Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor

 If one doesn't have the stomach to read Blake Bailey's biography of Philip Roth one can read Benjamin Taylor's slim volume about his friendship with Roth, where Roth's misogyny is on full display.  Roth comes across like a college freshman who never matured, making endless snobbish remarks and telling unfunny jokes while blaming others for the fact that he never received the Nobel Prize he felt he deserved.  At one point Taylor tries to interest Roth in the films of the great director Douglas Sirk but "we got no further than the overheated credits to Written on the Wind.  'What do you see in all this Hollywood dreck, Ben? I really want to know.'  His own tastes run to Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray and Fellini."  To me this is conclusive evidence that Roth's view of the world is quite limited and lacking in a sense of irony about himself and everyone else. Taylor's praise of Roth's late works are unconvincing;  I think only The Plot Against America (2004), an alternate history, is at all successful.

Turner Clasic Movies October 2021

 Because it's October there are a fair number of horror films this month.  I recommend all the horror films directed by Jacques Tourneur as well as those directed by Terence Fisher and those produced by Val Lewton.  There are also a number of other good films in October:

Oct. 3 Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), an impressive melodrama about making movies.

Oct. 5 Minnelli's Band Wagon (1953), a somewhat melancholic musical with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and Nicholas Ray's Party Girl (1958), a sort of gangster film/musical

Oct. 6 John Ford's beautiful and moving How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Oct. 8 Mark Sandrich's Follow the Fleet, with Rogers and Astaire dancing to Irving Berlin music.

Oct. 11 Rudolph Mate's corrosive film noir D.O.A. (1950)

Oct. 13 Godard's Breathless (1961) and Andre De Toth's Pitfall (1948)

Oct. 15 Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941)

Oct. 18 Ernst Lubitsch's brilliantly funny Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Oct. 20 Michael Powell's A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Oct. 25 Jean Renoir's masterpiece The Rules of the Game (1939)

Oct. 29 Raoul Walsh's politically perceptive A Lion is in the Streets (1953)

Oct. 31 Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

William G. Hole, Jr.'s Hell Bound 1957

 As usual Eddie Muller did an excellent job of introducing Hell Bound on his weekly Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies, putting it in the context of the work of low-budget producers Howard W. Koch and Aubrey Schenck as well as the history of film noir, coming to an end with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly in 1955 and Orson Welles's Touch of Evil in 1958.  By 1957 and 1958 the memory of WW II and even the Korean War was fading and more and more movies were being made in color and widescreen because of the competition of TV, war memories and black-and-white being important elements of film noir.

With the low-budget Hell Bound in 1957 film noir goes out with exaggerated elements of cynicism and darkness.  It starts out with an off-kilter film by Jordan (John Russell) projected for a mob boss to raise money for a complicated heist of drugs from a navy ship.  The mob boss donates his girlfriend Paula (former Playboy bunny June Blair) to help with the plot, though when Paula takes her shoes off (which she often does) to seduce Jordan he just slaps her down, eventually stabbing her and substituting his own girlfriend after Paula falls for ambulance driver Eddie (Stuart Whitman).  Jordan gets a layout of the ship he plans to rob and then kills the crew member he paid for it.  He also recruits a health officer and a junkie to help with his complicated plot, the health officer paid off and the junkie blackmailed. The heist does not go well. 

The sleaziness of the film is considerably enhanced by the decrepit locations where the film takes place, especially a junkyard of Los Angeles streetcars piled high(the LA trolley system was abandoned under pressure from freeway builders and car manufacturers), a powerful symbol of the changes happening to Los Angeles in the fifties. 

Barbara Pym's Excellent Women 1952

 I am tired, I said to myself, as I walked upstairs, and my face is quite grey.  Nobody must come near me.  I would have a rest this afternoon, for Winifred had gone back to the vicarage and was comforting Julian.  I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women.  But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs. Gray; sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew.  Perhaps it might after all be my duty to marry him, if only to save him from being too well protected.

-- Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (Penguin, 1953)

One of the pleasures of reading the London Review of Books is discovering new authors, as I did when reading Alison Light's review of Paula Byrne's biography of Barbara Pym, a writer who was unfamiliar to me, though I was vaguely aware that Philip Larkin was an admirer of her novels.  Excellent Women is written in the first person by spinster Mildred Lathbury, daughter of a clergyman and very involved in volunteer work in and about her Anglican church.  The novel is very much of its time and place --post-WWII London -- but more relevant than ever for its clear-eyed role of women in society and their relationships with the men who run things.  Mildred mildly flirts with men, including Rocky Napier (who lives with his wife just below Mildred's apartment; they share a bathroom), anthropologist Everard Bone (a name that reminds one of one of the funniest moments in Howard Hawks's 1938 film Bringing Up Baby), and her clergyman Father Malory, who lives with his sister Winifred.  She also mourns an unrequited love from her youth and is determined never to marry, especially as she watches the diastrous attempted couplings around her.

Pym has been compared to Jane Austen, but I find her observant and comical views of everything, including the Church, to be more akin to the novels of Trollope, full of compassion and understanding. Mildred sees that people can act like fools and even admits she can at times be foolish herself, but she understands the complex reasons that sometimes we have little choice in our behavior. I find the title, Excellent Women, to be ironic, as often women have fewer choices than men.

As far as I can determine none of Pym's novels have been made into movies.  In their time they might have made excellent Ealing comedies; today's audience might find their wonderfully droll humor too subtle. 

Leslie Selander's Tall Man Riding 1955

 Tall Man Riding is a pretty good B Western, starring Randolph Scott, a mainstay of Westerns throughout the 50's, culminating with the seven films he did with director Budd Boetticher starting in 1956.  The screenplay by Joseph Hoffman is tightly structured (from a novel by Norman Fox; one benefit of making Westerns is that they are seldom compared to the original source story or novel) and filmed on location, with "the wind in the trees," by veteran cinematographer Wilfrid Cline, who photographed five films in 1955, including Andre De Toth's Indian Fighter.  B veteran Selander's direction is workmanlike and impersonal.

Scott plays a man returning for revenge on the man who (literally) whipped him and broke up his romance with Dorothy Malone (one year away from her extraordinary role in Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind).  The other woman, a saloon singer played by Peggie Castle (from Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, 1953), saves Scott's life with her superb shooting and is gunned down by her bad-guy lover John Baragrey.  In Westerns what is iconography and what is cliche' depends on how effective it is.  In Tall Man Riding there is one particularly impressive shoot-out that takes place entirely in a dark room, with only muzzle flashes visible.  Unfortunately there is a "happy" ending that's all-too-common in B films, with Scott ready to ride off alone before changing his mind and going inside with Malone. 

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time 1936

 Dorothy Fields's colloquialism was perfectly suited to her adult view of sexuality, which is delightfully embodied in "A Fine Romance."  The first verse, sung by Rogers to Astaire in Swing Time, is the quintessance of her style, at once slangy and elegantly-turned -- not to mention warm-blooded:  "We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes, / But you're as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes."

Terry Teachout, "The Two Female Giants of the American Songbook," Commentary, Sept. 2021

One's favorite Astaire/Rogers film depends on how much one enjoys the comedy of these "musical comedies," often embodied by Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton, and whether one prefers Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin or George Gershwin.  The dancing, choreographed by Astaire and Hermes Pan, is always wonderful, though there is never quite enough of it.

In Swing Time the comedy is often ineffective -- Eric Blore has only a small part with too many reaction shots and Horton is completely absent; director George Stevens works hard and mostly unsuccessfully to get laughs with Helen Broderick and Victor Moore but the two actors do most of the laughing themselves. The dancing, however, is lovely and so are the songs by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, especially "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance."  The dances are effective in expressing the increasing love between Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in spite of their betrothals to others and are closely interwoven with the often absurd plot. There is also a dance for Astaire in blackface "Bojangles of Harlem" which might make one uncomfortable today but is an impressive homage to dancer Bill Robinson, as Arlene Croce says, "it is homage, not impersonation."  The comedy might not be at the level of the Rogers/Astaire films directed by Mark Sandrich (especially Shall We Dance, 1937) but the dancing is exquisite.

Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina by Georgina Pazcoguin

 He [Peter Martins] used this production as a vessel to promote most of the cast (alas, not moi).  I had not been promoted for my contibutions, and all I had left was a bruised ego and this mess of trauma I'm still trying to work through.  I had my legs splayed and breasts fondled onstage by my colleagues.  I threw my body down the stairs repeatedly.  I had my anatomy once again shamed, this time for not being curvy enough.

--Georgina Pazcoguin, Swan Dive (Henry Holt and Company, 2021)

Being a ballerina is not for every girl or woman; reading Swan Dive causes one to believe that it is something one does because one has to do it:  the life is all-consuming and the financial rewards are limited for most dancers (about $65,000 a year for corps members in NYC Ballet) and one's career as a dancer ends somewhere between 30 and 40 years old and only lasts that long if one can avoid serious injury.

It can be a wild ride, both good and bad, for a ballet dancer, as Pazcoguin makes clear in this detailed book about her life as a dancer with NYC Ballet.  Pazcoguin is of mixed race (her dad is Filipino and her mother Italian)from Altoona, Pa. and started out at the Allegheny Ballet Academy, eventually doing an audition in Pittsburgh and getting a scholarship to the School of American Ballet at 14, leading to the corps of NYC Ballet and eventual promotion to soloist, while butting heads constantly with artistic director Peter Martins over everything from casting to moonlighting on Broadway.  She gradually began to feel that she was not getting the roles she deserved, in part because of her race, and helped to initiate Final Bow for Yellowface to promote diversity in ballet.

Pazcoguin is particularly foulmouthed for a ballerina, at least as we have seem them in the memoirs of such principal dancers as Suzanne Farrell and Merrill Ashley, but perhaps it's time for the pendulum to swing the way corps members talk to each other and express their anger and frustration.  Pazcoguin is full of highs and lows, the highs being when she is actually dancing roles she loves (such as Anita in West Side Story) and when she spends time with her fellow dancers sharing feelings, the lows when she is injured, miscast, or having to talk to the dour and authoritarian Peter Martins.  Martins quit in 2018 after accusations of harassment and abuse surfaced and as Swan Dive ends Pazcoguin is hopeful about her role with the new regime at NYC Ballet, but she now has a real estate license and is ready, if necessary, for her next season.