“Oh ho ho ho”

Robert Moses on the wane, his power gone. From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

And as they walked down the steps of the cottage to the author’s car, Moses did something that made him feel for an instant that the man walking behind him was not Robert Moses but Paul. The author had, unknown to Robert Moses, spent time with his dead brother. Paul Moses had managed to keep his chin up even in discussing the misfortunes of his life, but sometimes, drifting into reveries during lulls in the conversation, he had — unconsciously, it seemed — uttered a phrase, a sigh, almost a moan, that hinted at the depths of the melancholy within him: a painful, reflective sighing: “Oh ho ho ho. Oh ho ho ho.” The author had speculated that so unusual an expression might be inherited from their father. But in all the times he had previously talked with Robert Moses, the author had never heard him make that sound of discouragement and something close to despair.

But he made it now.

This post is my last from The Power Broker.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

Garth Hudson (1937–2025)

He was the last original member of The Band. Here’s an obituary from The Guardian.

And here, from 2017, is some extraordinary pianism, a lengthy solo lead-in to “The Weight.” I hear the hymn “Jerusalem” (Sir Hubert Parry’s setting of a William Blake poem), “Old Folks” (Willard Robison–Dedette Lee Hill), “Dardanella” (Felix Bernard–Johnny S. Black), a bit of Brahms (thanks, Elaine), and “The Last Rose of Summer” (a traditional melody joined to a Thomas Moore poem). I suspect there’s still more to hear.

I don’t know what the screams from the audience are about — trying to get the pianist to wrap it up? At any rate, they’re to be ignored, just as Garth Hudson ignored them.

Jules Feiffer (1929–2025)

The cartoonist and writer was ninety-five. Here’s an NPR obituary, with links to more NPR features about his work.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: AMC, Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

The Sleeping Tiger (dir. Joseph Losey, 1954). “We’ve never had a criminal for a houseguest — at least one we knew about.” A daft premise: prison psychiatrist Clive Edmonds (Alexander Knox) takes in the man who tried to mug him, Frank Clemmons (Dirk Bogarde), for a six-month effort at rehabilitation. Clive’s wife, Glenda (Alexis Smith), left to her own devices as her schlubby husband is off to give one lecture after another, is increasingly drawn to this young, pompadoured, rather brutal stranger, one already possessed of a rich criminal record. A sudden, unconvincing plot turn keeps me from giving the movie four stars, but Smith gives a great performance as a self-abasing, emotionally starved mess. ★★★ (YT)

*

Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (dir. David Mamet, 1996). A filmed version of Ricky Jay’s Broadway show. An amazing performance of card tricks, card throwing, and sleight of hand, enhanced with learned patter. To watch Ricky Jay in action is to be transported to a Steven Millhauser-like world in which things happen that are beyond explanation. When someone like Ricky Jay leaves us, I think about all the knowledge that goes with that person. ★★★★ (YT)

[Watch it while it’s there.]

*

Maestra (dir. Maggie Contreras, 1023). A documentary about La Maestra, an international competition, held in Paris, for female orchestral conductors. From 250 entrants, fourteen are chosen; then five; and finally one. The most interesting story, to my mind: that of a French émigré, now teaching in Iowa, who finds herself confronting the painful family life she left behind. What would help to offset the unvarying narrative movement (conducting followed by eliminations): greater exploration of the sexism that the competitors themselves talk about — for instance, the suggestion, even at La Maestra, that one competitor should smile more. ★★★ (N)

*

Shadow in the Sky (dir. Fred M. Wilcox, 1952). An oddly low-key treatment of combat-induced PTSD. Ralph Meeker plays Burt, a veteran receiving long-term care in a VA hospital. Nancy Davis is his sister; James Whitmore, his brother-in-law; Jean Hagen, a sympathetic nurse. Burt is tormented by rain, and a moment of crisis forces him to overcome his fear. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Love Actually (dir. Richard Curtis, 2003). It’s a Christmas movie and feel-good movie, with a huge cast and slightly bewildering network of relationships, familial, romantic, friendly, work-related. The comic bits are genuinely funny; the moving moments are genuinely moving; the corny moments are painfully corny. And the plotting is delightfully intricately, with everything coming together in an airport. Stealing the movie: Billy Nighy as a dissolute rocker looking for a comeback with a Christmas refashioning of the Troggs’ “Love Is All Around.” ★★★ (AMC)

*

Footsteps in the Dark (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1941). A harmless murder-mystery comedy, with Errol Flynn as Francis Warren, an investment counselor who secretly writes mystery novels as F.X. Pettijohn. When a prospective (and sketchy) client is murdered, Warren turns amateur detective to find the killer, consorting with burlesque dancer Blondie White (Lee Patrick), staying out all night (“board meeting”), and arousing his wife’s (Brenda Marshall) and mother-in-law’s (Lucile Watson) suspicions. I have no interest in swashbucklers, but I like Flynn in this comic role, lobbing stock compliments to his tart-tongued mother-in-law and impersonating a Texas oilman to impress Blondie. With Ralph Bellamy, William Frawley, Alan Hale, Allen Jenkins, Roscoe Karns, and several actors from the second half of the alphabet. ★★★ (TCM)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Cast Aginst Type: Heroes as Villains

The Velvet Touch (dir. Jack Gage, 1948). Valerie Stanton (Rosalind Russell) is a Broadway star famed for performances in light comedies — five smash hits in a row — but she wants to branch out and play Hedda Gabler (and think of it: here’s a Hollywood picture that assumes an audience’s at least glancing familiarity with Ibsen). Miss Stanton’s producer and one-time lover Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames) wants to keep his star in comedy, and threatens to reveal an ugly history to her new lover if she doesn’t comply — and within the first few minutes of the story, he’s dead, and the movie turns to flashbacks. A brilliantly filmed ultra-opulent noir, with great sets (that library!) and great music (by Leigh Harline), and sharp All About Eve-like dialogue (by Leo Rosten). With Leo Genn, Claire Trevor, and Sydney Greenstreet as Captain Danbury, looking backward to Inspector Bucket and forward to Lieutenant Columbo. ★★★★

*

Immediate Family (dir. Denny Tedesco, 2022). From the director of The Wrecking Crew, a warmhearted documentary about four session musicians whose names you’ve likely seen on some album’s back cover: guitarists Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel. Many great stories of dumb luck (right place, right time) and life on the road, though there’s almost no discussion of how a life in music impacts one’s obligations to one’s own immediate family. The greater reason I’d fault this documentary: coming in at 1:42, it’s too long, with too many professions of mutual admiration and too many details better left to Wikipedia articles or a website for the movie. I don’t need to know, for instance, that one of these guys produced six albums — one, two, three, four, five, six — for Jimmy Buffett. ★★★ (N)

*

Stakeout on Dope Street (dir. Irvin Kershner, 1958). A trio of teenaged boys find a briefcase holding a two-pound can of white powder, and when they figure out what they’ve found, they’re determined to cash in — and so are criminals whose briefcase is missing. I thought I was going to see a piece of lurid dreck, but I found instead a well-made Dragnet-style B movie, with a strong script, capable unknown actors, and surprising camerawork (that bowling ball). Best scene: a long flashback in which heroin addict Danny (Allen Kramer) recounts an episode of withdrawal. A bonus: music by Richard Markowitz, performed by the Hollywood Chamber Jazz Group. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Walls of Jericho (dir. John M. Stahl, 1948). So many older melodramas now look like case studies of the dark triad — Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy — which might have been found even in the early 1900s in the county seat of Jericho, Kansas. Here we meet (among others) county attorney Dave Connors (Cornel Wilde) and his alcoholic wife Belle (Ann Dvorak), Dave’s old friend and newspaper publisher Tucker Wedge (Kirk Douglas) and his wife Algeria (Linda Darnell), “she-lawyer” Julia Norman (Anne Baxter), and young Marjorie Ransome (Colleen Townsend). One of these characters will seek to poison relationships between others, whatever the cost. Political rivalries, ugly gossip, the small-mindedness of life in a provincial place, and, yes, the dark triad. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Proud and Profane (dir. George Seaton, 1956). And the dark triad can also be found in 1943, at an Allied military base in New Caledonia. William Holden is Colonel Black (his first name, Colin, surfaces very late in the story), a rigid, domineering Marine, a wildly dishonest commander of men and women. Deborah Kerr is Lee Ashley, widow of a Marine killed at Guadalcanal, here as a Red Cross volunteer. Their relationship swerves into a mightmare of toxic behavior, and the story jumps several sharks before losing its balance, falling into the ocean, and being eaten by one last shark — that is, plot twist. ★★ (YT)

*

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (dir. Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park, 2024). Wallace invents a smart gnome to do gardening (and bring in ££); the evil penguin Feathers McGraw (from The Wrong Trousers) reprograms the gnome from the zoo where he’s locked up; an army of evil gnomes takes shape; and chaos ensues. There are many wonderful small touches: a Brown Betty teapot, a Penguin paperback, a box of “Brown Flakes” (cereal), Feathers’s sardine can, and, again and again, the meanings communicated by the facial expressions of silent characters. But the story gets bogged down in a subplot about Inspector Mackintosh and Police Constable Mukherjee (reminiscent of Wicked Little Letters), and Wallace’s cheerful conclusion about automation and artificial intelligence — “I knew you would embrace technology in the end, lad” — seems weak tea in light of the havoc the gnomes have wrought. And speaking of gnomes: they’re kinda terrifying, and I’m not sure any child younger than maybe eight would feel at ease watching them as they march toward the audience. ★★★ (N)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Raindrop.io)

HCR on 1/20/25

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the day.

[Post republished with this year’s 1/20. We’re not in 2024 anymore.]

Message received, maybe

“Mom, we’ll just visit here in your room today. Donald Trump was elected president, and the giant television in the dining room has his inauguration on. So we’ll just stay here.”

And it seemed (emphasis seemed ) that my mom — almost ninety-three, with profound dementia — understood what I was saying.

Half-staff

[Image found here.]

MLK

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929. I’ll repost (for obvious reasons) a sentence that I posted in 2020. From Why We Can’t Wait (1964):

Perhaps the most determining factor in the role of the federal government is the tone set by the Chief Executive in his words and actions.

Related reading
All OCA MLK posts (Raindrop.io)

Lillian Edelstein, 2F

[867 East 176th Street, East Tremont, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Lillian Edelstein and her husband Sam lived in this building in apartment 2F. Lillian’s sister lived in 3F. The sisters’ mother lived in 3G. This building is one of the 159 buildings, housing 1,530 families, that Robert Moses tore down in 1953 and 1954 for the Cross Bronx Expressway. Moses said that the buildings were “slums,” “walkups,” “tenements.” “Tenements? ” a former resident of the neighborhood said to Robert Caro. “Listen, I lived in tenements. These were not tenements at all.”

Lillian Edelstein, a self-described “housewife,” became the leader of the East Tremont Neighborhood Association and kept up a valiant fight against the destruction of her neighborhood. But the fix was in. Here is an affidavit in which she told her story. Here is a 2015 obituary. And here is a 1989 episode of The American Experience, “The World That Moses Built” (aired January 10, 1989), in which you can see and hear Lillian Edelstein talk about Robert Moses and her fight, briefly at 6:13 and at greater length in a segment about the Cross Bronx that begins at 41:47.

What does Robert Moses think about the constuction of the Cross Bronx Expressway and the destruction of East Tremont? From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Asked if he had not felt a sense of awe — of difficulties of a new immensity — when, beginning active planning of the great road during the war, he had first seen the miles of apartment houses in his way, he said he had not. “There are more houses in the way [than on Long Island],” he said, “there are more people in the way — that’s all. There’s very little real hardship in the thing. There’s a little discomfort and even that is greatly exaggerated. The scale was new, that was all that was new about it. And by this time there was the prospect of enough money to do things on this scale.” Asked if he had ever feared that the tenants might defeat him, he said, “Nah, nobody could have stopped it.” As a matter of fact, the East Tremont opposition hadn’t really been much trouble at all.

“I don’t think they were too bad,” Robert Moses said. “It was a political thing that stirred up the animals there.”

As you can see in Google Maps, there is now no there there, only the polluted air above the Cross Bronx Expressway. (You′ll have to turn the image around to see the missing side of the street.)

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives : Two more East Tremont buildings, now gone : All OCA Robert Caro posts

A Family Circus double-talker

“Wow! Look at that franistan frelm!” There’s more to Bill of The Family Circus than has met the eye.

Related posts
Frammis : Franistan