In life and in the theatre

Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).

Also from this novella
Suspicion

“It's hard to know what to do with all this”

Daniele Del Guidice, A Fictional Inquiry, trans. from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel (New York: New Vessel Press, 2025).

This novel, first published as Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983) recounts an unnamed narrator’s travels in Trieste and London to puzzle out the life of an Italian writer who chose not to publish a word in his lifetime. The novel reminds me of both Leonardo Sciascia and W.G. Sebald, especially Sebald. If you are attuned to either of those writers, you might like A Fictional Narrative .

Credit this reading choice to the folks who display the books at the Seminary Co-op. I saw a copy on one of the banded ledges that adjoin the bookshelves. I bought a copy, started looking at it more closely, told Elaine about it, and bought a second copy the shelves. And so it became an official pick of the Four Seasons Reading Club (Elaine and me, reading).

[Banded ledges? Think of a shallow version of a supermarket endcap, with bands holding the merchandise on little ledges.]

Selling a goldbrick

From The Man I Married (dir. Irving Pichel, 1941). Carol Hoffman (Joan Bennett), an American vacationer in Berlin, asks a question. Kenneth Delane (Lloyd Nolan), an American foreign correspondent, answers:

“What I can’t get through my head is why these people listen to Hitler, when they know in the end it’ll only mean bloodshed and chaos.”

“Well, Schickie sold them a goldbrick, probably the greatest goldbrick that’s ever been sold any peoples in the whole history of time. He’s actually made them believe that the only culture in the world is the Nazi culture, that the only form of life worth living is the Nazi form. He’s a mathemagician. Fanatical egomaniac with the greatest appetite ever since on this earth since the days of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun. He won't be satisfied until he makes an effort to wipe the democracies right off the map, and I don’t mean just England and France either. Yeah, I know, I know. A lot of us Americans laugh it off when they hear things like this, but not me. I’ve seen too much. I’ve seen the war machine he’s constructed. Nobody can tell me he has the slightest intention of letting that machine go to rust. In the long run, of course, he won’t win. But before he’s through, Schickie’s gonna spill an awful lot of blood.”

Eerie viewing in 2026.

[Schickie: Schicklgruber, the original family name of Hitler’s father Alois. Goldbrick : “a confidence game in which the victim buys a ’gold’ (actually gold-painted lead) brick.” Mathemagician : a portmanteau that suggests a mastermind and trickster.]

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Netflix, a theater, TCM, YouTube.]

A Month in the Country (dir. Pat O’Connor, 1987). From J.L. Carr’s 1980 novella. A veteran of the Great War (Colin Firth), suffering from what was then called shell shock, travels to a Yorkshire village to take on the work of uncovering a mural in a rural church. In the same village, another veteran (Kenneth Branagh) is undertaking a small-scale archaeological dig. A cranky vicar (Patrick Malahide) and his unhappy wife (Natasha Richardson) add emotional complications. An understated movie of uneasy friendship, unfulfilled desire, and the solace of solitary work. ★★★★ (A)

[I watched twice over two nights, and even now I’m not sure that anyone’s first name is ever spoken.]

*

The Blue Dahlia (dir. George Marshall, 1946). It’s quintessential post-war noir: fighter pilot Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) and crew members Buzz and George (William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont) come back from the war, and after Johnny finds his wife Helen (Doris Dowling) in a bungalow full of day-drinking types, he finds himself the prime suspect in his wife’s murder. The plot is little more than an episode of any TV mystery: one victim, several suspects, whodunit. What makes this movie worth watching again and again is characterization: the ever-resourceful Johnny; wicked Helen; Buzz, going out of his mind when he hears loud music; the sleazy nightclub owner Eddie (Howard Da Silva); and Joyce (Veronica Lake), Eddie’s estranged wife and Lauren Bacall wannabe. Screenplay by Raymond Chandler, so there’s ample snappy dialogue: “It’s funny, but practically all the people I know were strangers when I met them.” ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Strange Woman (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1946). “She’s so rotten; you’ve got to believe me”: it’s another melodrama that might be better understood as a study in the dark triad — Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. In early-nineteenth century Maine, Jenny Hager (Hedy Lamarr) marries a wealthy timberman (Gene Lockhart) before making a play for another man (Louis Hayward), and then another (George Sanders). (Saying anything more would ruin the movie.) Lamarr, Lockhart, and Hayward are terrific, but the most terrifying moment in the movie belongs to Moroni Olsen as a traveling evangelist. ★★★★ (A)

[The movie’s title in from Proverbs 5:3–4: “For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword” (KJV).

*

Not as a Stranger (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1955). “There was something left out of you, Luke: it isn’t enough to have a brain; you have to have a heart”: so says the father (Lon Chaney Jr.) of medical student Lucas “Luke” Marsh (Robert Mitchum), an arrogant, aggressive presence in classrooms and operating theaters. Short on funds, Luke marries Kristina Hedvigson (Olivia de Haviland), a Swedish-American nurse with savings, convinced that he can manage a relationship with a partner he doesn’t love — and then things get complicated. De Haviland is okay (long in the dark about the reason for her husband’s iciness); Mitchum is just inert. The stronger presences here are supporting players: Frank Sinatra as a good-guy med-school pal of the principals, Broderick Crawford as a professor (admitted as a med student under a quota system for Jews), Charles Bickford as a country doctor (and perhaps the first person to utter the word prostate in the movies), and, especially, Gloria Grahame as lonely Harriet Lang, who smolders, and smolders, and then smolders some more. ★★★ (A)

[Gloria Grahame. Click for a larger view.]

*

Hotel Reserve (dir. Lance Comfort, Mutz Greenbaum, Victor Hanbury, 1944). From an Eric Ambler novel. Hotels, like trains, are good settings for mysteries, as they bring together and keep together motley groups of strangers, all of whom might fall under suspicion. The mystery in this movie, set in pre-WWII France, is straightforward: which hotel guest has switched cameras with an Austrian refugee and medical student (James Mason) who is now accused of photographing French military installations. Alas, the suspicious characters here are few, and many of the hotel guests are little more than decor. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Man I Married (dir. Irving Pichel, 1940). It’s August 1938, as Germany prepares to invade Czechoslovakia, and American magazine writer Carol Hoffman (Joan Bennett) and her German-born businessman husband Eric (Francis Lederer) undertake an extended vacation in Berlin. Surely, Carol thinks, things can’t be awful in Germany as are rumored, can they? — though she and Eric are bringing a pile of money to get a famed philosopher out of Dachau. The story charts Carol’s gradual enlightenment about her husband and Nazi Germany, an enlightenment aided by the truth-talking of American correspondent Kenneth Delane (Lloyd Nolan), with a major twist at the end. One of the earlier anti-Nazi Hollywood films. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1946). This movie used to air endlessly on a local public-television station (it’s in the public domain), and I watched it often, but I was surprised, after many years away, how little of it stuck in my head. I’d forgotten, for instance, that it’s a film noir that begins in childhood. I did remember that it’s a twisted story of guilt and recrimination, with Barbara Stanwyck as the wealthy plutocrat of Iverstown, Kirk Douglas (in his first screen role) as her alcoholic husband, Van Johnson as a man from the past who has happened back into town, and Elizabeth Scott as a parolee who misses her bus. And then there’s a scary Judith Anderson. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Ever in My Heart (dir. Archie Mayo, 1933). Love at first sight, in 1909, between all-American Mary Archer (Barbara Stanwyck) and Hugo Wilbrandt (Otto Kruger), a German professor of chemistry who’s come to teach at the university in town. The Great War, anti-German sentiment, and personal losses upend the couple’s marriage, and Hugo returns to Germany, convinced that he will never be accepted as an American. And Mary ends up assisting American forces in France. And that’s when the story becomes still more painful, in a way that could never happen post-Code. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Maternal Instinct (dir. Jessica Dimmock, 2026). I hesitate to invoke the dark triad again, but it’s the only way to name what’s at work in this movie, a documentary with short, silent dramatizations. In 2020, Taylor Parker, a Texas woman, was pulled over by a highway patrol trooper for erratic driving. She claimed to have just given birth. The crimes that led up to that traffic stop stagger the imagination — that’s all I can say. ★★★★ (N)

*

Pray Away (dir. Kristine Stolakis, 2021). A documentary about the “ex-gay” religious movement, some of its former leaders, and some of those still committed. The title seems to move in two directions: it’s an exhortation (to “pray away the gay”) but also a suggestion, I think, that prayer cannot change a person’s core identity (go ahead, pray away, have at it). It’s sad to see people who believe that they cannot be who they are, and joyful to see people finally able to accept themselves (it’s not a spoiler to note that there’s a wedding). The one large flaw: there’s nothing to explain what goes on, aside from prayer, when groups such as (the now-defunct) Exodus International and (still active) Living Hope attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation. ★★ (N)

*

In the Hand of Dante (dir. Julian Schnabel, 2025). Parallel stories, with Oscar Isaac as both Dante and a dissolute twenty-first-century writer pulled into a scheme to steal a hidden manuscript of the Divine Comedy. The movie is audacious, bizarre, grandiose, gratuitously violent, and at many points baffling — it felt to me like an Orson Welles project gone very wrong. The extraordinary scenery, by which I mean libraries, kept me watching. But the absurdities and corpses keep piling up, and Martin Scorcese’s turn as Dante’s fictional mentor Isaiah (wut?!) adds unintentional comedy to what’s already ridiculous. ★ (N)

*

Toy Story 5 (dir. McKenna Harris and Andrew Stanton, 2026). An intergenerational story of childhood, toys, and the dangers of screens. Younger and older viewers will be watching different movies: a granddaughter’s favorite moment was Buzz Lightyear on a pink-and-blue-maned horse; mine (tears!) was seeing the inscription on the back of the picture of Jessie. The moral of the story: toys and screens can work together (thus making all sectors of corporate enterprise happy). One telling element that might be overlooked: the cluelessness of at least some parent characters, and the utter absence of others. ★★★★ (T)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Gloria Steinem (1934–2026)

“‘When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,’ Ms. Steinem often said. ‘It was just called life’”: from the New York Times obituary (gift link).

Cassandra Wilson (1955–2026)

From the New York Times obituary:

“We live very segmented lives,” she told Time magazine in 1996. “There’s Black music and there’s white music. There’s R&B and funk and whatever. This has always bothered me. People don’t see things in streams, they don’t see what tends to connect us all together. That’s what I see. That’s what I try to get at.”

Here’s “The Way You Look Tonight” (Jerome Kern–Dorothy Fields), from the 2015 Billie Holiday homage Coming Forth by Day . The strings are by Van Dyke Parks. You can see the two of them in this short video about the making of the album.

Calling for a straitjacket

In a post about renaming oceans, I imagined a straight-faced reporter asking the current occupant why he hasn’t yet renamed the Strait of Hormuz.

And now the occupant has wondered aloud if that name should be changed to Trump Strait. But Trump Straitjacket would be more fitting. A nice snug fit.

[I refer to him as “the current occupant” whenever I can. Here it seems appropriate to use his name. But I won’t link to his TЯuth Social post.]

Tell Apple Maps it’s Lake Ontario

Did you know that Apple Maps permits the user to Report an Issue about a location? I reported an issue this morning about Lake America. Wrong name! “Sanity requires that it remain Lake Ontario,” I wrote.

It’s sad to see that on his first day as Apple CEO, John Ternus permitted this change. Perhaps he can visit the Oval Office and present the current occupant with a gold replica of a bended knee.

“As if we suddenly remembered it!”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

The first Oxford English Dictionary citation for déjà vu  in English comes from a 1903 publication. But the term first appeared in 1876, in the work of the French philosopher Émile Boirac.

A passage from Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846) is another example of déjà vu before its time.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

[Why is the first déjà vu in this post italicized? Because it’s words as words, as in the sentence before this one.]

Eww, influencers

In an e-mail:

New England has long been home to L.L.Bean, and now it’s home for Drake and Ann Michael Maye. As they continue this next chapter, we’re excited to partner with them and share stories that celebrate time outside, everyday traditions, and the moments that make a place feel like home.

He: a New England Patriots quarterback (though L.L. makes no mention of his team affiliation). She: “content creator and media personality known for her popular baking and lifestyle content.” It all seems like a deeply un-Beanie marketing strategy.

Something I realized only after copying and pasting the above text: the company name has no space before Bean. How long has that been going on? At least nineteen years: there’s a discussion at Wikipedia.