PAYPHONE

A pangram from the dowdy world, in yesterday’s New York Times Spelling Bee. And from June 6, 2021. Is the Spelling Bee in reruns?

A handful of pay phone posts
A Blue Dahlia pay phone : A Henry pay phone : A Naked City pay phone : A subway pay phone, 1932 : Chicago pay phones : “If your coin was not returned”

[Pay phone is dowdier than payphone.]

Margie in 1952

I had occasion to look at a 2021 OCA post about the Remington Rand Photocharger, a long-gone piece of library technology that I remember from my Brooklyn childhood. When I followed that post back to a short film from the Brooklyn Public Library with a glimpse of the RRP in action, I was startled to see our friend Margie King Barab, then Margie Lou Swett, in a scene with high-school students, or “high-school students,” sketching costume plates in the library. In 1952, Margie was a twenty-year-old actress and singer in New York City. Her high-school days were back in Nebraska.

[From The Library: A Family Affair (1952). Margie appears at the 10:25 mark. Click for a larger view.]

A 2020 OCA post has much more about Margie’s television appearances and about a Naked City episode with characters who appear to be modeled on Margie and her first husband, the writer and raconteur Alexander King.

You can see if I’m seeing things by looking at screenshots from an episode of Naked City in which Margie appears uncredited. Or compare the screenshot above with a Carl Van Vechten portrait of Alex and Margie King. That’s Margie, for sure, in the Brooklyn Public Library and in the Naked City elevator.

Related posts
Seymour Barab (1921–2014) : Margie King Barab (1932–2018)

Twelve movies

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

The Hidden Hand (dir. Benjamin Stoloff, 1942). TCM promised a hunt for a serial killer, but what I got was a dippy comedy with racial stereotypes (Willie Best, Kam Tong) and murders. Briefly: a wealthy woman uses her asylum-escapee brother to do away with her money-grubbing relations. As the escapee John Channing, Milton Parsons alternates between crazed killer and staid butler in a genuinely comic performance. The only other reason I can think of to watch this movie: to see what happens when the ship’s wheel turns. ★★ (TCM)

*

Despair (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978). An adaptation of the Nabokov novel, with a Tom Stoppard screenplay, Dirk Bogarde as Hermann Hermann (get it?), and Klaus Löwitsch as Felix, Hermann’s supposed doppelgänger. I will quote a young Hobart Shakespearean, Sol Ah: “Even if the movies they make are good, they won’t be as good as the book.” What’s missing from this movie is the self-conscious comedy of Nabokov’s narrator: Hermann here is a character among characters, minus everything that makes his narrative voice a loony delight. It’s like Lolita without Humbert Humbert narrating. ★★ (YT)

[Bonus: the YT version has Portuguese subtitles, so it’s possible to learn a bit of a new language while watching.]

*

San Quentin (dir. Gordon Douglas, 1946). The premise: Nick Taylor (Barton MacLane), a San Quentin inmate and (dirty no-good rotten) member of the Inmates’ Welfare League, escapes while at a prison-sponsored press event touting the League, a self-help group (first step: admit you belong in prison). So the warden (improbably, ridiculously) enlists Taylor’s paroled arch-enemy Jim Roland (Lawrence Tierney) to track the fugitive down. This movie affords the opportunity to see Raymond Burr in his screen debut and to see a real Sing Sing warden awkwardly read from cue cards, eyes moving, right, left, right, left. Still, that real warden is probably sharper than his movie counterpart. ★★ (TCM)

*

Mostly Martha (dir. Sandra Nettelbeck, 2001). I’d call it a feel-good movie with subtitles — which is not necessarily a bad thing. Martha Klein (Martina Gedeck) is a high-strung chef at a posh restaurant, the kind of chef who comes out from the kitchen to yell with a customer and insist that the meat is not undercooked. Everything begins to change when Martha is suddenly pressed into caring for her young niece Lina. And then a new chef, Mario (Sergio Castellitto), begins working at the restaurant, and I know I said no spoilers, but you can see where this is going. ★★★ (DVD)

*

The Harmonists (dir. Joseph Vilsmaier, 1997). The Comedian Harmonists, an extraordinary German vocal quintet with piano, flourished in the late 1920s and early ’30s before the Nazi regime banned them from performing (three members of the group were Jewish). This dramatization traces the group’s rise to popularity (audience-reaction shots suggest a Weimar version of Beatlemania), a romantic rivalry, and ever more ominous developments in German life. The only strike against the movie, to my mind: the final scene, in which “the movies” takes over as the music swells. If you’ve never heard the Comedian Harmonists, forget about the Barry Manilow musical based on their career (coming soon to Broadway); go here instead. ★★★ (DVD)

[The Harmonists appears to be unavailable to stream. Try a library.]

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Holiday Noir feature

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (dir. William Nigh, 1948). Don Castle and Elyse Knox are Tom and Alice Quinn, an out-of-work dance team whose lives are upended when footprints from Don’s “magic shoes” (his distinctive tap shoes, and his only shoes) are found at the scene of a murder. This movie must be Castle’s finest hour — he (minus the Clark Gable mustache) and Knox give compellingly understated performances, and the scene in which they talk through a prison visiting-room’s screen is genuinely affecting. Look for Regis Toomey (the soda jerk of Meet John Doe ) as a police detective, and Bill Walker (Reverend Sykes in To Kill a Mockingbird ) as one of the distinctive faces of death row. Despite heavy borrowing from a better-known movie (whose name would give away too much), I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes is a perfect B-picture, a Cornell Woolrich story told in flashback with true noir fatalism: “It could happen to anybody, what happened to me.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Two from the Criterion Channel’s Hitchcock for the Holidays

Murder! (1930). Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall) goes along with his fellow jurors but remains haunted by doubt: is Diana Baring (Norah Baring) really a murderess? As Diana’s execution date nears, Sir John sets out to solve the crime. Great atmosphere (a circus), a startling death, and sometimes-impenetrable dialogue. Was Herbert Marshall ever really that young? ★★★★ (CC)

Torn Curtain (1966). When an American physicist (Paul Newman) leaves a conference in Copenhagen for East Germany, his collaborator and wife-to-be (Julie Andrews) follows to figure out what’s going on. I don’t understand the lukewarm reception this movie received: though it’s hardly a novel story, it has all the pleasures of a Hitchcock film, with strong traces of The 39 Steps and North by Northwest. And it has one of the funniest and most gruesome on-screen murders I’ve seen. And it has Lila Kedrova, who steals the show as a countess looking to flee to the States. ★★★★

*

The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoe (Buzzfeed Studios, 2021). I have lived my life with only a vague awareness of multi-level marketing. But I know it’s everywhere around me, with downstate-Illinois moms selling cosmetics, essential oils, nutritional supplements, and (way back when) Longaberger baskets to family and friends. This documentary looks at DeAnne Brady and Mark Stidham’s LuLaRoe, purveyors of women’s clothing, primarily “buttery soft” leggings in an endless variety of garish patterns, with an artificial scarcity-factor built in (all-black leggings are a “unicorn”). More importantly, the documentary looks at the lives of women (and one man) who bought into the dream, or, really, into a cult of belief: there’s even a conversation with Rick Ross. ★★★ (M)

*

Cop Hater (dir. William Berke, 1958). It’s Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) territory: someone is killing cops, for no apparent reason, and it’s up to the 87th Precinct to figure it out. On the one hand, this movie has something of the flavor of Naked City (the series) in its depiction of cops and their relationships with wives or girlfriends. On the other hand, it’s ridiculously lurid (or lure id ), with men removing T-shirts and women removing skirts (it’s summer, and there’s a heat wave). Look for Vincent Gardenia and Jerry Orbach in their first credited screen roles. ★★★ (YT)

*

Naked Alibi (dir. Jerry Hopper, 1954). Someone else is killing cops, making for a chance double-feature. Sterling Hayden is Joseph Conroy, chief of detectives, fired for brutality (“I’m a psycho cop, that’s what they think”), but still determined to prove that hotheaded baker Al Willis (Gene Barry) is the killer. The movie takes an unexpected turn midway, shifting from a sedate California city to a border town and introducing Gloria Grahame as an ambiguous love interest. Nothing especially surprising here: the fun is in trying to figure out who’s the crazy one — Conroy, or Willis. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Vivacious Lady (dir. George Stevens, 1938). A college professor (Jimmy Stewart) marries nightclub singer (Ginger Rogers), but he’s afraid to tell his parents and pretends that she’s his friend’s girlfriend, and the newly marrieds can never get the time alone to do whatever. I should have realized from the premise: it’s a screwball comedy, the kind of comedy I often find mightily unfunny. Charles Coburn is the prof’s dad and college president; Beulah Bondi, is the long-suffering mom. Bondi dancing the Big Apple, Coburn’s monocle dropping from his face, a Murphy bed (named Walter) opening by itself: my, the laughs just keep coming, or not. ★★ (TCM)

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

Some Automats

[155 W. 33rd Street, 250 W. 42nd Street, 611 W. 181st Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much, much, much larger view.]

There are thirty-eight Horn and Hardart Automats in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory. This has been some of them.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[“There are thirty-eight”: I’m channeling The Naked City and Naked City. There were also eighteen Horn and Hardart retail outlets in Manhattan, one Automat and two retail outlets in Brooklyn, eight retail outlets in the Bronx, and “some” (three) retail outlets in Queens.]

A pocket notebook sighting

[From Mad Love (dir. Karl Freund, 1935). Click for a larger view.]

Peter Lorre as the skilled but mad surgeon Dr. Gogol. It’s not the notebook he’s after.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : The Flight That Disappeared : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Four in a Jeep : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Ivy : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Mr. Klein : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Portland Exposé : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

Twelve movies

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

Don’t Look Back (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, 1967). A documentary made from footage of Bob Dylan’s 1965 English tour. I watched out of a sense of responsibility to cultural history and was deeply underwhelmed. The robotic strumming, the wheezing harmonica, the typing while Joan Baez sings, the snarkitude at everyone’s expense, especially Donovan’s: Dylan strikes me as an emperor in need of a good haberdashery. Strange: the first words he says on camera are “Did you see my cane?” — and this is before his motorcycle accident. ★★ (TCM)

*

The Clouded Yellow (dir. Ralph Thomas, 1950). British intelligence agent David Somers (Trevor Howard) gets the boot after one mistake and takes a short-term job cataloging butterflies at a country house. Thus the title, suggesting, perhaps, migratory movement and, certainly, nets and fragile beauty. When Sophie Malraux (Jean Simmons), the allegedly disturbed niece of the house, is accused of murder, David takes her on the lam, and through a grand tour of English landscapes. A movie made of wonderful Hitchcockian episodes, à la The 39 Steps, but there’s little chemistry between Howard — who seems himself an avuncular figure — and Simmons. ★★★ (YT)

*

Footsteps in the Night (dir. Jean Yarborough, 1957). A man is found dead in a Los Angeles motel room, and suspicion falls on a neighbor with a gambling problem whom the dead man inveigled into long nights of cards. The movie plays like an hour-long episode of Dragnet, with two detectives cracking occasional jokes and plodding along from place to place until there’s a bit of high drama at the final minutes. Worth watching for brief appearances by James Flavin (veteran of hundreds of movies) and Harry Tyler (Bert the short-order cook in The Grapes of Wrath). Both men must have understood that there are no small roles, only small actors. ★★ (YT)

*

I Confess (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1953). Wearing a priest’s cassock, a church caretaker in Quebec City (O.E. Hasse) commits murder and confesses to the very priest whose cassock he wore, Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift), who’s required by church law to keep the confession secret. Logan of course soon becomes a suspect, and his relationship with an old sweetheart (Anne Baxter), suggests he had good reason to kill. With Clift as a man with a secret to hide, there’s a strange meta quality to the story. Difficult to see much chemistry between him and the hammy Baxter; Hasse and Dolly Haas are more genuinely desperate partners. ★★★ (TCM)

[In the Small World department: Dolly Haas was married to Al Hirschfeld. Our friends Seymour Barab and Margie King were their friends.]

*

The Secret Fury (dir. Mel Ferrer, 1950). Someone’s turned up the gaslight — but who? Deeply strange, with Claudette Colbert as Ellen Ewing, a classical pianist who’s about to marry some guy (Robert Ryan), and as the ceremony gets underway, a stranger stands up to say that Ellen is already married. Three movies in one: a melodrama, a courtroom drama, and a very dark noir. Paul Kelly is great as a district attorney; and look for VIvian Vance as a hotel maid. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Hell Is a City (dir. Val Guest, 1960). When an escaped criminal (John Crawford) heads home to Manchester and pulls off a robbery and murder, it’s up to Inspector Harry Martineau (Stanley Baker) to track him down — or to climb up after him. Location filming and a strong cast (Donald Pleasance, Vanda Godsell, Billie Whitelaw) make for a terrific movie. I suspect the strong influence of The Naked City (the movie) and Naked City (the television series). What clinches it for me: several scenes of domestic tension between Martineau and his wife Julia (Maxine Audley) — in keeping with the Naked practice of showing cops in their private lives. ★★★★ (YT)

*

This Is the Bowery (dir. Gunther von Fritsch, 1941). A short film from the series The Passing Parade, with John Nesbitt’s narration. It’s a ludicrously or poignantly optimistic look at life on the Bowery, with one man (Charles St. John) resolving to give the straight life one more try. Hearty soup and strong coffee served at the Bowery Mission help him on his way. Filmed on location — the real street and its semi-residents, many of them looking remarkably well kempt. ★★★ (TCM)

*

How Do You Like the Bowery? (dir. Dan Halas and Alan Raymond, 1960). A short documentary by NYU students Halas and Raymond. Here the men of the Bowery speak, and the urgency with which some of them address their interviewer makes me think of the souls in Dante’s hell. It’s one memorable face after another. My Bowery triptych would have these two short films flanking Lionel Rogosin’s full-length 1956 movie On the Bowery. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Suddenly (dir. Lewis Allen, 1954). A damaged war vet (Frank Sinatra) has contracted to assassinate the president of the United States, traveling to the town of Suddenly and taking over an isolated house from which to shoot a rifle. It’s up to the people held captive in the house to stop him: a grandfather (James Gleason), his war-widow daughter (Nancy Gates), her young son (Kim Charney), the town sheriff (Sterling Hayden), and a TV repairman (James Lilburn). The movie is almost all plot, with a brief touch of romance and a few hints of the vet’s feral war record. So strange to watch and think about Sinatra’s fleeting friendship with John F. Kennedy; so strange to watch and think about one the names Donald Trump used when making phony calls to the press: the vet’s name, John Barron. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Flowing Gold (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1940). Bromance, romance, and fossil fuels: a wanted man (John Garfield) shows up at an oil field, saves the foreman’s life (Pat O’Brien), and falls in love with an oilman’s daughter (Frances Farmer). Aside from a spectacular explosion, everything here is predictable. The reason to watch is Frances Farmer, who looks like someone from at least fifty years in the future. A bonus: Cliff Edwards, “Ukulele Ike,” the voice of Jiminy Cricket. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Fyre (dir. Chris Smith, 2019). My daughter made a joke about a cheese sandwich, and suddenly I was looking up the details of the notorious Fyre music festival, a scam perpetrated by Billy McFarland, an entrepreneur who promised festivalgoers exclusive lodgings and fine food on a private island. Instead, the marks got surplus tents, rainsoaked mattresses, and cheese sandwiches in foam containers. And now McFarland is out of prison and planning Fyre Festival II. A con man, exposed as such, and trying a second time: I wonder if McFarland has met a leading Republican contender. ★★★★ (N)

*

Two O’Clock Courage (dir. Anthony Mann, 1945). A pick for TCM’s Noir Alley, and an Anthony Mann movie we’d never heard of — and it starts off so well, with fog and foghorns, and a shadow (Tom Conway) staggering away from the camera. A perky cabdriver (Ann Rutherford) drives onto the screen, and the story turns into something like a radio whodunit with touches of comedy, as the cabbie helps the amnesiac shadow sort out clues to his identity and prove he’s no murderer. A fun element: the story takes place in a city that never sleeps, with clothing stores open all night, and landladies awake and fully dressed at all hours. A bonus: Jane Greer in her first speaking role, as a drunken actress. ★★★ (TCM)

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

A pocket notebook sighting

[From Ivy (dir. Sam Wood, 1947). Click for a larger view.]

Police Inspector Orpington (Cedric Hardwicke) and his pocket notebook mean business.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : The Flight That Disappeared : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Four in a Jeep : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Mr. Klein : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Portland Exposé : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

A pocket notebook sighting

[Crime boss Phil Jackman (Russ Conway) holds a notebook listing the taverns whose pinball machines he controls. From Portland Exposé (dir. Harold Schuster, 1957). Click for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : The Flight That Disappeared : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Four in a Jeep : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Mr. Klein : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

A pocket notebook sighting

[Alain Delon as Robert Klein, from Mr. Klein (dir. Joseph Losey, 1976). Click for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : The Flight That Disappeared : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Four in a Jeep : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

Eleven movies, one series

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

Flaxy Martin (dir. Richard L. Bare, 1949). A lawyer, Walter Colby (Zachary Scott), serves a crime boss and falls for his girlfriend Flaxy (Virginia Mayo), with many complications ensuing. Flaxy is missing for much of the movie, literally out of the picture, as Walter spends time in the company of, and for a while handcuffed to, plucky librarian Nora Carson (Dorothy Malone). As in The Best Years of Our Lives and White Heat, Mayo is a long way from light comedy, and she does very well. Watch for Elisha Cook Jr. as a cliché-spouting gunman and Tom D’Andrea (the goldfish-soliloquy cabbie in Dark Passage) as a mechanic who appears to live in his garage. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Black Glove, aka Face the Music (dir. Terence Fisher, 1954). Alex Nichol plays an American jazz trumpeter touring England. When a singer he’s just met (Ann Haslip) is murdered, he finds himself the prime suspect. Musically, things are off here: our hero steps into someone else’s rehearsal, begins blowing, uninvited, at top volume, and everyone’s cool with that. And the police appear to be cool with leaving him to solve the crime himself. ★★ (YT)

*

The Big Caper (dir. Robert Stevens, 1957). If you’re a crime boss (James Gregory) looking to pull off a payroll heist, what do you do? Why, of course: have an underling (Rory Calhoun) and your own girl (Mary Costa) pose as a married couple buying a gas station in the town where the heist is to take place. What results is a surprisingly good movie with Asphalt Jungle overtones (and Florenz Ames as a Sam Jaffe-like safecracker). Best scenes: the “couple” at home and at a barbecue, talking with neighbors and pretending to be ordinary suburbanites. ★★★ (YT)

*

Bullets for O’Hara (dir. William K. Howard, 1941). We watched thinking that this movie might have been Anthony Quinn’s first, but he had already appeared in thirty of ’em (he’s up to third billing here). Completely forgettable, aside from the ridiculous premise: a newly married man robs his wife’s wealthy friends before revealing to her that he’s a gangster. A police detective then hatches a plot. Quinn has something of a Mike Mazurki vibe here — there’s no sign of what would come later in his career. ★★ (TCM)

*

Godland (dir. Hlynur Pálmason, 2022). A new movie, streaming at Criterion, so I know I’m supposed to like it, and I did, to a point. This story of a young (presumably Lutheran) priest traveling from Denmark to and across Iceland to serve a village is visually compelling: Maria von Hausswolff’s cinematography held my attention at every moment of the movie’s 142 minutes. The themes in play are hard to miss: faith and doubt, impermanence, selfhood and community, a beautiful and unforgiving natural world, the languages of colonizer and colonized (it’s the nineteenth century, and Iceland was under Danish rule). But characterization and plot are thin, and when I learned that the title Godland is a distortion of the movie’s Danish and Icelandic titles, and that the photographs described in the preamble are a fiction, I felt at least slightly cheated. ★★★ (CC)

[Vanskabte land (Danish): Disfigured land. Volaða land: Volcanic land? Volatile land? Miserable land?]

*

Paris Underground, aka Madame Pimpernel (dir. Gregory Ratoff, 1945). Just a few minutes in, and this movie was acing the Bechdel test. It’s Paris, 1940, and two friends have fled Paris: Constance Bennett is an indolent American, Kitty de Mornay; Gracie Fields is her stout-hearted English friend Emmeline Quayle. Their plans change with the discovery of a downed British pilot. Based on Etta Shiber’s memoir Paris Underground, with strong touches of Hitchcockian comedy. ★★★★ (YT)

*

A four-part series

Merpeople (dir. Cynthia Wade, 2023). In a memoir of life with agoraphobia, Allen Shawn writes that the world needs all kinds of people: athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, and worriers, people ”who can design air conditioners” and people ”who can inspire joy.” So I suppose it must need people who want to perform as professional mermaids and mermen — the audiences on view in this documentary series certainly appear to be happy. As do the performers, all of whom have chosen a life of burning eyes, meager pay, ungainly fish bodies (pulled into place with the help of personal lubricant), and the constant danger of hypothermia (the mantra “No dead mermaids” runs through the series). The Blixunami, the Mertailor, and Sparkles are three of the more compelling personalities here. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s British Noir feature

It Always Rains on Sunday (dir. Robert Hamer, 1947). An extraordinary piece of filmmaking about family life and its discontents in London’s East End: Rose Sandigate, a former barmaid, now a wife and stepmother (Googie Withers), two resentful stepdaughters, one son, and a kind but obtuse husband (Edward Chapman) who seems more interested in darts than in his wife. Other families and complications abound in this world of crime, poverty, and seduction. Into the uneasy Sandigate situation comes a man from the past, an escaped convict (John McCallum) whom Rose once loved — it’s a bit like a lower-class Brief Encounter, compressed to a single day but moving to a very different end. Don’t miss the closing credits: they tell an interesting story. ★★★★

Pool of London (dir. Basil Dearden, 1951). Merchant seamen, one American, one Jamaican (Bonar Colleano, Earl Cameron) on a weekend’s shore leave in London. Minor and major crime, an interracial almost-relationship (Cameron and Susan Shaw), and a gripping chase to end the story. But until that chase, the movie meanders. Filmed on location, and looking as if it took inspiration from It Always Rains and Naked City. ★★★

Yield to the Night (dir. J. Lee Thompson, 1956). A movie with a title from Homer (Iliad 7, when a herald urges Ajax and Hector to cease their single combat), a recitation of “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” and Diana Dors as a murderer awaiting execution: I’m there. Having seen Man Bait and The Long Haul, I knew that Dors was a highly capable actor, and this movie must be her finest moment, as we watch her character change from platinum-haired glamour girl (scenes in flashback) to a glassy-eyed, pallid woman in a prison jumpsuit. The prison scenes are noteworthy for the small kindnesses offered by both the convict and her keepers. The opening credits make a point worth thinking about, with second billing going not to Michael Craig, who plays Dors’s lover, but to Yvonne Mitchell, who plays a prison matron: there’s a clear, albeit one-sided, lesbian subtext here. ★★★★

Hell Drivers (dir. Cy Endfield, 1957). An ex-con (Stanley Baker) takes a job at a trucking firm transporting loads of gravel, with the drivers expected to move at terrifying speed to make their daily quota. The film focuses on corrupt business practices, friendship, romantic love, and male rivalry, with extended and, finally, boring displays of toxic masculinity on the road and in a roadside restaurant — it’s like a cross between On the Waterfront and Rebel Without a Cause. It doesn’t help that the scenes of breakneck driving are so obviously speeded up. With Peggy Cummin, Herbert Lom, Patrick McGoohan, and a young Sean Connery. ★★

[The other films in this feature: All Night Long, Green for Danger, Night and the City, Obsession, Odd Man Out, The Small Back Room, Time Without Pity, The Woman in Question. Our household has already seen them, and they’re all worth seeing.]

*

Showgirls (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1995). It’s the story of an aspiring dancer (Elizabeth Berkley) who professes no formal training, aspires to a career in Las Vegas, and spends much of her screentime naked or barely clothed. Rivalries, friendships, threats, and leering looks from all directions make up the thin, predictable plot, supplemented by copious use of the word “darlin’” and dance sequences that look like debased versions of Metropolis and The Rite of Spring. As a movie, it’s merely bad; as a bad movie, it’s not bad enough to be good. Best/worst scene: the pool, which had us laughing from the moment the electric palm trees light up. As a movie: ★ / As a bad movie: ★★ (CC).

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

Twelve movies

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

Hi-Jacked (dir. Sam Newfield, 1950). A truckdriver on parole finds himself under suspicion when his cargo of mink coats is hijacked. As trucker Joe Harper, Jim Davis (later of Dallas) looks like a cross between Burt Lancaster and Elvis Presley, but he unmemorable on the screen. Sid Melton provides odd comic moments in a movie that ends up with four or five people dead. What keeps this movie from a one-star rating: diner scenes with Iris Adrian as a waitress with an endless supply of snappy patter. ★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Method Acting feature

The Pawnbroker (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1964). “Sol Nazerman, the walking dead,” shouts a fellow Holocaust survivor. Nazerman lost his wife, his children, his friends, and his ability to feel for anyone, as his management of his East Harlem pawnshop makes clear. His life in the present is mostly a matter of his dealings with a lone employee (Jaime Sánchez), who sees him as a mentor, and a crime king (Brock Peters), who uses the pawnshop for money laundering. Into this present comes the insistent intrusion of the past, in brief or not-so-brief flashes on the screen, all of which make me think that post-traumatic stress is never truly post. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Strongroom (dir. Vernon Sewell, 1962). Relatively short and totally gripping: three aspiring young criminals lock over a just-closed bank and lock the manager and secretary into a strongroom. One of the robbers is supposed to leave the keys in a phone booth and notify the police, but something goes wrong, leaving the victims to be found — somehow — or else die a slow death over a holiday weekend. There’s meaningful dialogue between manager and secretary (the locked-in-a-room trope), but the real story here is that of the keys, with strong elements of due diligence and devotion to duty. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Outside the Wall (dir. Crane Wilbur, 1950). Richard Basehart is an interesting player in the world of noir: he didn’t have the looks for it, and here, as in Tension (1949), he plays something of a sad sack who rises to the noirish occasion. As Larry Nelson, he’s a man of thirty, pardoned after fifteen years in prison, inexperienced in all ways of the world outside prison. He seeks tranquility in a low-paying job at a sanitarium but finds himself in complicated trouble with vicious gangsters (Harry Morgan, for one) and beautiful nurses (Dorothy Hart and Marilyn Maxwell). Some great on-location footage makes the movie, here and there, a Philadelphia version of The Naked City. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Sin of Nora Moran (dir. Phil Goldstone, 1933). Pre-Code in its frankness, but postmodern in its structure. Nora (Zita Johann) is sentenced to be executed for a murder she did not commit. The interest here comes from the narrative, which presents the movie’s story via montages and flashbacks that make it difficult to know what has happened when. This obscure (I think) movie deserves to be better known. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Blind Date, aka Chance Meeting (dir. Joseph Losey, 1959). An affair between a young painter (Hardy Krüger) and an older married woman (Micheline Presle) goes wrong, and the painter finds himself the prime suspect in a murder. If it had been made a steamy quarter-century later, it might have been an erotic thriller. But it’s just fine as is, though a bit slow-moving. There’s a Hitchcock connection, a strong one, but I can’t name the movie without giving everything away. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Unseen (dir. Lewis Allen, 1945). What a difference a year makes: this movie is a sequel of sorts to Allen’s The Uninvited, but it’s not nearly as good. Here we have a young governess (Gail Russell of The Uninvited) caring for the young children of a grumpy windower (Joel McCrea) in a big old house right next to a big old closed-up house with mysterious goings-on. I appreciated the overtones of The Turn of the Screw, but there are zero chills, zero thrills, and the story is painfully implausible. ★★ (YT)

*

Circle of Danger (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1951). This movie would seem to have every advantage: a great director, fine writing and cinematography (Philip MacDonald, Oswald Morris), a capable cast, led by Ray Milland, and a title that promises (à la Ministry of Fear) some satisfying noir. But where is the danger? The story is reminiscent of The Third Man: an American (Milland) comes to post-war England to find out the truth about what happened to his brother, a volunteer with British forces who was shot in the head, apparently by one of his fellow soldiers. On the way to the quick, anti-climactic ending, too much time is devoted to a baffling courtship that pairs Milland and a writer of children’s books (Patricia Roc) who’s always put out about his showing up late and who really needs to get over herself. ★★ (YT)

*

The Seventh Veil (dir. Compton Bennett, 1945). First there was The Seventh Victim (1943), then The Seventh Cross (1944). This film is far less compelling, the story of a concert pianist, Francesca (Ann Todd) controlled by her second cousin, Nicholas (James Mason). When Francesca attempts suicide, a psychiatrist (Herbert Lom) steps in to plumb her past with the aid of narcosis and remove the veils that hide the secrets of the mind. Some great concert scenes (I watched always afraid that something would go wrong), but the pace is slow and the movie doesn’t even try to justify its ending — an ending that made us yell at the TV. ★★ (YT)

*

Spy Hunt (dr. George Sherman, 1950). A crazy premise: a vital piece of microfilm is hidden in the collar of one of two black panthers on a train traveling from from Milan to Paris. When the train is sabotaged and the freight car derails in the Alps, the panthers escape, the hunt is on, and a small group gathers in an Alpine inn run by a kindly doctor (Walter Slezak): the animals’ handler (Howard Duff), a journalist who wants a story (Märta Torén), a big-game hunter, an artist who wants to sketch the panthers, and another journalist. But how many of these folks are enemy agents? Torén’s coolness under pressure, Irving Glassberg’s cinematography, two truly menacing beasts, and a suspenseful scene with gunpowder make for a superior film. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Catered Affair (dir. Richard Brooks, 1956). It’s a Marty world, with a family living in a Bronx apartment: a cabdriver father (Tom Hurley), his wife Aggie (Bette Davis), children Jane and Eddie (Debbie Reynolds, Ray Stricklyn), and Aggie’s brother Uncle Jack (Barry Fitzgerald). The problem at hand: Jane is marrying a fellow (Rod Taylor) from a family a greater means, and the young people want a simple wedding, but Aggie is determined that it be a grand affair. I wanted to like this movie much more than I did: Borgnine, Davis, and Reynolds are fine (even if Reynolds makes an improbable daughter), but Gore Vidal’s screenplay (from Paddy Chayefsky’s play) is condescendin’, Barry Fitzgerald’s Irish shtick is insufferable, and the saccharine ending makes me squirm. ★★ (TCM)

*

One Way Street (dir. Hugo Fregonese, 1950). The film begins with lines from an unidentified “Song of a Fatalist”:

Waste no moment, nor a single breath
In fearful flight from Death;
For no matter the tears that may be wept,
The appointment will be kept.

The plot is simple and compelling: a doctor (James Mason) serving a crime boss (Dan Duryea) and his henchmen makes off with the boss’s girlfriend (Märta Torén) and loot. The couple flee to rural Mexico and make a new life, with the doctor as a venerated healer of humans and horses — but there’ll be trouble ahead, or behind. Overtones of “The Appointment in Samarra,” Out of the Past, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre run through the story. ★★★★ (YT)

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

Pocket notebook sighting

[From Four in a Jeep (dir. Leopold Lindtberg and Elizabeth Montagu, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

Bad sound made the movie unwatchable. But at least I got a notebook out of it.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Flight That Disappeared : The Fearmakers : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

Pocket notebook sighting

[From L’Innocent (dir. Louis Garrel, 2022). Click for a larger view.]

Look: if there’s a criminal plan afoot, there’s gotta be a notebook.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Flight That Disappeared : The Fearmakers : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent