.  Ragged, inglorious, and apparently purposeless, but my own.

Turner Classic Movies April 2022

 It is nice to finally get away from the white elephants of March's Oscar-winning films to some termite films (to use Manny Farber's terms) in April.  

April 1 Stanley Donen's charming musical Give a Girl a Break (1953)

April 4  Andre De Toth's film noir Pitfall (1949), Yasujiro Ozu's An Inn in Tokyo (1935), Orson Welles's baroque The Trial (1963)

April 5 Raoul Walsh's Northern Pursuit (1947), Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), John M. Stahl's superb weepie Imitation of Life (1934)

April 6 Jacques Demy's marvelous French musical The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

April 7 Raoul Walsh's sharply political A Lion is in the Streets (1953) and Nicholas Ray's Wind Across the Everglades (1958)

April 8 Edgar Ulmer's fascinating low-budget science-fiction Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)

April 9 Ernst Lubitsch's wonderful Ninotchka (1939)

April 10 Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (1955)

April 11 Chaplin's elegant A Woman of Paris (1923), Jean-luc Godard's Breathless (1960), Jacques Tourneur's film noir Out of the Past (1947) and Joseph H. Lewis's dark Gun Crazy (1950)

April 12 John Ford's great Western Stagecoach (1939)

April 14 Blake Edwards's downbeat Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), John Huston's terrific caper film The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1948)

April 18 Roberto Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) and Robert Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)

April 19 Two great films directed by Raoul Walsh They Died with Their Boots On (1941) and Objective Burma (1945)

April 20 Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1956)

April 25 Allan Dwan's pre-code incisive view of small-town America Man to Man (1930) and Raoul Walsh's Gentleman Jim (1942)

April 26 Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938)

April 27 Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956)

April 29 John Ford's The Last Hurrah (1958)

Edgar Selwyn's The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931)

 Edgar Selwyn made eight films from 1929 to 1934 before returning to the theatre, having been recruited from Broadway at the beginning of the sound era; both The Sin of Madelon Claudet and Skyscraper Souls (1932 ) show Selwyn's interest in making movies instead of filmed theatre.  At one point Selwyn and cinematographer Oliver Marsh toggle back and forth between Madelon (Helen Hayes) on her way down through prostitution and theft while her son Larry (Robert Young) is on his way up as a doctor, his education paid for by his mother whom he thinks is dead.  Selwyn also uses effective tracking shots to emphasize Claudet's movement through different environments, from penniless life with an artist through marriage to a wealthy con man (Lewis Stone) to prison and prostitution after she gives birth out of wedlock (yes, this is a pre-code film).

This was Helen Hayes's first film and she is the focus throughout, as her lover deserts her when he travels to America, after which she gives birth to a son whom she leaves with friends when she marries Carlo Boretti (Lewis Stone) who shoots himself ("give me my overcoat," where his gun is) when he is arrested at the opera and Claudet is sentenced to ten years in prison because the authorities thinks she must have known about her husband's activities.

This is a very class-conscious film, as Claudet won't reveal herself to her son because she is afraid her prison record will keep him from getting a medical education, the film being narrated in flashback by a doctor (Jean Hersholt) who could only get a job in orphanages because of his lack of social position, who convinces Larry's wife not to leave him and helps to find a place for Madelon Claudet to live without ever telling Larry that she is his mother.

Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)

 I find this film beautiful because it gives me the impression that the two leading characters, Ernest and his Lisbeth, with their gentle Preminger-like faces, manage, by shutting their eyes with a kind of passionate innocence to the bombs falling around them in Berlin, to get deeper into themselves than any other characters before them.                                                                                                                       

--Jean-Luc Godard (translated by Susan Bennett) on A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Screen, volume 12, issue 2)

It is a story very close to my concerns, especially the brevity of happiness.                                                     --Douglas Sirk on A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Sirk on Sirk, Viking Press1972)

A Time to Love and a Time to Die is Sirk's penultimate film and one of his most beautiful, with its screenplay by playwright Orin Jannings (from Erich Maria Marque's novel), music by Miklos Rozsa and widescreen cinematography by Russell Metty, who photographed a number of Sirk's films. Under the credits is a mood of foreboding, as the buds of Spring are gradually destroyed by the snow of Winter, producing a feeling of fatalism that is occasionally interrupted by brief moments of happiness.   

Ernst Graeber (John Gavin) is on the Russian-German front in 1944 as the Germans are in retreat, shooting civilians as they go.  Graeber eventually gets a brief furlough to his home in Hamburg and meets Elizabeth Cruse (Liselotte Pulver) as he looks for his missing parents, Elizabeth being the daughter of his parents' doctor.  Elizabeth and Ernst fall in love while hiding underground during the constant bombings.  Graeber continues to search for his parents while Elizabeth tries to find out what happened to her father, arrested by the Gestapo for suggesting that the Germans could not win the war.  Ernst and Elizabeth decide to get married on the last day of his furlough, spend their wedding night in a bombed-out art museum and the next morning Ernst heads back to the front. 

This technicolor film has a very limited palette, mostly blacks, greys and browns, with the only bright colors coming from the fires and explosions that are turning the whole city of Hamburg into rubble and the only blue coming from the always-threatening sky.  Sirk effectively uses the awkwardness of Gavin and Pulver to convey their youth, their brief moments of happiness (always interrupted by bombs) and their fatalism, underscored by Rozsa's melancholy music.

Kitty Green's The Assistant (2019)

The Assistant reminds one of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23. quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles from 1975 in its quotidian minimalist style as well as its plot of a woman essentially all alone in a patriarchal society.  Julia Gardner (of Ozark and Inventing Anna) is Jane, who has been working for five weeks at the bottom of the pecking order in a film company in Tribeca with a boss obviously based on Harvey Weinstein.  She sweeps up, answers the phone (including calls from the boss's wife trying to find out where he is), getting coffee and sandwiches and even escorting the boss's new mistress to a hotel.  She gets suspicious of one of the boss's new hires and goes to report the situation to a Human Resources executive (played by Matthew Macfadyen) who defends the boss and tells her she has nothing to worry about because "you're not his type," i.e., he acts like any other Human Resources executive I've ever dealt with or heard about.  Jane meekly returns to her office and teaches the new hire how to use the phones. 

Jane is treated condescendingly by everyone in the office the way such employees often are, especially if they are female.  She calls her father at the end of a long day and says things are okay and she is working towards being a producer.  Writer and director Kitty Green and her cinematographer Michael Latham portray accurately one day in the life of an employee who is alone in New York even when she is in an office full of people and Julia Gardner does a superb job of showing what she thinks and feels by her movements and expressions, without having to say a word.  

Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, The Conservative Establishment. and the Courts to Set Him Free by Sarah Weinman

 Edgar Smith spent most of his adult life trying to game the criminal justice system.  He was determined, deliberate, canny, and manipulative.  For several years, he got what he wanted and more:  freedom, celebrity, a career as a best-selling author.  He had the friendship of William F. Buckley, who went against his own conservative ideology to champion and advocate for Smith's innocence.  But then he squandered it all.                                                                                                                                                                      -- Sarah Weinman, Scoundrel (HarperCollins, 2022)

In 1957 Edgar Smith was convicted of murdering fifteen-year-old Victoria Zielinski in Ramsey, N.J. and sentenced to death.  While he was in prison William F. Buckley, Jr. read that Smith was having trouble getting copies of the conservative National Review, of which Buckley was editor.  Smith and Buckley started a correspondence and Buckley became convinced Smith was innocent and helped him raise money for appeals and put him in touch with editor Sophie Wilkins, who helped him with his book Brief Against Death.  The appeals were eventually successful in convincing a district court that Smith's confession was coerced and ordered a new trial.  An agreement was made that if Smith would confess to the murder he would be freed for time served, 15 years on death row. Immediately when freed in 1971 Smith was driven to Manhattan to appear on Buckley's TV show Firing Line (the show was in two parts, both of which can now be seen on YouTube).  Smith moved to California as writing jobs dried up and in 1976 he stabbed Lefteriya Ozbun; she fought him off and escaped as Smith went on the lam and contacted Buckley, who contacted the FBI.  Smith was sentenced to life and died in prison in 2017 at the age of eighty-three.

Weinman tells this story in the same effective matter-of-fact way she did the story of The Real Lolita (see my blog entry of Oct. 7, 2018).  She quotes extensively from the triangular correspondence of Smith, Wilkins and Buckley, with Smith coming across as a clever manipulator of emotions, especially in his epistolary romance with Wilkins, who eventually caught on and spurned him.  Weinman lays out all the facts for us and lets us make up our own minds about the complex psychology of the relationships and whether there is any lesson to be learned here, other than that it is not always easy for justice to be well served. 

Film Journal

 The Card Counter (2021).  Another beautifully realized story of isolation, depression and attempts at redemption by writer/director Paul Schrader.  Like most of Schrader's movies this is Bressonian in its minimalist style (I highly recommend Schrader's book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer) and impressively played by Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish and Tye Sheridan in ugly casinos all over the country, with Isaac and Sheridan sharing painful memories of American soldiers torturing prisoners while the two plan ways to deal with the worst of the torturers. 

Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clerq (2013).  Nancy Buirski's film, originally done for the American Masters series on PBS) chronicles follows the life of NYC Ballet star and Balanchine's fourth wife through her dedication to ballet and her bout with polio at the age of 27, after which she would never walk again and devoted her life to teaching and philanthropy.  There is not enough film of La Clerq dancing but what is available is lovely, especially Jerome Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun and the last movement of Balanchine's Western Symphony, in both of which she is partnered with Jacques d'Amboise.

Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym (2010).  Another fascinating documentary by Wiseman, with no narration or identification of those who appear except, in this case, owner Richard Lord of Lord's gym in Austin, Texas.  There's a lot of training detail, especially the importance of footwork, reminding one of Wiseman's films about The Paris Opera Ballet and American Ballet Theatre.  The gym is open to all sexes and all ages and we get a number of interesting discussions about why people are there, almost all of whom do not intend to become professionals.  

Denis Villeneuve's Sicario (2015).  Another film about American agencies battling the Mexican drug cartel, with the usual theme of how one has to be as ruthless as the gangs in order to bring them down.  There is one effectively choreographed gun battle at a traffic jam on the Mexico/U.S. border but otherwise it is mostly confusion about who is doing what to whom and why.  Villeneuve went on to do the new version of Dune while writer Taylor Sheridan is now working mostly in television (Yellowstone and 1883).

The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly (2021)

It was said that anyone who wanted to know Los Angeles needed to drive Sunset Boulevard from Beginning to Beach.  It was the route by which a traveler would come to know everything that is L.A. : its culture and glories as well as its many fissures and failings.  Starting in downtown, where several blocks were renamed Cesar E. Chavez Avenue thirty years ago to honor the union and civil rights leader. the route took its travelers through Chinatown, Silver Lake, and Los Feliz before turning west and traversing Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and the Pacific Palisades, then finally hitting the Pacific Ocean.  Along the way, its four lanes moved through poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods, by homeless camps and mansions, passing iconic institutions of entertainment and education, cult food and cult religion.  It was the street of a hundred cities and yet it was all one city.                  -- Michael Connelly, The Dark Hours (Little, Brown and Company 2021)

This book is, among other things, a continuing paean to Los Angeles, that Michael Connelly began in 1992 with The Black Echo, the first book with his Harry Bosch character.  Detective Bosch is now retired and in The Dark Hours he is called on for help by detective Renee Ballard, who works the night shift and first appeared in Connelly's The Late Show in 2017. The pair work together unofficially to solve two serious crimes (rape and murder) while Ballard's official partner is lazy and uninterested.  Ballard in fact gets little help from her fellow cops, bogged down by Covid and morale lowered by Black Lives Matter. Ballard operates on little sleep and manages to trap serial rapists with luck, hard work and her willingness to ignore protocol and put herself in harm's way.  Connelly is some ways an heir to Raymond Chandler in his affection and detailed portrayal of the denizens and neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Kelly Reichardt's River of Grass (1994)

 Kelly Reichardt's River of Grass was her first film and she has stuck with her low-budget independence.  In my review of  Night Moves (5/27/21) I mentioned how she seemed effectively minimalist, almost Bressonian, in her approach, which is also true of this first feature, to some extent a critique of the "lovers on the run" genre (They Live by Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, et al.), as Cozy (played by Lisa Bowman) and Lee (Larry Fessenden) are not in love, do not seem capable of a crime, and are not very much on the run because they don't even have the money for the toll road that will take them out of Florida. The film was made on location in scuzzy parts of Florida even as they are being developed and paved over, vividly echoing the novels of John D. MacDonald, and has a marginally sympathetic view of slackers without jobs, mothers who don't know how to take care of their children and cops who prefer jazz drumming and can't keep track of their guns.

Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens

 The more you immerse yourself in the 1920's, a period of enormous creative dynamism but also of teeth-rattling instability, the more a single insight seems to animate nearly all the art and popular culture of that age:  that the world is a dangerous and unpredictable place, and in it each of us is alone.    -- Dana Stevens, Camera Man (Atria Books, 2022)

There seems to be a continuing interest in the films of Buster Keaton recently, starting with Peter Bogdanovich's documentary The Great Buster in 2018 and leading to the current schedule of Keaton films at New York's Film Forum and the recent books by Stevens and James Curtis.  I think there are at least two reasons for this:  one is the depressing state of contemporary movies and another is Keaton's modern existentialism and cinematic brilliance.  I vividly remember when Keaton's films were revived at the Elgin theatre in the 70's, the first chance for most of us to see this incredibly beautiful and intelligent work of Keaton's from the 1920's, lovely films that seem more modern than ever today.

Stevens does not go into analyzing the individual films to any significant extent -- many other books have done that -- instead she give us a detailed biography of Keaton's life and influences.  Keaton never had the detailed business sense of Chaplin and when sound came in Chaplin warned Keaton against signing with MGM, predicting accurately that Keaton would completely lose any independence. Stevens examines Keaton's MGM films, which started out well with The Cameraman in 1928 and then went quickly downhill until Keaton was fired in 1933 for drinking and unreliability.  Keaton eventually stopped drinking (with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, of which Stevens gives us a history) and then worked behind the scenes as a gagman, moving eventually to a circus and a successful stint in television. 

Stevens includes detailed portraits of Keaton's wives, F. Scott Fitzgerald's unhappy times at MGM, writer Robert Sherwood's positive reviews of Keaton's films in Life magazine, and Bert Williams, an influential Black comic and actor who influenced Keaton's work, as well as the members of Keaton's crew who worked with him on his independent production in the 20's. My one quibble about this fascinating book is that there is no index, though there are extensive source notes. 

Mark Cousins's The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018)

 I would still rank Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made, even if in 2012 the Sight and Sound poll of critics replaced at as no. 1(after fifty years of polls) with Hitchcock's Vertigo, certainly a great film but not at quite the level of Orson Welles's film.  There should be a new Sight and Sound poll soon and it is of some (marginal) interest if there will be changes.  Regardless of what any critics or directors say there will continue to be arguments about Welles's work in everything from theatre and radio to films, especially the ones he was still working on when he died in 1985.  I have dozens of books about Welles and his life and each of them has a different view of him, as I wait for the fourth and final volume of Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles.

Meanwhile, we have Mark Cousins's film The Eyes of Orson Welles, from 2018 and shown recently on Turner Classic Movies (which has also shown the fifteen-part Cousins film The Story of Film:  An Odyssey).  Cousins had the cooperation of Welles's daughter Beatrice in assembling the incredible number of drawings and paintings that Welles prepared for all the plays and movies he made as well as many he wanted to make but never did, for a considerable number of reasons.  Cousins draws some intelligent and some far-fetched relationships between the lines of Welles's drawings and the movement of, for instance, a cigarette between Welles and Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai; at one point Beatrice shows Mark an impressively dark painting that was Orson' s response to having the editing of Touch of Evil taken away from him.  Cousins is Irish and takes us to Ireland where Welles performed Shakespeare as a teen-ager, as well to the Moroccan sites where Welles's Othello was shot and other locations around the world used by Welles, in his life and his marriages as well as his films.