Joseph Losey's The Big Night (1951)

The Big Night was Losey's last American film (of five) before he left for exile in England, one step ahead of HUAC.  It's a corrosive view of one night in America where a son, John Drew Barrymore, looks for revenge on a well-known sportswriter who gave Barrymore's father a thrashing in a bar, as a dozen spectators watched.  It's a film noir of dark and lonely streets, grifters and dipsomaniacs, seedy nightclubs and bars, shot in crisp black-and-white by veteran cinematographer Hal Mohr.   Only after Barrymore shoots the sportswriter does Barrymore's father (Preson Foster) tell him that he had refused to marry the sportswriter's sister because he was still married to Barrymore's mother, who had left him and was still alive, contrary to what he had told Barrymore.

Barrymore's hunt for the sportswriter takes him to a boxing match, where he gets shaken down by a lowlife pretending to be a cop and hooks up with a dipso and his two female friends, one of whom tries unsuccessfully to hide Barrymore's gun.  Barrymore has a great deal to prove, after the local kids beat him up because he is carrying books, and he constantly seeks the approval of his father.  The America that Losey portrays is matter-of-factly anti-intellectual and racist.  At one point Barrymore hears an African-American (Mauri Leighton) sing a lovely version of "Am I Too Young?" in a nightclub and when he sees the singer on his way out he compliments her, telling her she is beautiful and she smiles until he adds, "even if you are..." and he leaves the sentence unfinished as her expression quickly turns to sadness.

Everyone in the film is lonely, for one reason or another, a regular theme of Losey's in his five American films as well as the English films, particularly those written by Harold Pinter:  The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971)

Lamont Johnson's One on One (1977)

I originally saw One on One when it came out in 1977 and was impressed by Lamont Johnson's direction, Robby Benson and Jerry Segal's (Benson's father) script and Donald Morgan's straight forward cinematography, though I did not care much for the Seals and Crofts songs.  I was nervous seeing it again but it actually holds up pretty well, especially the relationship between Benson, a scholarship basketball student at a Los Angeles college, and the estimable Annette O' Toole as his tutor and eventual lover.

All the corruption that makes college basketball (and other big time college sports) still so odious are there: the bullying coaches, the no-show jobs, the tutoring and the easy courses,  Benson is a naive guy from a small town and has trouble playing along; he is eventually asked to renounce his no-cut scholarship and refuses, even when the coach has other members of the team beat him up. Benson triumphs in the end, when the coach is left with no one else to put in the game and Benson scores the winning points.

Most of Lamont Johnson's films were made for television but he always came through when he had the chance to make a theatrical film with a good script, a good cast,  and a medium budget, including The Last American Hero (1973) and the Burt Lancaster Western Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981), also movies about triumph against difficult odds.

Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott

I like to think that Darwin might have recognized structural patterns in this long history of evolution and that it would have given him pleasure to see that the process of discovery did not travel in a straight line. a historical progression moving inexorably toward a final truth.  Instead, like the history of species as he understood it, the story of the discovery of natural selection is a story of meanderings and false starts, of outgrowths, adaptations, and atrophies, of movements backward as well as forward, of sudden jumps and accelerations and convergences.
--Rebecca Stott, The Secret History of Evolution (Spiegel and Grau, 2012)

We like to give credit to one person for inventions and discoveries:  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Edison invented electric light, Philo Farnsworth invented television, Darwin discovered natural selection.  In fact, all these guys had numerous predecessors and sometimes it depended on when one filed for a patent and when one published.  Darwin, for instance, rushed On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection to print in 1859 because Alfred Wallace was about to publish his book on the same subject, though Wallace's theories were developed after Darwin's

But even before Wallace and Darwin there were numerous scientists who came close to the same conclusions, often hampered and suppressed by the prejudices and power of the Catholic Church.  Rebecca Stott's book is both stylish and intelligent, as she lays out in fascinating detail all the amateurs and scientists who preceded Darwin -- to whom Darwin gave credit -- starting with Aristotle, who published The History of Animals in 344 BC, through Jahiz in 850, Leonardo in the 15th century, Plissy in the 16th century, Diderot in the 18th century and the increasing numbers in the 19th century: Lamarck, Coldstream, Grant, Chambers and Wallace.  Stott brings these seekers after knowledge vividly alive, not only for their discoveries but for their struggles against ignorance and prejudice and for their personal struggles with their health and finances.

Turner Classic Movies in December

Turner has its usual slate of Christmas movies in Dec. but it also has a number of films and their remakes, including three versions of Showboat (1929, 1936, 1951).  My favorites for Christmas are Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis, 1944 on the 24th, Going My Way, also 1944 on the 22nd and Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, 1940, on Dec. 1.

Dec. 3 has Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be,1942

On Dec. 6 is Sam Peckinpah's gritty Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia 1974

On Dec. 8 is John Ford's beautiful Three Godfathers and on Dec. 9 is Ford's Mogambo 1953

On Dec. 9 is the Preston Sturges/Mitch Leisen Remember the Night 1940.(see my post of Jan 3 of this year) and two versions of Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk's from 1959 and John Stahl's from 1934.

On Dec. 26 is Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939 and on the 27th is Sirk's All That Heaven Allows.

Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about films on Turner in Dec.

John Robertson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1920

"My present condition of mind is much inferior in strength and solidity to what might have been had I not given loose reins to my lustful appetites.  I have been ruined and enervated by a life of effeminacy and slothful indulgence."
John Coldstream, marine zoologist, 1830.  Quoted in Darwin's Ghosts:  The Secret History of Evolution, Rebecca Stott (Spiegel and Grau, 2012)

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" in 1886 it was the Victorian era, when scientists were often clergymen and doctors and struggled to reconcile ideas of God and man's nature, especially after the publication of Darwin's controversial Origin of the Species in 1859.  By 1920, when John Barrymore played Jekyll and Hyde in John Robertson's film, there had been several film versions of Stevenson's story and at this point there are over one hundred film versions, the best ones being Rouben Mamoulian's pre-code version with Frederic March in 1931 and Victor Fleming's 1941 version with Spencer Tracy (both of which will be shown on Turner Classic Movies in December) ; my own favorites are Roy Ward Baker's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor (1963).

John Robertson's 1920 version is fairly stagy, based, as most early versions were, on the 1886 stage play by Thomas Russell Sullivan, but it does have an extraordinary performance by John Barrymore, who changes from Jekyll to Hyde at first without makeup, though in later scenes grotesque makeup is used in dissolving from Jekyll to Hyde as Hyde descends into debauchery, ignoring his sweet fiancee (played by Millicent Carewe) for temptress Gina (Nita Naldi) and hanging out with prostitutes in opium dens.  Jekyll had made the mistake of thinking he could change to Hyde "without touching his soul," eventually running out of the drug he needs to change back.

John Farrow's The Unholy Wife (1957)

The Unholy Wife is a strange, sometimes ponderous sometimes beautiful, film; it's an attempted film noir in color, after the film noir had run its course with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly in 1955.  Australian-born director John Farrow had directed a number of rather impersonal films noirs (The Big Clock, 1948 and Where Danger Lives, 1950) and this is his penultimate film (he died in 1963 at the age of 58).  The Unholy Wife seems to be an attempt to move the film noir into the era of technicolor films, as Allan Dwan had started to do in 1956 with Slightly Scarlet, but things didn't quite jell:  British actress Diana Dors, method actor Rod Steiger, younger actor Tom Tryon and older actress Beulah Bondi seem to be in different worlds, with often mysterious motivations.  Add to this a priest, played by Arthus Franz, and some half-baked theology (Farrow was a Roman Catholic who had written books about popes and priests), a hard-boiled screenwriter for the film (Jonathan Latimer) and flashbacks within flashbacks and the results can be even more confusing than most films noirs.

Diana Dors, with her platinum blonde hair and her form-fitting suits in various colors (red, blue, pink) demonstrates an effective combination of sexuality and brains, ending up unrecognizable in prison with brown hair, streaked with gray, looking out a window one last time on her way to her execution for killing her mother-in-law, which she did not do (though she had killed her husband's business partner).  Dors leaves behind a young son whom Steiger (who had rescued Dors from a sordid life as a B-girl) adopts and begins to teach about grapes and the wine business that his immigrant grandfather had started.

The Unprofessionals by Julie Hecht

I had to learn that men were a kind of non-human species; they were like beings from outer space who needed a form of simple communication.
-- Julie Hecht, The Unprofessionals (Random House, 2003).

I've followed Hecht in Harper's and The New Yorker since her stories started appearing in the 1970's.  There is no question that she is a unique voice, observant and funny, sometimes cynical and misanthropic, often at odds with the modern world.  A little bit of her can go a long way, so it has taken me a while to read her novel, which turns out to be chapters that can stand on their own as short stories, tied together by the narrator's long relationship with a heroin addict.

Hecht's narrator seems to put more emphasis on what she doesn't like than what she does like, but I found in reading her novel that there is a great deal her narrator likes, even if much of it is disappearing, for reasons ranging from death to unprofessionalism, She seems to like Xanax, David Letterman (Hecht wrote a moving tribute to him when he retired from his late-night show), Elvis Presley, classical film (especially The Stranger, Shadow of a Doubt and The Red Shoes), some literature (especially Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman), Dr. Andrew Weil (the narrator is vegan), Armani jackets, buckwheat-hull pillows, et al.

The narrator's dislikes seem to be stronger than her likes, however, possibly because there is so much that is accepted uncritically in the contemporary world, including CNN, barking dogs, talc, filthy supermarkets, cable TV (the required box is ugly), the subway (for the noise alone), cordless phones, socializing (people all say the same thing), book clubs, marble rye, et al.

The Unprofessionals is sometimes quite funny but also rather tragic, as her addicted friend, who shared many of her cynical views, kills himself after numerous attempts at rehab. Only with this tragic end does the narrator realize how kind her friend had been, even if he had always remained a stranger.