Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

By the time Jackson was thirteen his mother was already dead of cancer, his sister had been murdered, and his brother had killed himself, helpfully leaving his body -- hanging from the light fixture -- for Jackson to find when he came home from school.  Jackson never got the chance to be selfish, to sprawl and make demands and fold his arms sarcastically.  And anyway, if he had, his father would have given him a good skelping.  Not that Jackson wished suffering on his son --God forbid -- but a little less narcissism wouldn't go amiss.
Kate Atkinson, Big Sky:  Little, Brown and Company,2019

Welcome back Jackson Brodie. This is Atkinson's fifth novel about private detective Brodie, and the first since 2010 (It would be helpful, but not necessary, to read the earlier ones first).   In between Brodie novels she has written novels that experiment with narrative conventions and she has gradually introduced those experiments into the Brodie novels.  Actually Brodie in Big Sky is only one of the many characters, including a group of golf buddies and their families, with the golfers running a sex trafficking ring.  And almost every character hears, in parentheses, someone in their head "talking" to them.  Brodie hears his former lover, Julia, while trying to take care of their teenage son Nathan and their dog Dido, Queen of Carthage.

There's a great deal to keep track of in this multi-layered novel, more a novel of human relationships than a strictly crime or private detective novel (what little detecting Brodie does -- mostly divorce work --leads him into trouble and is mostly unsuccessful), especially the relationships between spouses, between parents and children and between siblings and half-siblings.  Atkinson takes us in directions that lead to dead-ends and red herrings in strange parts of the East Coast of Yorkshire, where Brodie is now living, before the crimes are revealed, just as Laurence Stern and Tobias Smollett did.

Truth, in Jackson's experience, was often found skulking behind the lines. Sometimes, of course, that could be preferable to it charging you from the front with a bayonet.

Russell Rouse's The Fastest Gun Alive 1956

The Fastest Gun Alive is a terrific little Western, giving life to some cliched situations and standard characters.  In some ways this MGM film has something for everyone --  action, a complex love story, dancing teenagers, a little boy with a toy gun -- but director Russell Rouse, who only directed eleven films but also wrote some superb ones (especially D.O.A. in 1949), brings the characters and conflicts to vivid life in this film that takes place in 1889, as civilization is taking over the Wild West.

Glenn Ford plays George Temple, a frustrated storekeeper who has given up guns and alcohol for the sake of his wife (played by Jeanne Crain) and child on the way.  But he gets angry when his customers are always complaining and gets somewhat inebriated, deciding to show his ability with a gun to the townsfolk, who are suitably impressed with his ability to shoot silver dollars in the air.  Then bank robber Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford) rides into town with his gang, Taylor Swope (John Dehner) and Dink Wells (Noah Beery) while all the townspeople are in church.  Harold hears that there is a fast gun in town and threatens to burn the town down unless Temple comes out to draw against him.  Temple feels he has no choice but to save the town, even though he has again given up his guns for the sake of his family,  Temple slowly walks into the street from the church and he and Harold shoot it out.

Rouse and his co-writer Frank Gilroy (on whose story the film is based) bring humanity to all the characters,  Temple failed to confront his father's killer while Harold has been trying to prove he's the best ever since his wife ran off with a faro dealer. Swope and Wells leave town ahead of a posse (they had killed the sheriff's brother in another town while robbing a bank) while Harold only cares about proving he's faster than Temple.

This impressive psychological Western was photographed in beautiful black-and-white by George Folsey, who started in films in 1920, with an intelligent score by Andre Previn.  Throughout Rouse uses unusual shots from high angles, suggesting that there might be a higher power watching.  The film starts with the outlaws riding over mountains and past rock formations, identifying them throughout with the wildness of the West, contrasted with the town and its symbols of civilization:  stores and a church.

John Sturges's The People Against O'Hara (1951)

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I, generally, consider the director the major creative force on a film.  In this day and age where most movies are, to a greater or lesser extent, meretricious one tends to notice more the major contributions to classical films of other artists.  I have, for instance, always enjoyed movies where Ennio Moriconne wrote the music or John Alton did the cinematography, as he did for The People Against O'Hara.  Alton demonstrated a mastery of chiaroscuro in several black-and-white films for Anthony Mann (Raw Deal, 1948; T-Men, 1947; Reign of Terror, 1949) and uses it most effectively in The People Against O'Hara, directed by the sometimes workman-like John Sturges.

There are enough elements of the film noir in The People Against O'Hara to qualify it for that genre, even if those elements -- fatalism, confusion, compromised authority -- are played down in this MGM film the way they would not be at RKO or Warner Brothers.   There is even a small part for a femme fatale -- played by Yvette Duguay-- the wife of a mobster who is the alibi for O'Hara, who is too afraid of her husband to admit their relationship.  Spencer Tracy, who was 51 when this film was made, had been playing old men for years.  His dipsomania (in the film, that is) had made him turn from criminal law to civil but he decides to make a last stand to help the O'Hara family; the Irish in this film are mostly good guys, the Italians are the bad guys.

When Tracy slips back into drinking he bribes a witness in the trial and when he returns home to his loving daughter (played intelligently by Diana Lynn) the shadows of the railing on his stairs reflect on him rather like the bars of a cell.  The film begins with an example of light and dark -- a murder viewed ambiguously in the light of a doorway in the distance of a dark street --and continuously sees the streets of New York as very much like the characters in the film, a combination of light and shadow.

Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport-Hines

It was at this time [1937] that a Cambridge luminary, the novelist E.M. Forster, wrote a credo that has been lampooned, truncated in quotation and traduced by subsequent writers. His remarks in their entirety carry a message of individualism, conscientious judgement and anti-totalitarianism that might have been a text for Whitehall [the center of government for the United Kingdom] values in the 1930's.  "One must be fond of people," said Forster, "and trust them if one is not to make a mess of one's life, and therefore it is essential that they should not let one down.  They often do."  Writing in 1939, when totalitarian nationalism was rampant, Forster continued: "Personal relationships are despised today.  They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as products of a time of fair weather which is now passed, and we are urged to get rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some movement or cause instead.  I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."
--Richard Davenport-Hines, Enemies Within (William Collins 2018)

I was a graduate student in art history in 1978 when Margaret Thatcher announced that Anthony Blunt (an expert on Poussin, one of my favorite painters) was the fifth of the Cambridge spies; we mostly shrugged our shoulders, just as I did when James Weinstein, founder of "In These Times," said he thought Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were guilty because he would have done the same thing if he had been offered the chance.  Davenport-Hines's book is a bit of a slog in the beginning, as he admirably traces communist spies in England back to the Russian revolution and analyzes the motives and actions of Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby, as well as many others.  

Backed up with an extraordinary amount of evidence and thoughtful reflection Davenport concludes that it was gender loyalty more than class loyalty (the spies were mostly middle class) that caused co-workers in MI5 to give each other the benefit of the doubt; married women were banned from the civil service until 1946 and the Diplomatic Service until 1973, though there were some outstanding exceptions who received waivers. The fact that a couple of the spies were gay and/or dipsomaniacs is irrelevant to their motives, which were almost exclusively political and began when the Soviet Union was England's ally in WWII.

Among Davenport-Hines's conclusions:
I suggest that the preoccupation with class loyalties and social exclusion, which has dominated histories of communist espionage in Britain, is  a species of self-serving Marxism which relies on illusory or falsified readings of the English class system. 

Fritz Lang's Die Frau im Mond 1929

Lang made The Woman in the Moon in 1929, just as sound was coming in for movies.  Lang rejected adding a soundtrack to the film that he had made as his last silent film.  For a long time there was only a severely cut version of this film available, 95 minutes of the original 169 (it has been said that Lang made his silent films long enough to keep them from being shown on double bills).  The film is full of fascinating details and is essentially in three parts:  the melodrama leading up to the rocket launch, the journey  itself, the time spent on the moon.

The first part is the most "Langian,"  with a cabal of ruthless businessmen trying to prevent scientist Wolf Helius (played by Willy Fritsch) going to the moon without their representative,  American Walt Turner, a master of disguise and ruthlessness who resembles Hitler (who was gaining popular support in the twenties by denouncing the treaty of Versailles).  They drug Helius,, steal his plans and threaten to blow up his rocket unless he takes Turner along.  He reluctantly agrees. On the trip are Freide Velten (Gerda Maurus), with whom Helius is in love, and Velten's fiancé Hans Windegger (Gustav van Wagenheim).  Also on the crew is the old professor who has done the research necessary to make the trip possible, George Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl) and a boy stowaway, Gustav (Gustl Stark-Gstennenbauer).  In other words, there was someone, more or less, for whom each member of the audience could root, as was often the case in films of the classical era.

The next part of the film is the launch and the trip to the moon, shown in serious scientific ways (Lang had a  number of consultants, including rocket scientist Willy Ley), such as weightlessness, technical problems, and how to land safely.  When they get to the moon the feuding starts as they begin to look for the gold and find it, after discovering they can breathe in the moon's "atmosphere."  Turner fights for the gold, pulls a gun and is shot by Helius in a struggle, with one of Turner's shots hitting the air supply on the ship, meaning not everyone can return.  Helius draws the short straw and stays, joined by Velten, who secretly leaves the ship before it blasts off.  Helius and Velten embrace, certain that someone will eventually arrive to rescue them.

Lang was intrigued by all the details of space travel and is even given credit for inventing the countdown before the launch.  The scenario was written by Lang and Thea von Harbou --Lang's wife at the time --who published a novel version of it before the film was made. Lang fled Germany in 1933 after he ;divorced von Harbou, who stayed in Germany and worked in the film industry during the Nazi regime.

Edward Montagne's The Tattooed Stranger 1950

One of the seediest films ever made.
--Carl Macek, Film Noir (The Overlook Press, 1979)

Although Eddie Mueller showed The Tattooed Stranger in Noir Alley on TCM I would not call it a film noir, as much as I enjoyed the film:  it had little alienation or fatalism, there were no night scenes and it had a happy ending (the curse that keeps many B films from becoming truly noir).  It did have lots of great location shots of New York City, including Brooklyn, the Bronx and the Lower East Side and interesting minor characters, from a waitress to a cemetery owner  1950 was getting to the end of B movies, as director Edward Montagne and actors John Miles, Patricia Barry nd Walter Kinsella were poised to enter television, where they spent the rest of their careers.

The Tattooed Stranger crams a great deal into its 64 minutes, from murders in Central Park and a tattoo parlor to a love story between a cop and the botanist who identifies the grass in the car where a woman was murdered.  The cinematography by William Steiner and direction by Montagne are workmanlike and there is a nicely choreographed shootout in a yard crammed with burial monuments.

G.W. Pabst's Die Buchse der Pandora 1929

The originality of Pandora comes from [Louise] Brooks's fearless sense of an intelligent woman unable to resist her own sensuality.
--David Thomson

Pandora's Box is another example of how the artistry of the silent film was reaching its peak just when sound was coming in.  The star of the film is American Louise Brooks, who had made a few American films but hated the studios and only did a couple of B films after her return to America.  Brooks plays Lulu, who sleeps with men for money and with women for fun.  She has an iconic bobbed hairdo and an extraordinarily expressive face, which Pabst used for a number of intense close-ups.  Lulu is a courtesan who convinces a rich man to marry her and then shoots him as they struggle for a gun that he tries to get her to use on herself, so disgusted as he is with her behavior and his own.  The man's son sets off the fire alarm during Lulu's murder trial and they escape to England, where Lulu is murdered by a man she meets in the street, a man who has no money for her but she takes him home anyway,

This lurid tale is a masterpiece of fatalistic eroticism and low-key expressionism.  Pabst, along with cinematographer Gunther Krampf, captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of Weimar Germany, where sex and sensationalism are temporary means to thwart despair and self-destruction.  A year later Josef Von Sternberg made Der Blaue Engel, with a similar theme.