Domestic comedy

[After a partial rendition of “Nighthawks at the Diner.”]

“So do you like my Tom Waits imitation?”

“It affects me physically.”

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Domestic comedy

[Of a pizzicato passage in an orchestral work, requiring that bows be placed on laps.]

“Aren’t they afraid their bows will fall?”

“Not the people with no-problem laps.”

Elaine’s fix for the problem-lap problem is putting a dent into the Internets this morning. One of her readers has named the fix the lap-stop.

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Domestic comedy

[Fun while driving.]

Name your Price:

Hi Price

Lo Price

Wright Price

And always standing off to the side at the family reunion:

Bergen Price

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[My dad would have liked this stuff.]

Domestic comedy

“Do you want tomatoes?”

“Yes, please.”

“How many?”

“Some?”

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[“Some,” as in rocks. They were grape tomatoes.]

Domestic comedy

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can I know my trousers from my pants?”

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[With apologies to William Butler Yeats.]

Domestic comedy

“Joe Flynn from McHale’s Navy is in this episode of That Girl.”

“Win win!”

“How do you punctuate ‘win win’?”

“I don’t know — I wasn’t talking with punctuation.”

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Domestic comedy

“It’s a ‘known fact,’ as you would say.”

“Don’t turn my words against me!”

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Domestic comedy

“I tend not to look people in the windshield when we walk.”

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Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

The Glass Wall (dir. Maxwell Shane, 1953). A Hungarian survivor of Nazi camps, Peter Kaban (Vittorio Gassman) arrives in New York as a stowaway, where his sole hope of not being deported is to jump ship and find the American serviceman whose life he saved and can vouch for him, a guy who said he played clarinet in Times Square. A gripping story of life on the run, with Kaban as both the hunter and the hunted. There’s a touching moment with a Hungarian burlesque dancer (Robin Raymond), and Gloria Grahame gives a great performance as a coat-thief and unexpected love interest: dig her monologue about working in a shoelace factory. You’ll have to watch to the end to understand the title. ★★★★

*

99 River Street (dir. Phil Karlson, 1953). A superior noir, whose events play out in a single night. John Payne plays an ex-fighter who drives a cab and hopes to own a gas station someday. When his life spins out of control, a dispatcher pal (Frank Faylen) and an aspiring actress (Evelyn Keyes) help him put things together. Brutal fight scenes, in and out of the ring, and a host of shady characters: Jay Adler, Peggie Castle, Brad Dexter, and the feral Jack Lambert. ★★★★

*

The Scarf (dir. E.A. Dupont, 1951). An escapee from an asylum for the criminally insane (John Ireland) seeks to figure out if he committed the crime for which he was convicted. This ambitious effort scatters in several directions, from a philosophical dialogue between the escapee and a learned desert recluse (James Barton, in a great role) to a sojourn in the desert with a singing waitress (Mercedes McCambridge) to a slapstick fight in a bar. The story becomes, finally, about choosing between heteronormative desire and intergenerational desert bromance (yes, really). Best scene: the ultra-creepy psychiatrist (Emlyn Williams) meets the waitress. ★★★

*

Sudden Fear (dir. David Miller, 1952). A famous playwright (Joan Crawford) and an aspiring actor (Jack Palance) marry, and already I’m afraid. The couple’s happy life in San Francisco is complicated by the unexpected arrival of the past, in the form of Gloria Grahame. Great suspense, with steep staircases, a little mechanical dog, and lots to think about regarding plots and scripts and performances (great ones). Would pair well with Cast a Dark Shadow (dir. Lewis Gilbert, 1955). ★★★★

*

Midnight Lace (dir. David Miller, 1960). Dumb luck: we didn’t know we were about to watch another movie from the director of Sudden Fear, with strong overtones of that movie and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder. Doris Day and Rex Harrison are Kit and Anthony Preston, a power couple in London, she an heiress, he a corporate executive. Someone is telephoning and threatening to kill Kit, but who, and why? A great performance from Day as an increasingly desperate but resourceful victim-to-be, and fine supporting performances from Myrna Loy as Kit’s feisty Aunt Bea, and John Williams (from Dial M) representing Scotland Yard. ★★★★

*

Julie (dir. Andrew L. Stone, 1956). More dumb luck: we didn’t know that we were going to be watching another movie with Doris Day as a woman in danger. No mystery here: the danger to Julie Benton comes from her obsessively jealous, violent husband (Louis Jourdan). At times the movie feels like a prescient PSA in its explication of the realities of domestic violence: the law, as a police detective says, can do little in the absence of evidence. The ending has become the stuff of spoof, but considered on its own terms, it’s wildly suspenseful and ahead of its time. ★★★★

*

The Verdict (dir. Don Siegel, 1946). After sending an innocent man to his execution, a police inspector (Sydney Greenstreet) is determined to show up the colleague who has taken his place in Scotland Yard (George Coulouris, with an improbable mustache). Set in 1890s London, the story is ostensibly a vehicle for Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, but there’s little chemistry between them in this locked-room murder mystery. Greenstreet looks tired, and Lorre skirts around the edges of the story, out late, drunk. The solution to the mystery requires that disbelief be hung by its thumbs. ★★

*

Don’t Blink – Robert Frank (dir. Laura Israel, 2015). I greatly admire Robert Frank’s photography — my copy of The Americans is many years old. But I found this documentary exhausting and unsatisfying, with fleeting image after fleeting image, all to the accompaniment of a largely irrelevant musical soundtrack. Frank is a benign but curmudgeonly presence, living with enormous personal loss, giving up little to the filmmaker’s camera. This documentary made me miss the patient close-reading of photographs typical of a Ken Burns project, and that’s saying something. ★★

*

My Favorite Year (dir. Richard Benjamin, 1982). “I’m not an actor; I’m a movie star!” It’s 1954, and a hard-drinking, swashbuckling Errol Flynn type, Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole), is to appear on King Kaiser’s Comedy Cavalcade (i.e., Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows). Young Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker), who idolizes Swann, vows to keep the errant star on the straight and narrow. The bromance and feel-goodism that take over the movie leave me cold, but the scenes of writers and actors at work are a delight. Watch that cable. ★★★

*

Dangerous Crossing (dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1953). Meet the Bowmans, Ruth and John (Jeanne Crain and Carl Betz), newlyweds on an ocean liner. Mr. B. disappears, and no one can attest that he was ever on board. So think of this movie as as variation on The Lady Vanishes. Its strong point: the way it plausibly places everyone, from a fellow passenger to the ship’s doctor, under suspicion. ★★★★

*

The Whistler (dir. William Castle, 1944). A wealthy executive pays for a hit man to “remove” someone but soon has to reconsider the deal. This low-budget movie (based on a radio show) has vaguely acceptable acting, bare-bones sets, and a clever but ridiculous plot whose twists come via telegrams. One surprising moment: when the camera pulls back, a little corner that looks like a cheap stand-in for a restaurant turns out to be a little corner in a larger set. Watch for Gloria Stuart, Old Rose in Titanic. ★★

*

Road House (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1948). What a road house: it has living quarters for its manager, a bowling alley, and a bar and grille (sic) named Spare Room. The owner, Jefty Robbins (Richard Widmark), has hired Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino) as a singer-pianist, but she has eyes for Jefty’s pal, road house manager Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde), who’s had eyes for Susie the cashier (Celeste Holm). The movie looks at first like a conventional love triangle (or rectangle), but don’t forget — it has Richard Widmark. My favorite moment: Ida Lupino sing-speaks “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road”). ★★★★

[Sources: the Criterion Channel, TCM, and YouTube.]

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Domestic comedy

“Did you do the dishes last night?”

“Yes, you identified me as doing them, as such.”

Elaine and I have been working the empty phrases “as such” and “at that” into our conversation. Living where we do, we have long been accustomed to making our own fun.

How, earlier in the day, had I identified Elaine as the dishdoer? By the spatula in the dishdrainer. Elaine puts those larger tools in the cutlery cups. I stand them up in the small rectangles formed by the coated wires running the length and width of the drainer. When I asked about the dishes, the spatula was gone.

As I said, “our own fun.” And good fun at that.

I have written this post in the excellent writing app iA Writer. When I turned on the Style Check (for fun), the app suggested removing “as such” from these sentences. No way.

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Domestic comedy

“We must have embarrassed people back then with our PDAs.”

“It wasn’t known as a PDA yet. So we didn’t.”

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[Disambiguation: PDA here stands for “public display of affection,” not “personal digital assistant.”]

Domestic comedy

[Shouted from floor to floor.]

“Jonathan Capehart is growing a beard!”

The people on the news, it’s like we know them now.

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Domestic comedy

[Reading Robertson Davies prompted us to look up some details of clerical garb.]

“You know where you can buy those?”

“In a surplice store.”

Elaine knew I’d have the punchline.

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Domestic comedy

[Elaine, after hearing next week’s challenge.]

“Think of a word. Double it. Think of another word. Subtract the first word from the second word. What color socks am I wearing?”

Domestic comedy

“Anyone can be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. I could nominate you.”

“And then I could talk about it at my rallies!”

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[I joked too soon: in truth, I cannot nominate Elaine. Contra Mental Floss, it’s not “university professors” who can nominate. As the Nobel website says, it’s “professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion.” Literature doesn’t count.]

Domestic comedy

My daughter Rachel:

“There’s no such thing as a free tote.”

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[Used with permission.]

Domestic comedy

[The television was on.]

“We have some new polling to show you, and it shows some trouble for the Trump campaign.”

Followed by spontaneous applause from our four hands.

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Domestic comedy

“I’m so tired of seeing ODE in crosswords. And ODIST. No one calls John Keats an ODIST. He’s from Andy of Mayberry.”

“Isn’t he the one who’s in the jail?”

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[Wikipedia explains: Andy of Mayberry was the title for episodes of The Andy Griffith Show rerun on daytime television.]

Domestic comedy

“You had me at mise-en-scène.”

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[But no one had really said mise-en-scène. It appeared on the screen as we browsed the Criterion Channel.]

Domestic comedy

“It looks absurd — it’s like a Love Boat toupee!”

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