Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff

On their arrival in hilly Ithaca it had been decided that a car would be a necessity, despite the excellent public buses.  "One of us had better learn to drive," went the thinking; Vladimir appears to have been relieved that it was not he.  Vera knew her husband's peccadilloes as well as his capabilities -- when he provided an address it was almost guaranteed to be an approximate or obsolete one -- and she continues to worry about his health through the fall.  She had looked into driving instruction in New York; she appears to have been eager to take the wheel.

-- Stacy Schiff, Vera (Random House, 1999)

Vera is a detailed and moving story about a relationship that was a marriage, a partnership and, as Schiff says, a brain-bridge that lasted more than fifty years.  Vladimir did the teaching and the writing; Vera did the typing, the editing, the inspiring and the bill-paying and paperwork.  When Vladimir was teaching and fell ill Vera would step in and take over his classes.  When Lolita was a commercial success (after Vera had stopped Vladimir from burning the manuscript) Vera took charge of all the letter-writing and translations (she knew four languages).  They went hunting for butterflies together and seldom were separated.  The book is fascinatingly full of the details of their lives, from their meeting and marriage in Germany in 1925 to their years in America (1940-1961) and their final years in Switzerland, Vladimir dying in 1977 and Vera in 1991.  The New York Times headline to her obituary read "Vera Nabokov, 89, Wife, Muse, and Agent."

Raoul Walsh's Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N.,1951

The Walshian hero is less interested in the why or the how than in the what.  He is always plunging into the unknown, and he is never too sure what he will find there.

--Andrew Sarris

Raoul Walsh's film, I have been told by Susan, is fairly close to the spirit and the plots of C.S. Forester's eleven Hornblower novels, though it is unclear how much Forester contributed to the screenplay; the credits say "adapted by C.S. Forester", though three other screenwriters are also credited.  In any case Gregory Peck makes an excellent Horatio Hornblower; he's taciturn but shows his feeling through facial expressiveness and the entries in his logbook.  Hornblower returns from the sea to find his wife had died after giving birth to their son and he reads a letter his wife wrote; we hear her voice as the camera slowly pans the furniture of their living room; they had only been together "for fifteen months in fifteen years."  Hornblower feels not only sadness but guilt for falling in love with his passenger Lady Barbara on his way home.

The film takes place during the Napoleonic Wars in 1807 and was filmed in France and England, with superb art direction by Thomas Morahan (he had done Hitchcock's Under Capricorn in 1949), cinematography by Guy Green, with beautiful blues of sky, sea and Hornblower's coat, and a rousing (if sometimes obvious) score by Robert Farnon.  The battles at sea are impressively choreographed by Walsh, with some of the most effective use of miniatures I have ever seen, with editing by veteran Jack Harris. Walsh demonstrates once again his ability to combine spectacle with intimacy.

Kenneth Longeran's Margaret (2011)

 It is the blight man was born for, 

It is Margaret you long for.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Now that I've seen the extended version of Longeran's Margaret I'm impressed with the multi-layered beauty of the film.  The essential story of Lisa (Anna Paquin) trying to deal with the death of a woman, Monica (Allison Janey) who was crossing the street and was hit and killed by a bus because teenager Paquin distracted the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) is also a complex story of New York post-9/11.  The extended version fills in some narrative gaps about Lisa's relationship with her divorced mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron), her teacher Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon) and Monica's friend Emily (Jeannie Berlin), as Lisa tries to deal with her grief and guilt about the death of Monica.  At one point private-school-student Lisa travels to Bay Ridge to confront the bus driver at his home and get him to admit his role in Monica's death, only to annoy the driver, who is worried about losing his job and his ability to support his family, emphasizing the gulf between the classes in New York.

The film is the most operatic film I've seen since the films of Sergio Leone, with its heightened emotion, its beautiful score by Nico Muhly and its use of actual operas at Lincoln Center, especially Joan and Lisa dissolving in tears at The Tales of Hoffman. Margaret is rather jagged -- more like life as it is lived and the result of Longeran's detailed script, which is followed closely in the extended version.  Longeran's use of sound is innovative and fascinating, as he often does not separate completely the sound of conversation from other conversations going on around it.  Cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski's color cinematography captures the complex beauty of New York and its denizens and motor vehicles, with effective "pillow shots", cutaways that don't serve a literal narrative purpose but capture a hemmed-in quality of buildings, especially skyscrapers.

The Burglar by David Goodis (1953

"I wanted to be near you.  I wanted you and I wanted you to want me.  But you didn't want me, you never wanted me, you never will.  I've had a lousy time, I've gone through nights when I've torn pillows apart with my teeth, so hungry for you I wanted to smash down the wall and break into your room.  You knew it, Nat.  Don't tell me you didn't know it."

--Gladden to Nat in The Burglar (Lion, 1953).  

When I saw Truffaut's film Tirez sur la pianiste in the 60's I noticed it was based on a novel by David Goodis, which I was finally able to track down in those pre-internet days, and gradually was able to find most of Goddis's eighteen novels.  In 2012 The Library of America published five of those novels, including The Burglar, which was made into a movie in 1956, directed by Paul Wendkos (I wrote about the film on Dec. 17 of last year).  The novel is bleak and downbeat, as most of Goodis's novel were, reeking of the sexual frustration, violence and working class desperation of 1950's America.  It's about a gang of burglars led by Nat and the girl Gladden, who had been with Nat since her father taught Nat how to burgle and who was eventually killed in a botched heist.  The gang operates in and around Philadelphia, where Goodis lived and which he knew well.  Gladden leaves the mob for Atlantic City and is manipulated by a crooked cop while Nat is manipulated by the cop's girlfriend.  Eventually the gang and the crooked cop fight over the emeralds and everyone ends up dead, the emeralds scattered on an Atlantic City beach.

Much of the novel consists of Nat's inner thoughts about his life, his burglaries, his partners, and Gladden, who he tries to save from his life on the run but only ends up dragging her down (literally, into the depths of the ocean) with him.  "Nothingness glided in.  He was in the center of nothingness, taken into it, churned by it, going down in it, knowing the feeling of descending."

Norman Foster's Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937)

There were eight Mr. Moto films, starring Peter Lorre, a Hungarian who portrayed the Japanese Mr. Moto, and six of them were directed by Norman Foster, who was switching from acting -- he was superb in John Ford's Pilgrimage in 1933 -- to directing; he also was a co-writer of the screenplay for Think Fast, Mr. Moto.  The film character was rather different than the one writer John P. Marquand had created (see my post of Nov. 14 2020).  In this first film of the series Mr. Moto's character is rather ambiguous, even throwing a spy overboard on his trip by boat from San Francisco to China and using judo violently in his confrontations with the bad guys who are shipping drugs to the United States. The film is barely more than an hour long (fairly standard for a B film) but moves swiftly, with the help of a White Russian nightclub singer (she sings "I'm a Shy Violet") , played by Virginia Field, and Moto's Asian helper, played by Lela Liu.  The crisp black-and-white cinematography is by veteran Harry Jackson and director Foster, who had spent much time abroad, created an effective Asian atmosphere on a small budget.

The Nutcracker 1993, directed by Emile de Ardolino

 Since we couldn't go to The Nutcracker this year we watched, on DVD, the film version by Emile de Ardolino, "starring" Macaulay Culkin and danced by The New York City Ballet.  I would have preferred seeing the NYC Ballet version that was taped last year but that was only shown online and our TV is not a "smart" TV that can connect with the internet; for my comments on the four times we have seen the City Ballet version please see my posts of Dec.24 2015. Dec. 27 2017, Dec. 28 2018, Dec.26 2019 (we have the DVD because our daughter was ill in 2016).

de Ardolino's direction and Culkin's star turn are the worst things in the production, made to be seen in movie theatres.  de Ardolino's experience with recorded ballet was limited to TV, where he directed dances with small casts.  In the DVD he cuts too much, inserting numerous disorienting close-ups and overhead shots, causing confusion and disorientation.  Culkin apparently had some dance experience but doesn't show it here; apparently he was cast in the hope of getting some viewers who aren't as interested in seeing ballet dancing.  The first act is particularly confusing, not helped by a narrator who doesn't narrate much but does lessen the mysteries somewhat, interfering with our own understanding.  And the first act is truncated, not showing all of the beautiful dancing of the adults and the children and interrupting what there is of it with annoying close-ups. 

The second act is an improvement, especially when there are only one or two performers and the movie limits (not enough) the cutting, though when we see the youngest students in the angels segment de Ardolino has to show all the faces in close-up, subtracting from the gliding movement of the choreography.  The best dancing in the film is the pas de deux of the Sugarplum Fairy and her Cavalier (Darci Kistler and Damian Woetzel), beautiful Balanchine choreography beautifully danced. 

This DVD of The Nutcracker is, I suppose, better than nothing this year; it does make one even more eager to see it live in 2021.

Three Crime Novels

 1. Deal Breaker by Harlan Coben.  I read Deal Breaker (Dell, 1995) because I had liked two TV series on Netflix with which Coben had been involved -- The Stranger (from his novel) and Safe (which he produced) -- with their emotional and ingenious plots.  Deal Breaker is not particularly emotional but it is ingenious and sometimes funny, one of a series where sports agent Myron Bolitar becomes something of a detective, in this case when one of his stars plans to marry and his intended disappears.  Myron is helped by his partner Winsdor Horne Lockwood III, a black belt in Tae Kwan Do (Myron and Win often attend classes in the middle of their sleuthing).  The story moves slickly and quickly, with a predictable ending (something to which I do not object).

2. The Mad Hatter Mystery by John Dickson Carr (1933, recently republished by Penzler Publisher).  Carr was an American who was an expert on locked room mysteries and wrote twenty-four mysteries with his brilliant sleuth Dr. Gideon Fell.  On Dec. 2 last year I wrote about another Dr. Fell mystery (Carr wrote twenty-four of them) and in that, as well as The Mad Hatter Mystery, it is somewhat unclear as to whether Dr. Fell knew who the murderer was or was simply skilled at extracting confessions in the manner of Chesterton's Father Brown (Fell's appearance is supposedly based on Chesterton).  In the manner of many English mysteries of the time (Carr lived in England most of his life) there is an effective evocation of London and its inclement  weather as well as a map of the murder location and many red herrings.

3. I was impressed with Wendy Lesser's Scandinavian Noir (see my post of Oct. 16  last year) and am now re-reading Wahloo and Sjowall; The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Pantheon 1969, translated by Joan Tate), their second Martin Beck novel.  In this one Beck has to cut short his vacation to travel to Budapest, where a Swedish journalist disappeared.  While snooping around he is assaulted by friends of the journalist who were in league with him to smuggle drugs.  Beck is helped by the Hungarian police and finally solves the case by his obsession with detail, in this case the items in the journalist's suitcase, which had been left behind in a Budapest hotel.  Too much has been made about the innovative nature of the Martin Beck books -- the two Gideon Fell books I posted about show a similar grayness about good and evil -- but they are impressively written and translated and give considerable credit to Beck's comrades in the complicated hierarchy of the Swedish police.